Elon keeps leaning into the might of Twitter to deliver epic fact-checks against the corrupt corporate media establishment. This time it was personal, after the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post ran what has been described as a “hit piece” against his alleged lack of genius and other farcical reporting from outlets like Axios that pretended to carry about Musks’s legacy.
Musk, rarely flustered, responds in a way that must double the already-present anxiety among the gatekeepers of the ruling class.
The legacy media should worry about its reputation. We have only just begun.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2022
“The legacy media should worry about its reputation. We have only just begun,” Musk promised.
No doubt, the main cause of concern from the beginning has been Musk’s readiness to blow up the comfortable arrangement of narrative control from within the all-too-cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. As soon as Musk offered to buy Twitter, the overreaction was a dead giveaway people were nervous.
Then, Musk started releasing the Twitter Files, and the exposure of collusion by the likes of the F.B.I. with Big Tech is now suspected to just have scratched the surface.
Obviously, the self-anointed power players couldn’t live with that, so they attempted to hit back with slander and malice. As the Washington Post wrote – citing an anonymous source, no less – Musk’s reputation as having the “Midas touch” is now crumbling. Or so we’d be led to believe. Here is how the Post put it.
Musk has built his reputation on having a Midas touch with the companies he runs — something many investors and experts thought he would bring to Twitter when he purchased it for $44 billion in October, paying nearly twice as much as it was worth by some analyst estimates. He is known for sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla, demanding long hours and quick turnarounds from his workers. He is seen as an engineering genius, propelling promises of cars that can drive themselves and rockets that can take humans to Mars.
But that image is unraveling. Some Twitter employees who worked with Musk are doubtful his management style will allow him to turn the company around. And some investors in Tesla, by far the biggest source of his wealth, have begun to see him as a liability. Musk’s distraction has prompted questions about leadership of SpaceX as well, though it is much less reliant on his active involvement. Meanwhile, Neuralink and Boring Co., two companies he founded, continue to lag on promises.
It wasn’t that ling ago everybody was long on Tesla. The company was pushing boundaries in the electric vehicle market and Musk was seen as some left-wing savior to advance civilization into a Green New World.
But then he bought Twitter under the promise of restoring free speech and transparency, and that was a threat.
As the Post’s hatchet job continued, quotes from the anonymous source began to emerge.
“Musk is repeatedly described as a man obsessed with Twitter in all the wrong ways, who is failing both at protecting his new investment and his previous ones, according to interviews with a half-dozen former Twitter employees and people in Musk’s orbit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or because they were not authorized to speak publicly about company matters,” the source claims.
The Post continued:
“Instead of focusing on plans to make the site a competitor to YouTube with video and rolling out other new features that will earn revenue, he instead got sucked into the culture wars, the people said,” the Post report claimed. “That took the form of the Twitter Files, an examination by some journalists of many of the company’s actions before Musk’s arrival, such as the blocking of a New York Post story that dug into the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the ban on former president Donald Trump.”
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