The incendiary Musk, unpunished

During an interview with Elon Musk, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, told him that his theory about an ongoing civil war in the UK is false, and that it is serious that he continues to spread this falsehood to his millions of followers. Minton Beddoes also pressed the tycoon on his support for the European far right, his anti-Muslim rhetoric and cuts to US humanitarian aid: Musk did not take it well. He wrote on X, which he owns, that the editor-in-chief of The Economist is “a traitor to the West, plain and simple”. According to Musk, “society is full of traitors”, whom he defines as follows: “Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor”; “anyone who does not love America” is a traitor. And when images emerged – some fake, others showing the opposite of what had been claimed – of thousands of people arriving from Morocco at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Musk went on a rampage.

He published doctored images and shared a comment by the Trump administration’s anti-immigration guru, Stephen Miller, who claimed that what happened in Ceuta occurred ‘every single day’ during the years of Democratic government; he posted a photo of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, with Alexander Soros – because you wouldn’t want to miss the chance to blame Soros; he wrote that, as they were ‘all men of military age, this means it is an invasion’, and so on and so forth: one inflammatory piece of spin after another, one falsehood after another from a Musk with a massive megaphone – a Musk who goes unpunished.