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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
Well, one lesson l’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”
If you’ve got better things to do with your time than muck around on social media (anyone?) then you might have missed that rare glimpse of self-awareness on the part of Elon Musk, posted on X, better known as Twitter. The tweet referred to an earlier one he’d posted, a quote tweet in response to a favourite of his, @DogeDesigner – “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”
Musk made a topical joke in poor taste about assassination. He’s now deleted it. In case you missed it (ICYMI), it read: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” – with a “thinking face” emoji attached.
The graphic vaguely suggested, predictably enough, a Democratic (or “far left”) conspiracy to murder Donald Trump. Maybe it’s being run out of the pizza restaurant the Clintons supposedly used as a front for their international paedo ring. Who knows? Musk was certainly trying to be funny, but with a satirical edge that is quite beyond him. It made the wisecrack even less amusing and more of an indictment of the tweeter himself. So he took it down.
It’s worth pointing out that there would have been no chance of the Twitter moderators taking any action about such a hateful tweet for the obvious reason that he owns the platform, fired most of them – and removed almost all of the old rules against hate and violence; all because he is a self-styled “free speech absolutist”. This means that his social media channel is so clogged up with racism, Holocaust denial and neo-fascism that it’s almost impossible to breathe on there.
His conversion to Trump and Trumpism (despite Trump’s well-known and unscientific aversion to electric vehicles such as Musk’s Tesla) has made Musk a political player – and his site into a turbocharged vehicle for the extreme right. Musk himself spends an inordinate amount of time making a fool of himself on there, entertaining or appalling his 197.9 million followers – and many, many more when the algorithms get to work. On the other hand, he spent $44bn buying the money pit, so he might as well get his money’s worth out of it somehow.
Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet, with some of the trappings of a sovereign state. Aside from a global social media platform attuned to his interests, in every sense, he funds his own space programme and owns his own satellite network. He clashes and comments on the affairs of nations and supranational bodies – the US presidential contest, Brazil, Australia, the UK government’s response to the recent race riots, the European Union.
He is the second largest maker of electric cars (after BYD of China, who behave themselves) and has plans to help relocate humanity to Mars in case of environmental breakdown (which his friend Trump will do more than anyone else to bring about). I wonder sometimes what life on Mars with Musk as king of the planet would be like. Well, like Twitter, I suppose: uninhabitable.
Musk, for all his brilliance in many areas of endeavour, is also a child. There’s something inexplicably naive about the things he says, does and allows others to do on his platform. It may just that he can’t see how unhinged people are, nor how damaging they can be to other people and groups of people. He seems not to mind about all the international Jewish conspiracies that occupy too much of the Twittersphere; nor the way that X refused to take down a post that falsely claimed the Reverend Richard Coles is a paedophile.
Nor does he much object to the antivaxxers, the “chemtrail” people, the flat earthers, the sovereign citizens, the fruitcakes, the fascists and the fools. What is so infantile about Musk is that he is a man who refuses to take responsibility for what he says, what he does and what he permits to happen on the platform he controls – the viral spread of misinformation, disinformation and evil.
As a so-called “free speech absolutist” he disregards national laws, such as the long-standing prohibition on inciting racial hatred in Britain; and he is so spoilt he cannot bear to be challenged, as when he tweeted this, aimed at Taylor Swift: “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life”.
X’s algorithms spread fascistic myths and propaganda – and, in doing so, are in fact one of the biggest threats to free speech and human rights on this planet. Musk is entitled to his views, but not to try and foist them on the rest of us.
He is even trying to force advertisers to do business with them, when they would rather not have their brands parked next to some grotesque Islamophobic imagery. Musk, like Trump, is just another obnoxious, rich bully – and, in my opinion, dangerous with it. The sooner he takes off for Mars, the better.
