Elon Musk is straight up fantasizing about murdering his mortal enemies. Those enemies being the powerful cabal of evil journalists, of course.
On Monday, the world’s richest man and memelord-in-chief took to his website X to fume against a recent piece from The Verge that ran with a provocative headline: “The world’s first trillionaire is a killer.”
A screenshot of the article — which shows a photo of Musk giving his infamous Nazi salute — was posted by a prominent pro-Tesla account, who argued that this was a clear sign that “they” want to kill Musk.
Musk joined in with his idea of a lighthearted joke.
“If I were [a killer], the douchebags at Verge would have been dead long ago,” he wrote, adding his favorite crying-laughing emoji.
The Verge article in question argues, citing studies published in top scientific journals like Nature and The Lancet, that by slashing foreign aid funding that went to critical public health programs around the world, Musk had caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them children.
Musk has never responded to these accusations seriously; after defunding the foreign aid programs, he glibly celebrated that he had fed them “into the wood chipper.”
Verge editor Nilay Patel caught wind of Musk’s post and responded in decidedly classier fashion: “Oh hey thanks for the shout here’s a gift link so everyone can read it,” he replied.
Despite Patel having nearly two hundred thousand followers, his reply received little attention and is buried under hundreds of other replies from tiny blue check mark accounts all praising Musk. On his Bluesky account, Patel half-joked that his reply was the “most shadow banned post in the history of posts.”
We all know Musk’s opinions on journalists by now. Buying Twitter and turning it into X was his way of giving a giant middle finger to the elite media class. Since then, he’s been accused of suppressing journalists on his platform, including by shadowbanning and suspending them. To combat the “woke” mainstream media, he’s instead promoted independently sourced “citizen journalism,” and upholds his AI chatbot Grok as a more reliable arbiter of the news. (For an idea of what Musk’s ideal of “citizen journalism” looks like: the winner of X’s article contest earlier this year was a user who described himself as a literal Nazi, receiving $1 million.)
Most would be rattled by one of the most powerful men in the world putting their name in the crosshairx, but not Patel.
“Elon says all kinds of stuff all the time, I don’t worry about it much,” he told Gizmodo in an interview, adding that he hopes Musk will link to the Verge more. “The open web really needs the help.”
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