Multibillionaires are eccentric. It’s common knowledge, like water is wet, fire is hot, “Joker: Folie à Deux” is a terrible film.
From Jeff Bezos to Peter Thiel to Richard Branson to Howard Hughes (adjusting for inflation), they do weird things: shoot themselves into space, invest in treatments to “cure” aging, buy islands and wash their hands a lot.
It’s rare that the other 99.9% of us are directly exposed to their world-ownership whims, though we indirectly suffer the consequences of their rocket ship carbon emissions, self-serving super PACS and failure to pay taxes.
Elon Musk, however, is a different story.
Since the Tesla and Space X owner purchased Twitter (now X) in 2022 for $44 billion, he’s assumed the mantle of “free speech” warrior. I put free speech in quotations because we’re not talking about the kind of free speech people fight and die for under dictatorships or theocracies.
Musk’s idea of “freedom” is amplifying hate speech, sowing misinformation, stoking conspiracies, propping up nationalists in places like India and Argentina, and complying with censorship requests from authoritarian regimes like Turkey’s. As for our presidential race here at home, Musk’s misleading election claims on X were viewed 1.2 billion times between January and July of this year, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Then there’s the creepy posts, like the one aimed at Taylor Swift after she endorsed Kamala Harris on Instagram.
Musk recently amplified the false claims and conspiracy theories that Federal Emergency Management Agency officials were “actively blocking” relief shipments to victims of Hurricane Helene, “seizing goods … and locking them away to state they are their own.”
