Elon Musk Is Making a Bad Situation Worse
The X owner’s response to the attack on Trump shows the danger of absolute power.
For a long time, scientists have hypothesized that exposure to lead causes a measurable drop in IQ. I am beginning to think the same is true of X.
The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is undoubtedly a clever man, but in search of attention and notoriety online, he has become—or is pretending to be—very dumb indeed. How else to explain his half-baked media criticisms after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?
In the minutes after the shooting in Pennsylvania, news outlets did what they should do: They scrambled to sort fact from speculation. Reporters quickly uncovered the shooter’s identity and complicated political affiliations, informing the discussion of his possible motives. Photo agencies distributed high-quality and widely praised images of the incident, something they could do because they routinely send experienced photographers to cover rallies across the political spectrum. The British Broadcasting Corporation secured a crucial interview with a witness who claimed to have seen the shooter climbing a roof with a rifle—a statement that will force the Secret Service to answer tough questions about its competence.
[Ali Breland: The Trump shooting conspiracies outpaced reality]
None of that mattered to Elon Musk. Instead, he drew attention to the very first headlines from The Washington Post, ABC, and USA Today. These were cautious, reporting only that Trump was removed from the stage by the Secret Service following “popping noises” or “loud noises.” (For a time, CNN misleadingly asserted that Trump “falls at rally.”) In most cases, they were updated within minutes, first to “apparent gunshots” and then “gunshots,” as more information became available. All of the above outlets have since given blanket coverage to the shooting. As I write this, CNN has 10 articles about the shooting on its homepage, with the lead headline describing what happened as an “assassination attempt.” Yet Musk’s posts encouraged the suggestion that the media were downplaying the shooting to deny Trump his moment of heroic bravery. A user called DogeDesigner had compiled all the early headlines into a collage, which Musk quote-tweeted, adding approvingly: “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. X is the voice of the people.”
Why were the early headlines really like that? The term fog of war exists for a reason. Developing news situations are inherently chaotic. Witnesses contradict each other. Even official statements can be wrong. And for traditional media institutions, unlike individual users of social media, being wrong has consequences: Lost sales, broken trust, even lawsuits or appearances at congressional inquiries. News organizations had to make the same kind of high-pressure, irrevocable judgment as the sniper on the roof who took down the shooter. A wrong call really matters. Outsiders can criticize decisions taken at moments like this, but they should do so while acknowledging the stakes involved. Things that might seem obvious to onlookers nonetheless merit proper investigation. When the Princess of Wales was unusually absent from public life earlier this year, many people on X believed the explanation was obviously sinister. (In fact, she had cancer.) When someone on social media tells you it’s raining, the traditional media’s job is to look out of the window.
Elon Musk surely knows how breaking news works. And if not, he should. He regularly complains that the media doesn’t understand the workings of his companies, so he should hold himself to the same standard when talking about the news industry.
He doesn’t, though. He just says whatever he likes, safe in the knowledge that an army of greasers desperate for attention (and revenue) from Daddy Musk will boost his half-baked opinions. Nonetheless, every so often, a shaft of sense pierces the veil of his self-absorption. “The best ‘reporters’ are actual experts in a subject or those actually at the scene,” he posted late on Sunday. You mean, like … the ones at CNN? Or was DogeDesigner actually at the rally in Pennsylvania, taking time out from a busy schedule of posting renderings of Tesla CyberTrucks and strange images of Mark Zuckerberg as a Black man?
Musk was not the only commentator dabbling in media criticism, unburdened by research or even common sense. Another complaint was that The New York Times had cropped out the U.S. flag from its front-page picture—suggesting a lack of patriotism or a reluctance to associate Trump with a symbol of Americanness—and had described the incident as a “shooting” rather than an “assassination attempt.” From my years working on print newspapers, I can tell you that copy editors are obsessed with finding words that fit into the spaces available. This is why tabloids developed an argot all of their own: cops, love rats, rows, feuds, romps. Assassination is a word too windy even for American broadsheet headlines. As for the Times picture, the explanation seems simple: The paper’s staff photographer was positioned at a different angle from Evan Vucci of the Associated Press, who took the image that immediately went viral. The paper elected to use its own exclusive photograph, rather than one that readers had already seen all over the internet.
As someone who has written about media failings for more than a decade, I would not pretend that even the wealthiest legacy outlets are flawless and unbiased. The rush of early, cautious headlines happened because of the pressure that news outlets face to fill the information void within seconds of an incident occurring. Journalism just keeps getting faster. Online news has caught up with rolling television coverage by offering “push alerts,” direct to subscribers’ phones. Again, getting these wrong is hugely embarrassing to an established brand, and that dynamic makes journalists more tentative—particularly over the weekend, when staffing is light and more junior people are likely to be in charge. But the old brands—crucially—have mechanisms to update provisional or faulty information. They don’t have to be shamed by a Community Note on X; they generally correct themselves.
Complaints about the headlines would not have gained traction, however, unless they were assumed to demonstrate some wider truths. For Musk, who has been sucked into a right-wing infosphere with inviolable rules that govern every interaction, those truths are self-evident. One is that you can be as sexist or racist as you like, as long as you couch your opinions as a criticism of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Hence the bizarre spectacle of conservative influencers focusing their anger not on the (male) Secret Service snipers who didn’t spot the shooter early enough, but on the alleged uselessness of the female agents surrounding Trump—women who would have, let’s not forget, willingly taken a bullet for the candidate. Musk’s most avid fans have created a praetorian guard around him, echoing and amplifying him, encouraging him to express ever-more reactionary opinions. They compete for his attention, and pander to his whims, knowing that any engagement makes them money—thanks to Musk’s system for sharing ad revenue with paid X subscribers. His sycophants have choked off his access to information that might contradict his worldview.
[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]
Another rule of Musk’s new infosphere is that traditional media are always unfair to Donald Trump, and anything they do, no matter how innocuous, has to be interpreted through that lens. Those early headlines cannot simply be cautious—they must be an attempt to downplay the assassination attempt and deny the threat of political violence from the left. (Never mind that another thing that is currently deemed “obvious” on social media, but unsupported by the currently available facts, is that the shooter was unmistakably left-wing and motivated by political animus.)
This belief in the innate unfairness of liberal media is strong enough to have withstood the flood of later coverage, which has been unhesitating in its description of what happened as appalling and unjustifiable violence. One of the Washington Post’s dozen homepage stories on the shooting is critical of liberals who spread “BlueAnon” conspiracy theories about the possibility that it was staged. If legacy outlets are attempting to downplay the incident, they are doing a bad job.
None of that matters on X, of course. Elon Musk has spoken, and each of his posts has tens of millions of views.
Power corrupts, the saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At his coronation, Napoleon Bonaparte notoriously took the crown out of the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head, recognizing no authority higher than his own. Power went to his head, in the most literal sense possible. Elon Musk is in a similar situation today, although his vanity makes Napoleon look like a humble soldier from Corsica. Musk loves posting so much he spent billions to ensure unimpeded access to the ability to reply “lol” to terrible memes and “!!” under the kind of grim stuff that used to be confined to Breitbart’s “Black Crime” vertical.
Now, if Elon Musk wants to suppress his basic common sense about how the world works so he can better indulge his most paranoid fantasies, that’s his own business. But, as his reaction to the terrible shooting of Donald Trump shows, he has turned X into a machine for validating his prejudices. And that, unfortunately, is making the rest of us dumber, too.