Elon Musk admitted this week that some of the misinformation he spreads is incorrect. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody following him. What might be shocking, however, are the five facts (that may or may not be true) we unearthed about him.
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In a rare moment of introspection, Shadow President Elon Musk on Tuesday acknowledged that he is not infallible.
“Some of the things I say may be incorrect and should be corrected,” he said standing next to some old guy who was sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand.”
“Some” is doing some really heavy lifting in that first sentence. Try “most.”
In any case, maybe the CEO of the United States and the owner of the world’s loudest bullhorn should strive to bat 1.000 when it comes to not lying… especially if you know how much of an impact this misinformation can have.
If, for example, you can torpedo a bipartisan continuing resolution by spreading a few lies (and making some threats), then you must realize how much power you have.
But we get it, Elon!
It’s much easier to retweet something that fits into your view of the world but isn’t true at all than to verify a piece of information before spreading it, and it’s much easier to disseminate memes than to put some thought into a policy position and articulate it in a way that advances the public discourse.
And then, when it is pointed out to you that your tweet is complete nonsense, it’s easier to just attack the person doing the correcting than to acknowledge one of your many “mistakes.” And even if you were to post dozens of mea culpas daily to acknowledge errors, by then the original lie or piece of misinformation would have already been viewed and amplified millions of times, so that would not do a lot of good.
Of course, we don’t believe these are mistakes. If it takes a regular person ten seconds to figure out that a meme/shocking headline is false, surely a super-genius can do a quick fact-check.
Therefore, we think this is happening by design. With unlimited resources at your disposal, it should not be difficult at all to bat one thousand.
There is an alternative explanation, however. Maybe Elon Musk is simply misunderstood. Therefore, to allow Americans to get to know this mercurial billionaire a bit better, we have compiled a list of five facts about him. Some of them may be incorrect, of course, but you can’t expect us to bat one thousand either.
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- Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is building some pretty cool rockets. If you are into that kind of stuff, you have to applaud the ingenuity of the guys he has hired to advance space exploration.
- Elon Musk eats guinea pigs for breakfast. It’s not our thing, but it’s also not illegal.
- Elon Musk has 12 children (that we know of) with three women. Musk is very concerned about western civilization collapsing because of declining birth rates, and he is certainly doing his part to counteract that trend. If you are wondering, the one he keeps using as a prop is named X Æ A-Xii, but you can call him “X.”
- Musk has long dreamt of bringing back apartheid. Musk left his native South Africa shortly before its white supremacist regime collapsed. However, he grew up in the system widely known as apartheid. In high school, he wrote a paper that read in part “one day, I will buy myself an American president and then I will have my revenge.”
- Musk is an admitted user of ketamine. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, ketamine is “a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects. It distorts perceptions of sight and sound and makes the user feel disconnected and not in control,” i.e., definitely something you don’t want somebody to take who runs the government… at least not if you want that person to bat one thousand.
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In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
