The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology

One of my favorite trends in modern U.S. infotainment media is something I affectionately call "CEO said a thing!" journalism.

"CEO said a thing!" journalism generally involves a press outlet parroting the claims of a CEO or billionaire utterly mindlessly without any sort of useful historical context as to whether anything being said is factually correct.

There's a few rules for this brand of journalism. One, you can't include any useful context that might shed helpful light on whether what the executive is saying is true. Two, it's important to make sure you never include a quote from an objective academic or expert in the field you're covering that might challenge the CEO.

Here's just one recent lovely example:

Nothing that headline says is true. It doesn't seem to matter. "CEO said a thing!" journalism involves, again, no actual journalism. Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Mark Zuckerberg are frequent beneficiaries of the U.S. corporate press' absolute dedication to propping up extraction class mythologies via clickbait.

Nobody has benefited more from this style of journalism than Elon Musk. His fake supergenius engineer persona was propped up by a lazy press for the better part of two decades before the public even started to realize Musk's primary skillset was opportunistically using familial wealth and the Paypal money he lucked into to saddle up to actual innovators and take singular credit for their work.

Despite the fact Musk has increasingly shown himself to be a conspiratorial white supremacist with a head full of room temperature butterscotch, the U.S. press is demonstratively undeterred, as we saw when Musk recently lied about "getting out of politics" and "spending a lot less on campaign donations":

Musk has, at this point, openly embraced white supremacy, funded an authoritarian insurrection, converted the nation's top social media platform into a nazi propaganda safe space, and killed hundreds of thousands of people through his mindless decimation of government.

None of it has hampered "CEO said a thing!" journalism in the slightest. We're still being inundated with lazy pseudo-journalistic infotainment that pretends Musk is hard at work in his shed behind the house, clad in overalls as he dutifully ponders the convoluted assembly of rocket assemblages beyond mortal ken.

It's utterly pathological, and they've been doing it for so long it's clearly an active, conscious choice to platform falsehoods.

We saw it again this week, when Musk announced on his personal propaganda website that he was shifting his attention from settling Mars (which wasn't actually happening), to "extending human consciousness" by building AI-powered satellite factories on the moon (also not actually happening):

Outlets like Business Insider, one of the premiere outlets for lazy "CEO said a thing!" cack, was quick to publish several stories parroting Musk's claims, despite the fact that Musk was never actually going to settle Mars, and there's little serious indication that he'll ever actually build bases on the moon.

Even ostensibly "serious" tech publications like Ars Technica wrote semi-glowing tributes to Musk's bold nonexistent pivot, dutifully downplaying the fact that Musk is a serial fabulist with a head full of white supremacy and oatmeal.

Amusingly, you can find more accurate descriptions of what's actually happening in the Ars comment section than the article:

The cause is simple: his companies trade at prices well above what their fundamentals warrant because he’s been able to spin grand visions and, thus far, avoid consequences for missing them. SpaceX is expected to make their IPO later this year and he has billions of dollars on the line for how much upside investors think the company has. He needs that to keep playing kingmaker on international politics, and likely to make up for Tesla falling behind in the car business.

The same game was busy playing out over at the New York Times, where the paper quickly got to work helping Musk pretend that we're just a hop (and a few billion in taxpayer subsidies) away from sentient AI robot satellite moonbase factories:

To be clear, the actual engineers that work at Elon Musk owned companies have done some useful and very interesting things. Though you'll notice that their names and the specific engineering contours of their actual work is not of interest to an ad-based press obsessed with a singular billionaire savior narrative.

I've had ample quibbles with Starlink but it's genuinely nifty technology (except for the whole destroying the ozone layer and astronomical research thing). SpaceX has certainly modernized less expensive space launch technology (putting aside the rampant disregard for worker, public safety and environmental regulations that made it possible). The company has certainly gotten young folks excited about space (ignoring Musk's tendency to redpill young American men into huffing fascism's farts to the detriment of all mankind).

But it's just an indisputable fact that Elon Musk is a terrible person and stunningly ignorant human being who frequently has no Earthly idea how very basic things work. Huge swaths of his business empire are propped up by memestocks, dodgy financials, and massive, press-aided misrepresentation of what his companies' technologies are, and will be, actually capable of.

For now, Musk is also propped up by an authoritarian government dedicated to slathering him in billions in taxpayer subsidies for genuinely doing nothing. A government that has frozen forty different regulatory inquiries into dodgy or patently illegal violations by his companies.

It can't be overstated that the man bought an autocratic government, the impact of which is literally killing people. But in "CEO said a thing!" journalism, that's just not considered useful context.

Twenty years from now we'll be inundated with documentaries more honestly detailing what a gargantuan bullshit artist Elon Musk was (I recommend watching The Lady And The Dale on HBO if you like seeing history repeat itself). Until then we appear stuck in a press-enabled purgatorial innovation mythology comically detached from anything resembling factual reality.