Elon Musk went on a bizarre Twitter rant last week about the "fake news" media after his company received negative attention when media outlet Reveal questioned safety practices at one of his Tesla factories.
It was positively presidential, and wasn't exactly met with critical acclaim.
Though he has been praised by Stan Lee in a rare cameo appearance on the topic of media responsibility.
Musk has since suggested that he is going to set up his own website where normal members of the public, like him, could rate journalists and articles in order to track the credibility of media outlets and journalists, called "Pravda".
Once everyone had gotten over the strange name (Pravda was also the name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), many people started to ask: What does Elon think is a credible source?
Well, here's where it starts getting a bit sex-culty. Musk tweeted out an analysis that he believed to be "excellent", from The Knife Media, which defended him against several articles criticizing his ideas, and proposed their own media-rating system.
What's so bad about that?
Well, the article he's citing is from Knife Media, which is a rebrand of the Knife of Aristotle. This company is linked to NXIVM, Fortune reports, a marketing group that is allegedly a front for a "sex cult".
You may recognize the alleged cult from a high-profile case involving an actress from Smallville.
The co-founder of the self-described "self-help group" has been charged with sex trafficking and has allegedly turned female followers into "slaves", branded his initials into their bodies, and coerced members into having sex, the Guardian reports.
We're not saying that Elon Musk knew any of this – he clearly didn't as he has since deleted the tweet – however, it's clear that as a member of the public he saw an article and believed it to be credible. If his ranking system had been in place, there's a good chance he (and other laymen) would have ranked it as credible, even though it's an article from a firm potentially fronting a sex cult.
If his ranking is a good idea, he certainly didn't help prove that point here.
He has since deleted the tweet praising the article, though he stands by their analysis.
Just like his bizarre rant last week, it hasn't gone down well online.
Although that's no indication his trust rankings on Pravda wouldn't be through the roof.
