Tesla chief executive officer (CEO) Elon Musk has been dubbed as the ‘2023 Scoundrel of the Year’ by American news website New Republic. We are not joking. In a scathing article, the website has hit out at Musk, who also owns the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Recalling the social media platform’s move to suspend former US president Donald Trump’s account in wake of the January 6 Capitol riots, the website said that X (then Twitter) is now ‘teetering on the brink of collapse’ and is worth less than half of what Musk had paid to acquire it last year.
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The website said Musk was once a visionary who intended to make real things, be it electric cars or rockets. Drawing comparisons with Google, Facebook and even Twitter (pre-Musk takeover) who had to appear before US Congress for various reasons, Musk had been unscathed.
But now, the website has dubbed the billionaire as the ‘most villainous, also a deeply stupid and unserious person’.
Calling him an ‘evil’, Musk has been accused of making headlines for ‘incompetence’, the website claimed he unleashed and legitimised ‘heinous’ forces on the social platform he acquired.
“He has welcomed back some of the world’s most toxic people—Alex Jones, Donald Trump, innumerable Nazis and bigots—and has gone out of his way, again and again, to validate them,” the website added.
On November 15, Musk had sparked a massive row after he agreed with an X user who accused Jews of stoking hatred against the Whites, saying the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth.”
Calling Musk’s statement as unsurprising and reprehensible, the website said the Tesla CEO might be ‘fantastically wealthy’, but he is ‘deeply hateful’ who decided to dedicate his fortune to attacking diversity.
‘X is hanging by a thread’
The website accused Musk of opening the floodgates of X to ‘bigots’ and ‘trolls’, commenting that his own presence on the platform destroyed the utility once it had.
According to the website, X is now a “source of endless misinformation and propaganda, a place where a pro-Putin conspiracy theorist can become a widely read source for information on the Israel-Hamas war, and where Alex Jones can spew lies about children murdered in schools.”