You have to take the bad with the good. Two days ago the Dwight D Opperman Foundation chose Elon Musk as the 2024 winner of the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award. Other winners included Rupert Murdoch, Martha Stewart, Mike Milken, and Sylvester Stallone.
Now to be fair and complete, the Ginsberg family has issued a statement that they don’t approve of these awardees, they have nothing to do with this award, they were not consulted with this selection, and the award has nothing to do with its original guidelines.
My cite is not the Onion:
Nominees for the Vladimir Putin Leadership Award are pending.
Yeah, I used to respect Isaacson as a great biographer. The events involving Elmo have really trashed his reputation. In that respect Elmo really is a lot like Trump, in the “everything he touches turns to shit” sense.
Well, I guess he’s got to get something for all that money. Being able to call other people stupid without getting called on your own bullshit has to be worth something, right?
Thing is, Lemon said the reason he wanted to interview Musk was to establish Musk’s freedom of speech. In other words, the goal was to show that, even if asked tough questions he might not like, Musk would still not cancel the show. It would raise the credibility of Lemon’s show, but also Twitter and Musk.
But, by cancelling it, Lemon still looks good for standing up to the guy paying the bills, while Musk and Twitter look bad. His pulling funding doesn’t actually prevent the interview from going out.
Musk seemingly cannot think past “this makes me feel bad.”
On the other hand, what substantial cost will doing that have on him? Almost none, most likely. At best, it’s another brick in the stupid, immature wall.
True. But on Musk’s scale, at absolute max that’s like you or I dropping a penny and not bothering to bend over to pick it up. And even that probably exaggerates the dollar impact on Musk by several orders of magnitude.
The thing that confuses me a bit is why Musk even consented to start down this road. Once we assume all his thoughts are a drug-fueled random walk, then anything “makes sense” in the degenerate sense of “this could follow that for any reason or no reason”.
But short of that dismissive scenario, what was he thinking as he was connecting with Lemon and fleshing out what they were going to do and to what goal for Musk himself?
Allowing that the whole deal with Lemon was some sort of sober, well-considered idea and not fueled by some drug cocktail(s), Musk is clearly a narcissist. He probably thought his own natural genius and brilliant ideas would speak for themselves, and it never crossed his mind that he might be put into a position to look weak or foolish.
People have said that about him before - that he is so wealthy and always has been, so he is rarely challenged in person or made to feel uninformed or not the smartest guy in the room. It just never crosses his mind that it could ever happen to him.
Musk probably genuinely believes that he’s some sort of free speech champion, in the way so many bigots think “free speech” means “that thing liberals are so scared of.”
Free speech definitely doesn’t mean being forced to account for your beliefs or admit to your failings.
“So sure, of course I’ll be interviewed, I’m a free speech abs- oh nooooo he’s not asking the questions I was hoping he’d ask this is OVER.”
You know, Lemon asked some very hard questions during his interview. I can see why Musk would find this annoying. You don’t see Stephen Colbert discussing the medical prescriptions of the network brass. That said, I am unsure what Musk was expecting.
You can see it at the very start of the interview. Musk wanted to make a splashy point that “X” was a place that supported both right AND left voices so he was not some terrible bigot like all the mean people were saying but a free speech champion like he secretly knew he was all along.
The funniest part of the early interview was Don Lemon retorting back as to why Elon thought he was “far left” and you could see Elon visibly struggling to figure out an acceptable way of saying “because you’re black” without revealing that that was his true subconscious logic.
In his mind, Don Lemon was some feeble minded wokie who he could destroy with facts and logic which would simultaneously serve his purpose of both that he doesn’t discriminate against any viewpoint and also that the only logical political position anyone could be if they were as genius as him is the one where he finds Ian Miles Cheong genuinely insightful. He was so confident that this was going to be the outcome he didn’t even bother preparing ahead of time, as he admitted 5m into the interview that he hadn’t actually watched any of Don Lemon’s work except what came to him via Fox News.
That Don Lemon refused from the very start to play into his pre-arranged narrative meant that he now needed to apply his own self reality distortion field and construct from scratch new logic as to why the actions he’s taking are only those which could have been taken by a genius and now here we are.
I’ll start worrying about that the day that CBS brass starts bragging on the social media company that they bought at the inflated price of $44 billion that they’re taking Ketamine to self-medicate their depression. Or sorry, that they’ve gotten a prescription to take to treat their depression from an “actual, real doctor”.
Yeah the whole “free speech” thing, to Musk and his ilk free speech means “I get to say whatever I want to say and you don’t have the right to respond to me.”
He’s never been challenged in any meaningful way his entire life and his ego and narcissism are at Trump levels. The first time he’s challenged by a journalist actually asking serious questions he’s left flat-footed and turns around and throws a temper tantrum. And then walks off and says you can’t have his ball to play with anymore. He’s a giant spoiled child.