Elon Musk is the world’s richest man but also the No. 1 target of the world’s richest governments and their associated industrialists. The reason traces entirely to his independence of mind and the actions that follow from that.
In times of censorship, he bought and now protects a free-speech platform, the only one remaining with any real reach into the public mind. Countless millions of people are deeply grateful, even if the platform is a long way from profitability.
Further, Mr. Musk is innovating in a time of stagnation with Tesla, Starlink, and SpaceX. He is outspoken against the many forms of despotism of our time. He was an original dissident against COVID-19 controls and probably the most prominent, keeping his factories running in defiance of the governor and then even leaving California for Texas to find more freedom.
This is the whole reason he is fending off attacks from every angle.
• Suspected breach of obligations to counter #IllegalContent and #Disinformation
• Suspected breach of #Transparency obligations
• Suspected #DeceptiveDesign of user interface
Mr. Musk has been very clear that he works to respect the laws of every country, even those with which he strongly disagrees. This pertains to the EU’s aggressive censorship, which was deployed through the COVID-19 era at the expense of scientific freedom and in defense of governments that locked down their citizenry, forced medical treatments on citizens that they did not want or need, and then covered up behind-the-scenes machinations.
It’s rich to have Mr. Breton go after Mr. Musk for a lack of transparency when the whole point of the EU’s regime is to force a lack of transparency. Adding to the irony, Mr. Breton knew that Mr. Musk would not censor the note on the world’s largest platform for free speech. He is thereby deploying the use of freedom in opposition to its existence.
And before we sniff at the censorial Europeans and their intolerance of free speech, consider that the same thing—or some version of it—is happening to Mr. Musk in the United States. After March 2020, there was a concerted effort led by deep-state actors to gain full control of social media to squelch any dissent. It affected every platform, including Twitter. Amazon and all app stores even banned Parler because it was becoming too popular.
As things died down, Mr. Musk bought the Twitter platform and purged 4 out of 5 employees, including the many government agents who had been hired to turn Twitter into a government propaganda machine. Since then, he has upheld the First Amendment and innovated a series of tools that allow for internal and crowd-sourced fact-checking to make his renamed platform the most reliable source of news and opinion in the world.
The SEC has sued Mr. Musk over the purchase of the platform.
The FTC has demanded internal X documents.
The Biden Department of Justice has sued SpaceX—get this—for not hiring refugees for secret rocket technology.
The Biden Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have sued Tesla over improper perks.
The Biden Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation against Tesla over self-driving cars.
The presumption here is preposterous: that Mr. Musk doesn’t care if his product is flawed and doesn’t desire improvement.
There is a federal investigation of Neuralink.
Then there is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation over harassment at Tesla.
Finally, we have the aggressive advertising boycott on the part of major corporations, including Disney, CNBC, Comcast, Warner Bros, IBM, and the Financial Times, among many others. Mr. Musk has refused to be intimidated by these people. He has said that he refuses to be blackmailed by money and instead told the companies, “Go [expletive] yourself.” That is rather remarkable and really does speak to a major problem in social media today, which is the extent to which so many platforms are willing to do the bidding of the corporatist system in order to serve the bottom line.
That is fully nine direct lines of attack, but probably the company and Mr. Musk could list another several dozen such cases once you consider all levels of government everywhere Mr. Musk’s companies are operating. And yes, it all sounds like something straight out of a novel by Ayn Rand. The successful and innovative entrepreneur is attacked on all sides by institutions and people who live off the system rather than innovate around and beyond it.
We truly do live in a new age of envy, powered by states and their industrial allies more wedded to their own profitability lines and plans than what the people want and what great entrepreneurs can create. This is very clearly a crony attack. What’s striking is that everyone knows that and yet it is tolerated in any case. It’s a great recipe for killing off the wealth-generating machine for a generation or two.
