|
In light of recent news that Elon Musk’s extremely pro-Russian proposal to end the war in Ukraine had actually/allegedly been born of a conversation he had with Vladimir Putin, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how Musk is our generation’s Henry Ford. A brilliant automotive innovator and industrialist who, to our chagrin, decides that making cars better and better is too small a job for his large mind and decides to dabble in politics. If he could solve cars, why couldn’t he solve the world’s most complex political problems? He is, after all, a genius.
Unfortunately, for all of us, both Musk and Ford’s egos come with some pretty ugly politics. Ford bought a newspaper just so he could the publish anti-Semitic tracts that were too outlandish for other outlets, and played footsie with Adolf Hitler, whom he evidently saw as a great man. Must wants to buy Twitter because he thinks he knows better how that media platform should be run and is playing footsie with the land-grabbing, European ethnofascist du jour: Vladimir Putin.
But those are just my musings. My colleague Tina Nguyen went and got the goods, diving into the reams of Elon Musk’s text messages that came out in the now-likely-defunct Twitter lawsuit. Tina does a masterful job of decoding them and taking us on this safari, telling us which right-winger whispering in Musk’s ear is which. What struck me about Tina’s piece, though, is the extent to which Musk, who loves to pat himself on the back as an independent, even renegade, thinker, is so at the mercy of the advice of right-wingers pinging his phone. It’s like he’s less of a thought leader, and more of a weathervane.
Have a look for yourself.
I’ll see you back here next week everybody. In the meantime, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.
Julia
Can’t see the full story?
You're receiving the free version of Tomorrow Will Be Worse at . For full access to Puck, and to each of my colleagues, you can
subscribe here.
|
| I was poring over the 33 pages of Elon Musk’s texts, recently disclosed in court filings submitted in his now possibly defunct Twitter litigation, when I stumbled across an intriguing exchange. An unidentified person, their name redacted by the court, had sent Musk an article hypothesizing the potential backlash to him owning Twitter, and offering suggestions about how to manage the re-platforming of certain banned right-wing power users, including “the boss”—codename among Trump’s underlings for the big man, himself.
The link to the article wasn’t included in the exchange, but it was simple enough to uncover its origin on the far-right website Revolver News. The piece heralded Musk’s potential acquisition as “nothing less than a declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire” and... |
