Remember back in May when Elon Musk called out the lack of credibility in journalism,
referred to the influence of the elites on media,
and joked about creating a rating site to help hold journalists to a standard of honesty?
Again, this was at the end of May: less than two months ago at the time Iâm writing this.
Totally unrelated, but itâs crazy how, in less than two months, public opinion of him has changed from overwhelmingly positive: Elon Musk is going to colonize Mars, Elon Musk is an eccentric genius, Elon Musk is going to save the world; to derisive, negative: heâs self-aggrandizing and ignorant for trying to help in Thailand, his fans are all misogynistic white men who are keeping women away from STEM or bootlickers who just love him because heâs wealthy, etc., etc.
This was accomplished, for the most part, without aggressively pushing the narrative that Elon Musk hates journalism, that journalists are just bravely speaking truth to power, etc. The articles that tried to push that angle were mostly ignored or mocked, given how overwhelmingly blatant the bias was; people seemed to find them insulting, mostly.Â
And so itâs even creepier when you consider the fact that, at the time, people were entirely aware that the media would try and hit back to turn public opinion back in their favor, with tweets like this:
meeting with immediate derision and eventually being deleted. People were fully aware of what was going on, and why.
The initial blowback seemed to be mostly a frenzy of articles searching for a weak point, searching for some accusation that would stick, something to attack him for that wasnât his contempt for biased media. It was mostly an ineffective one.
The most common tactic, it seems, was attacking his supporters as misogynistic. It even looks like there was a failed attempt at replicating the success of the âBernie brosâ propaganda bit with âMuskBrosâ:
but although the term never caught on (even a Google search for âMuskBrosâ only pulls up about 7,000 results) and overwhelmingly dropped out of use after only a couple of days, the goal, and eventually the effect, was the same: smearing his supporters as misogynistic white men who hate women.
Itâs since moved on from the accusations of misogyny, although those are still out there; now, bizarrely, itâs moved on to deriding him for attempted humanitarian projects, which are mostly brought up now mainly in the context of âwe found someone who claims Elon Muskâs quest to help Flint should be carried out differently.âÂ
And now, less than two months later, weâre at the point where they can be entirely blatant again:
And yes, I know this is admittedly poor timing on my part, since Musk just quite legitimately shot himself in the foot making baseless, as far as I know, accusations against one of the cave rescuers on Twitter.
That said, this has been on my mind for a while, and the tide of public opinion has been turning against him since the end of May; this is far from a new thing, and I guarantee most of the people seeing this will have observed that changing public opinion in posts on here from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as in the media.
His fans have been accused of misogyny; his humanitarian attempts have been denounced as PR stunts; in some circles heâs been placed in the same category as people like Jeff Bezos, because Bezos has profited spectacularly off underpaid Amazon workers and the ire towards him is easy to spread to other billionaires simply by association.
Heâs certainly not perfect - but nor did he suddenly become a supervillain in two months.
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