Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population

As Elon Musk has tweeted with increasing frequency—evolving from a tech CEO with opinions into a social media entity that generates content with the output of a small news organization—the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population has grown with almost identical momentum. The correlation is 0.952 across eight years, which forces us to consider the possibility that wolves respond to social media engagement, or that both Musk and wolves thrive best when given territory and an absence of natural predators. Neither theory holds up, but the scatter plot does.

Musk's tweet volume escalated from a few thousand per year in 2015 to over 15,000 by 2022 (and far more after acquiring the platform), reflecting his transformation from occasional poster to full-time digital provocateur. The Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population grew from about 1,700 to over 2,700 during the same period, continuing a recovery that began with the 1995 Yellowstone reintroduction and has proceeded at a steady pace as packs established territories across Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Both trends are simple growth stories with different drivers: Musk tweets more because he wants to, and wolves multiply because the Endangered Species Act lets them. The shared variable is nothing more than time and the tendency of things that are growing to keep growing.

Eight years of Musk's tweets and wolf populations growing together is the kind of correlation that practically writes its own punchline. The wolves are territorial, the tweets are territorial, and neither cares about the other's existence. Pack behavior, it turns out, looks the same from space and from Yellowstone.