Even ‘The New York Times’ is finally figuring out that Elon Musk is putting it all on the line for Donald Trump.
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Kudos to The New York Times: Less than two years after the paper was puzzled by where Elon Musk stands politically, its crackerjack reporters have finally managed to figure out this mystery. As it turns out, he is all in for Donald Trump.
Thanks, “paper of record.”
Apparently, all it took to come to this realization was Musk acting like a teenage girl at a Taylor Swift concert when joining Trump on stage at a recent rally in Pennsylvania.
Or maybe it was the fact that the owner of the online platform X has poured tens of millions of dollars into the race and is coordinating a massive get-out-the-vote effort with the Trump campaign.
Or maybe all of those tweets full of misinformation with which Musk is pushing a right-wing ideology gave it away.
In any case, it’s nice to see that the Times has now come to the realization that the billionaire has lied every time in the past when he claimed to be anything other than a hard-core right-winger.
Who can blame its reporters, though? After all, Musk is a man of some repute, so, clearly, what he says must be given equal or greater weight than what he does.
And, while the Times correctly points out that the billionaire is truly putting his money where his mouth is, its reporters are still, for the most part, missing the point of where Musk is having the greatest impact.
Those millions of dollars he is giving to his PAC (while trying to hide that fact) are peanuts compared to his most significant investment in right-wing ideology: Twitter.
Musk detractors seem gleeful whenever it is reported how much money the online messaging platform has lost since he purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022.
What they don’t seem to realize, and what is the crucial piece of analysis missing from the Times’ latest piece, is that the Twitter takeover was never a business decision. It was always about giving other right-wing ideologues (first and foremost the billionaire himself) a platform that allowed them to spread lies and misinformation to an audience algorithmically predisposed to believing them.
All of that money Musk is “losing” right now as X’s value tanks? That’s not a business loss, that’s a multi-billion-dollar in-kind contribution to the GOP.
Sure, he may occasionally complain about losing advertisers (which fits in with his narrative that he is fighting some kind of “machine”), but Musk is also not doing anything to woo them back to the site by making it more palatable for them.
Instead, he himself has become much more overtly radical in recent months, and has become probably the world’s greatest spreader of misinformation.
It would have been nice for the Times to put two and two together sooner in this case.
Then again, it’s nice that its reporters finally figured out that Musk’s politics are not that complicated after all.
