Elon Musk Had an Anti-Media Meltdown on Twitter

From Esquire

On Wednesday, a man had a meltdown on Twitter. Under normal circumstances, something that happens thousands of times a day would not be news, but the man in question here happened to be Elon Musk, the 53rd richest man in the world, South African inventor and engineer, and real-life Hank Scorpio from The Simpsons. If we've learned anything from the current political era, when an aggrieved billionaire starts railing against media and workers, it's best to pay attention before things get too out of hand.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX-the first private company to pull off a number of legitimately impressive feats, including the successful launch and landing of a reused rocket, as well as plenty of pointless but nonetheless dramatic ones, like sending a Tesla into space-is widely revered among a certain sector of the internet and engineering world. His appeal is part innovator, with designs on sending humans to Mars, and part eccentric billionaire doing whatever he wants, like selling $500 flamethrowers as a lark.

Aside from his engineering work, Musk stands out from the typical billionaire tech crowd with his imaginative, romantic, and sometimes silly musings. Perhaps most notable is his assertion that we’re all living in a simulation. Video games have improved so quickly there's "a billion to one chance" we're inside of one ourselves, he believes.

At the same time, he’s fiercely opposed to the unregulated rise of Artificial Intelligence, which he calls our "biggest existential threat."

Musk is a "cool" sort of billionaire-as-philosopher, bantering back and forth with Rick & Morty on Twitter about the singularity, ingratiating him even further to his legions of fans. It’s this "fun" part of his persona that stirred up controversy on Wednesday, in a heel turn that might not be as surprising as it appears.

Musk's first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, wrote in 2010 about what it was like being with Musk during his rise.

"As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship,'" she wrote.

"He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home," she continued. "This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. 'I am your wife,' I told him repeatedly, 'not your employee.'"

His reply, she wrote, was, "If you were my employee, I would fire you."

Which brings us back to the meltdown.

Earlier this week, a Twitter user responded to an unrelated tweet of Musk’s, asking him about his stance on unions. The query has become something of a recurring taunt on Twitter ever since a production worker at one of Tesla’s factories spoke out against low pay, forced overtime, and poor safety conditions leading to preventable injuries at the plant. "Although the cost of living in the Bay Area is among the highest in the nation, pay at Tesla is near the lowest in the automotive industry," employee Jose Moran wrote, before calling for unionization with the United Auto Workers.

Musk, as billionaires tend to do, did not take favorably to the suggestion, calling the accusations "disingenuous or outright false." "The forces arrayed against us are many and incredibly powerful," Musk wrote in a letter to employees. "This is David vs Goliath if David were six inches tall!"

Setting aside the questionable tact of a man worth $20 billion assigning himself and his company the role of David, even in contrast to his real perceived enemy "the giant car companies" with whom he believes UAW’s allegiance lies, Musk's tone-deafness didn’t end there. In lieu of higher pay or listening to his employees' safety demands, he had other perks in mind as a salve.

"There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course!) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots," he wrote. "It’s going to get crazy good."

In response to the question about unions this week, Musk tweeted that there was, in fact, "nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union." They could do it tomorrow if they wanted. "But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?" he asked.

Like with everything else Musk pronounces, a legion of fanboys quickly leapt to his defense. Picture an army of epic bacon bitcoin guys saying "You, sir, have won the internet!" in unison, forever. But others picked up on the sinister implication in the tweet. "[W]hy would they lose stock options? Are you threatening to take away benefits from unionized workers?" one asked.

What followed was Musk going on a tear, accusing unions of trying to enforce a two class "lords and commoners system" and invoking the War of Independence as a spiritual cri de coeur. It only got worse, and more confusing, from there as he continued to rail against critics in his mentions all day and into Thursday morning, ultimately turning his ire toward the media, the natural enemy of billionaires everywhere.

Musk’s dallying in the Twitter mud followed an earlier episode with his girlfriend, Canadian recording artist Grimes. Much of the music world was agog when the pairing made their public debut at the Met Gala earlier this month. Similar to the collective cultural groan we shared when Kanye West emerged as a MAGA-touting "free thinker," many Grime fans confessed to feeling betrayed by such a sensitive and creative artist partnering with the epitome of unbridled capitalism.

For her part, Grimes appears to have bought in; she went to bat for her man on Monday in a series of since-deleted tweets in which she claimed he did no such thing as preventing his workers from unionizing and invoked the term “fake news”-never a good sign for one’s political leanings in this particular climate.

Picking up where she left off, Musk came out swinging at the media Wednesday in a series of bizarre provocations and broadsides. To be fair, some tech media has indeed been highly critical of Tesla over the years and in recent months in particular, in light of reports on a self-driving Tesla that crashed into a pond and killed its driver earlier this week, the continued and on-going delay of the Tesla Model 3 vehicle, and a particularly bad review from Consumer Reports-all of which had a negative effect on Tesla’s stock price.

That comes after an April investigative report by Reveal (from the Center of Investigative Reporting) alleged, among other things, that Tesla failed to report a number of injuries at its plant. Before the piece was published, Tesla sent Reveal a statement reading, in part: "In our view, what they portray as investigative journalism is in fact an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla."

The culmination of Musk’s heel turn against media arrived when he shared a story suggesting negative press might not affect stock prices after all.

"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," he tweeted, in a statement echoing his self-positioning as an aggrieved underdog against the unions, this time with the much-maligned "big media" as the aggressor.

Musk, it probably doesn’t need to be said, has also done pretty well for himself in the media. For every critical piece written about his companies' failures, there are many more lauding him as a visionary genius.

Responding to the suggestion that he was beginning to sound like a certain other prominent rich guy regularly in the news, Musk dug his heels in further, tweeting, "Anytime anyone criticizes the media, the media shrieks 'You're just like Trump!' Why do you think he got elected in the first place? Because no ones believes you any more. You lost your credibility a long time ago."

From there his misunderstanding of how media works began to take shape, as he claimed it and car companies were in cahoots against him. Media is more critical of him, he said, because traditional car companies are big advertisers, whereas Tesla is not.

The solution to the media’s "credibility" problem, he suggested, was a site of his design that would rate the "core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication." It would be called Pravda, he said, the name presumably a joke about propaganda of some kind. He might have actually been serious.

He floated the idea to his followers. Should he invent Yelp for journalists?

Musk continued his meltdown into Thursday morning, chiding the media for not being able to sway the vote in its favor. "Come on media, you can do it! Get more people to vote for you. You are literally the media," he tweeted. Needless to say, a user-based system of rating reporters could instantly be abused and gamed by people acting in bad faith-as could a Twitter poll-although Musk seemed to suggest he could circumvent it.

While Musk's online outrage simmered, a story emerged from 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl about an interview she had conducted with then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election. Why did you continue to demean the media, she had asked him.

"You know why I do it?" Trump responded. "I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you."

It remains unclear if Musk intends to follow though with Pravda, or if the novelty of this attack on the media will hold his attention for much longer; he does have a tendency to discard things. There used to be a saying: don’t pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. That’s still true for the most part, but in the era of billionaire-born assaults on the media, it’s become a lot easier for them to convince the world the barrels are empty.

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