You don’t have to have paper-thin skin to be a free speech warrior – but it certainly seems to help. Elon Musk hasn’t had a great few days following his interview with The Economist, in which several of his claims were shot down and fact-checked by the reporter in question.
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Elon Musk interview with The Economist doesn’t go to plan
Zanny Minton-Beddoes had the opportunity to speak with Musk, and grilled him on a wide range of topics. Inevitably, the subject of politics came up, and following his pivot to the far-right in recent years, the richest man in the world admitted that he ‘might have got carried away’ with it.
He spearheaded the DOGE initiative at the start of Donald Trump’s second term, with little in the way of meaningful achievements to note. He was a frequent presence in the White House last year, before dramatically falling out with the president. He has also publicly offered his support to AfD and Restore Britain.
Elon Musk may have recently become a trillionaire, but his vast riches aren’t enough to pull him away from the keyboard. He frequently posts in favour of ‘remigration’, while also taking swipes at the LGBTQI+ community and Islam. Musk is further pushing a narrative that the UK is heading for ‘civil war’.
Elon Musk called out for ‘falsehoods’ posted on Twitter
With around 240 million followers on the platform he bought three years ago, the South African national routinely uploads inaccurate or misleading posts. This is what Beddoes decided to flag with him, and quite frankly, made the Tesla and SpaceX CEO look silly in the process…
Editor called ‘traitor’ after car-crash interview
Over the last 48 hours, Elon has been on the offensive, lashing out at the media in general and retweeting sycophantic praise of his, erm, performance. He sharpened his knives specifically for Beddoes, however, branding her a ‘traitor to the west’.
This followed a tweet he posted the day after the interview, calling the Editor-In-Chief of The Economist a ‘woke NPC’. It remains unclear when, or even if, Musk plans to sit down and talk with the press again. But it has become abundantly clear that, in his case, words can actually hurt your feelings.