By Ray Rivers
August 14th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
It wasn’t really a political interview. Elon Musk clearly doesn’t know how to do that. His Tesla Y was the best selling car globally last year. The boy-genius who gave the world the first serious electric car should have stuck to inventing things and left social media and politics to those who know what they are doing.
The chat, scheduled for 8 pm on Monday failed to launch on time. Musk’s X platform, formerly Twitter, may have been cyber-attacked or bogged down or something by the Iranians or Russians, as he has suggested. But more than likely X just crashed for mechanical reasons, and the highly promoted conversation between him and former US president Donald Trump was delayed for at least half an hour as a result. After all, Musk fired a good part of the original staff once he became the new Führer of the social platform.
The grumpy guy chat eventually ended up being the kind of ‘let them eat cake’
The grumpy guy chat eventually ended up being the kind of ‘let them eat cake’ chat among like-minded billionaires that one could have expected. Trump’s world has been shaken up with the resignation of President Biden and the nomination of his VP, Kamala Harris, as Trump’s opponent. And so he has mostly been laying low because every time he shows up to rant on TV, his approval ratings apparently drop.
Trump appears almost contrite these days. Perhaps he realizes that having helped defeat Joe Biden, with bluster and BS in that first presidential debate, he is now in a new contest. And he has to contend with a fresh face which is drawing more media attention than he usually does, and is stealing his thunder.
Musk’s X lets almost anyone write almost anything.
I joined Twitter back in it’s earlier days, my columns are carried there. But I have not been impressed with its transformation to X under Musk’s domination. Before his time, there had been attempts to restrain mis-information, but no more. Trump had been banned after orchestrating the attempted Jan 6th insurrection, but was reinstated by Musk along with other unsavoury characters like Alex Jones. Today, Musk’s X lets almost anyone write almost anything. It’s unsurprising that mis-information and dis-information abound. Musk calls it free speech, but it’s more like chaos and confusion.
The EU, which takes misinformation seriously, had warned Musk not to violate E.U. laws about amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation”. Musk’s response to the EU was to post this constructive meme – ‘Take a big step back and literally, f*** your own face!’
Musk simply grunted approval as Trump rambled on.
The first half hour or so, which seemed more like an eternity, was about the Trump assassination attempt played out in copious gory detail. Musk simply grunted approval as Trump rambled on with all the minutia of that event. Eventually Musk woke up when the discussion came to cutting government spending, regulation and debt, and the grunting turned into unfettered agreement on just about everything Trumpian.
Musk, the once the greatest solar power guru and environmentalist, advocated for more nuclear power at one point, suggesting that the dangers have been overrated. He noted that he had even visited the Japanese Fukushima site where he saw people eating veggies grown in the vicinity of the radioactive leak. Clearly that meant it was safe. To that Trump surprised everyone by saying he now liked the electric car, then politely admonished Musk for not putting solar panels on his Teslas.
As an interviewer, Musk played softball and sucked up to every word the former president uttered. He even joined the attack on VP Harris, noting that he once was a democrat. Clearly he has moved on because the Joe Biden democrats possibly pose a treat to him from making even more money and running his businesses without constraint. Or maybe he just got bored with social democracy and would like to visit the places where autocrats like Putin and wanna-be’s like Trump live.
The program showed us just how shallow Musk, the introverted genius is.
All in all, the best thing that could be said about this grumpy old guys chat was that it was boring. To be fair it had been billed as just a conversation. Though it was more of a monologue by Trump, complemented by errant grunts from his latest disciple who is bringing a bag full of money to the Trump election campaign. It ran for over two hours and revealed nothing that we didn’t already know or hadn’t heard.
But it did show us just how shallow Musk, the introverted genius, has been become. I’m really glad I didn’t end up buying one of his cars, as good as they are. And I’m not the only one either apparently. It seems other folks with a social conscience would rather buy from one of the emerging competitors than give more money, albeit indirectly, to the Trump for president election campaign.
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
Background links:
False Claims – Tesla Buyers – Grump[y Old Men
Loved this article, Ray. Well thought out and interesting..thank you for your candid insights.
It is time that consumers boycott anything owned by Musk. His ultra right wing views of hate and intolerance must be stamped out. Not a dime will he get from me!
“His ultra right wing views of hate and intolerance must be stamped out.” Really what you mean is his belief to freely express on X ideas that you don’t agree with. Musk has gone on record as stating that ideas that are illegal or that promote hate will not be published on X.
This morning, Amy Hamm, in the National Post wrote, “The leftist pundit class is looking at the conversation with the anxiety of a ruling nobility that doesn’t want to accept a change to the status quo”. You’ve just proved her point Ray.