Nobody says, “Hey, look at me!” with an authority and confidence to match that of Elon Musk. Not the Kardashians, not Donald Trump, and not even Marjorie Taylor Greene when she sees a camera following her. Like clockwork, Musk feeds a compulsion to work himself in the daily news cycle with a tweet, a threat, a product promise, a media interview or a stunt like smoking dope on Joe Rogan’s show.
This week alone, Musk earned headlines for vowing to sue Microsoft, for talking to the BBC about the “painful” part of running Twitter, for promising to compete with ChatGPT by creating his own AI platform, for attaching the “government-funded media” label to NPR, BBC and CBC’s accounts and then dropping it, for claiming Twitter is “roughly breaking even,” for telling Tucker Carlson birth control will lead to the “end of civilization,” for sharing his views on violent crime in San Francisco and for anointing his dog the CEO of Twitter.
As Elon Musk media weeks go, it was a light one. But it illustrates his strategy, almost certainly calculated, to hog our newsfeeds by quipping and provoking those around him, by making promises or predictions, and by lofting crude insults or weird theories. In a free country, there’s no law against being a dork or a fantasist of the Musk type, so we can’t ride him too hard for his incitements. And given his status as one of the world’s richest men, he probably deserves at least some of the outsize attention he draws from the press. But factoring all of that in, why do reporters and editors continue to treat his every gesture from the grandstand as worthy of paper and ink, airtime and Internet pixels? Why has the press become such a willing accomplice in his narcissism?
A vapor trail of broken Musk promises and failed predictions, all of which became news stories, have been documented by the elonmusk.today website. Musk vowed to build an “everything” Twitter app, but hasn’t. A full-time litigation shop? No sign of it yet. To convert atmospheric CO2 into rocket fuel? A no-show. The list continues: To create a super-fast Starlink service. Produce ventilators. Build a flying car. Distill a Tesla liquor (“Teslaquila”). Start a candy company. Sorry, not yet. When not making news by making promises, Musk enters our news diet by insulting people. He’s knocked a U.S. senator with a vulgar tweet, called a Thai cave rescuer a “pedo guy,” ridiculed Bill Gates’ beer belly and mocked a disabled Twitter employee. When predictions and insults fail to win him publicity, Musk has gained public attention by sharing conspiracy theories, signaling his support of the presidential candidacy of Ye, better known as Kanye West (and then withdrawing it), endorsing hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment and by making a poop emoji the auto-response to questions the press sends to Twitter.
Source : https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/22/elon-musk-the-barking-mad-publicity-hound-00093293