Column: Elon Musk takes Twitter exactly where we thought he would — into the sewer
Elon Musk is a lot of things in life: an inventor, an entrepreneur, an engineer. But, to most of us, he’s the guy who invented the electric vehicle that’s been the fuel of his company, SpaceX. Well, now that the first Model 3 electric vehicle has been unveiled in the wild beyond Tesla’s private test track in Hawthorne, he has taken his Twitter feed exactly where we thought he would: into the sewer.
That’s right. His latest missive, sent to his 2.41 million followers, was one of the most egregious missives you’ll ever see on Twitter. It essentially called out the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius and its chief White House correspondent, Jonathan Capehart at the very moment the two are the highest-profile public faces of the Trump administration.
What Musk got wrong
First, the big thing Musk didn’t get was that the Post is in fact the newspaper of record in Washington, D.C. It’s a member of the “free press,” something Musk probably knows about because he’s a journalist and a scientist on Twitter.
But he also got it wrong when he claimed Ignatius and Capehart were “partnered” with the Post so they couldn’t be objective about Trump. The Post, by all accounts, has nothing to do with it, and its relationship with the White House is, if anything, a little more lukewarm than it was prior to Trump becoming president. Indeed, the Post has had a contentious relationship with many of Trump’s key aides, most notably Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. Still, that doesn’t mean its reporting is necessarily biased.
Here’s the problem: Musk’s criticism of the Post’s reporting, or lack thereof, was not only wrong (
