(Dobbs) Maybe We've Learned The Truth About Elon Musk
No contrition. Just threats of a "thermonuclear" response.
A few days ago, after reading an article about Elon Musk’s blatant backing of an anti-semitic tweet, I emailed the story to someone I know who has bought a few of his Teslas. “I know they are great cars,” I wrote, “but now that there are good alternatives out there, please next time don’t buy one of Musk’s.”
A boycott of Elon Musk is in order. The man no longer deserves our support.
It’s too bad, because he has been the genius behind unparalleled technology that ultimately makes our lives better— PayPal, which enables easy online payments; Tesla, which made electric cars accessible to consumers; and SpaceX, which will accelerate America’s ambitions to make it to Mars. But his tweet last Wednesday in response to this anti-semitic post on the social media platform he owns— once called Twitter, now just named “X”— makes much of that moot.
The post said, “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” It then referred to “those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country.” It echos the theme of white supremacist “replacement theory,” which asserts that ethnic minorities, exploited by Jews, want to disempower and replace white Americans.
Musk’s response to this trash? “You have said the actual truth.”
It’s bad enough that when Musk bought Twitter just over a year ago, he dismantled much of the structure of the company including, unconscionably, the department that looked for and flagged misinformation, disinformation, violent threats, and hateful content. In other words, the very kind of tweet with which Musk just agreed. It was reported that about 3,000 “content moderators” lost their jobs.
And Twitter lost its integrity.
Now, renamed X, it also is losing its revenue, and rightly so. Several news organizations began reporting Thursday that some iconic American corporations have halted, or at least “paused,” their advertising on Musk’s platform. IBM, NBC Universal, Paramount (which owns CBS), Discovery (which owns CNN), Warner Brothers, Lionsgate, Comcast, Sony, Disney, and Apple, which last year reportedly spent upwards of $180-million advertising on X.
A spokesperson for IBM posted the company’s reasoning: “IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.”
The corporate boycott, however big it gets and however long it lasts, has to hurt. When Musk bought Twitter, ads accounted for about 90% of its revenue. But his initial actions as owner, when he all but eliminated content moderation, already had prompted advertisers to cut back, to which Musk threatened, “A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.”
As it turned out, the victim of that war was Musk. He said six months ago that his ad revenue had dropped by 50%. By last month, the company he bought for $44 billion was only valued at $19 billion.
And that bottom line is likely to sink even more. The liberal watchdog organization Media Matters reported a few days ago that hate speech has appeared on X alongside ads for companies like Oracle, Xfinity, and Bravo, as well as some of those same companies that pulled back their ad buys after Musk’s tweet. Media Matters says it found hate speech “on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts.”
Now X is fighting to save itself.
A company spokesperson announced that ads would no longer be allowed on the pro-Nazi accounts cited by Media Matters. Musk promised that any accounts posting “clear calls for extreme violence” would be suspended. X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino posted that the platform has been "extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination," then said, "There's no place for it anywhere in the world — it's ugly and wrong. Full stop.” But that only raises a question: why would its owner, who has more than 160 million followers, be allowed to amplify anti-semitic speech?
It all might fall under the category of too-little-too-late.
Especially in light of questions about just how repentant Musk really is. In the wake of last week’s controversial tweet, he has only doubled down. He has called Media Matters “an evil organization.” He has charged that the Anti-Defamation League, which says that anti-semitic incidents last year reached a record high and that hate speech on X has surged, “unjustly attacks the majority of the West.” And just last night he posted another threat: “a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
So when he wrote, “You have said the actual truth,” maybe we learned the actual truth about Elon Musk. And if you’re known by the company you keep, Marjorie Taylor Greene chimed in saying, “Everything that’s happening makes me want to support 𝕏 even more.”
It’s befitting that major American companies are taking a stand and boycotting Musk’s social media business. It also will be befitting if individual Americans, who now have a choice, give his cars the cold shoulder too.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
While many people, particularly in the U.S., are infatuated with how Musk created Tesla and the world of electric cars, I view it differently. No one — and certainly no one in the history of the world petroleum industry — has built a consumer industry that inflicts more damage on the environment than Musk. Each Tesla lugs around a one thousand pound battery that is made of rare earth materials mined from places all over the world, usually by desperately poor people. I think of mining in Africa where the earth is scarred, possibly forever. Then, all of those rare earth materials for batteries are transported to manufacturing plants, I believe in the western part of America. That transportation causes an unimaginably huge carbon footprint as well as the environmental damage of refining. The batteries in Teslas and other EV cars are so dangerous that they often catch fire, especially as the result of a collision or crash. Fire fighter have learned to just let it burn because the batteries will explode in toxic debris when sprayed with water.
Doesn’t this just warm your heart? Oh yes... I am referring to that shiny car over there engulfed in flames.
Agreed! And what about Starlink? Downright frightening.