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Hell hath no fury like a billionaire scorned. And Elon Musk has proved that in emphatic fashion with a Twitter tirade that would put a certain narcissistic president to shame.
Last night on Twitter, Musk had a bit of a meltdown. He was seemingly annoyed by a report from Reveal that questioned factory safety at Tesla, one of the companies he is CEO for along with SpaceX and the Boring Company. It’s not his first run-in with the media.
“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” Musk first tweeted. And then the fall of Elon began.
What followed was a bizarre Twitter tirade against the media and fake news, with Musk calling out journalists for being “sanctimonious” and “above criticism.” He continuously talked about the media needing to be truthful, which yes sounds a lot like Trump. Don’t shoot me, Elon.
Then things went a bit further, as Musk said he was going to create a site where the public could rank articles and track credibility scores, called Pravda. Which doesn’t sound like a recipe for an echo chamber and is nothing like those Fake News Awards.
Pravda, if you didn’t know, means “truth” in Russian and was the name of the official paper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The paper is still sort of going today.
And he might not be joking. In the past, erroneous tweets like this have led to whole new ventures like the Boring Company. And one writer noticed that Musk had actually set up “Pravda Corp” back in October 2017, suggesting he might be pretty serious.
Understandably, Musk’s ramblings did not go down too well. People were quick to point out that going after the free press was probably not a great way for a CEO to be acting. And he couldn’t just hide from criticism of his companies if he didn’t agree with it.
Ashlee Vance, the author of a widely praised 2015 Musk biography, also weighed in, saying that the Tesla CEO had gone “full Trump”.
There was also a bit of awkwardness as someone pointed out that the mother of Grimes (or c), Musk’s new girlfriend, was a journalist. Which totally won’t be weird at all when or if they meet.
Musk is still tweeting about all this right now, and also has a poll running to see if he should launch Pravda or not. It’s all become a bit bizarre really.
Not everyone is against him of course. But if Donald Trump Jr agrees with you, it's safe to say you're probably doing something wrong.
