Smackdown: Ronan Farrow takes on Elon Musk, gets scored for not understanding his subject
To the left, Elon Musk is a bad guy.
And bad guys need to be “controlled.”
Enter Ronan Farrow, who did a longggg piece for the New Yorker calling for that, didn’t get the response he probably thought it would.
The comments section of Ann Althouse’s blog (hat tip: Instapundit), where she slices off a quote from the Farrow piece and watches the responses, pretty well tells us all we need to know.
“… and at least seven major books…. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood. More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, ‘Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.’“
Writes Ronan Farrow, in “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule/How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in” (The New Yorker).
What it drew was a litany of scorings that makes one want to see just how bad the article might have been:
Musk has been clickbait for at least 5 years.
Like Trump, the experts pretend to understand him.
- 8/26/23, 1:40 PM
Lem the misspeller said…
Ronan’s me too hit piece.
- 8/26/23, 1:41 PM
RideSpaceMountain said…
“Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”
Funny. You could say the very same thing about every purple-haired pierced-septum adolescent at the New Yorker, New York Times, and j-school in this country.
- 8/26/23, 1:42 PM
That’s the first three. This one is particularly good:
And so is this:
- Original Mike said…
“Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift.”
Being manhandled by government bullies will do that to you.
- 8/26/23, 3:36 PM
That pretty well outlines the scope of the problem with the piece.
Amazing what a comments section can do!
The whole premise of the piece was that the U.S. government wanted to control him, and somehow, they always ended up the Keystone Kops or Wile E. Coyote in their efforts.
It opens with an interview of über-Deep-Stater Colin Kahl, who’s one of the worst of them, talking about how he wanted Elon Musk to pay for Ukraine’s $400-million internet service for its troops in the field instead of the Pentagon paying for it.
Like Raytheon would consent to something like that.
Something wrong with this picture? It never occurs to Kahl, or any of them, that maybe they should pay for this service if it is so important to them.
What a cheapskate.
Then there was a gushy section on Gen. Mark Milley, who, along with Kahl, served as one of the architects of the Afghanistan pullout, with Farrow missing the fact that maybe something is wrong with this picture of these incompetents calling the shots at anything, let alone Musk.
Farrow dutifully reports as if these guys had some kind of superior claim on Musk.
There’s a heavens-to-Betsy shiver from these guys at the thought of Musk talking with Vladimir Putin, and maybe modifying his stance because of it, which is what open-minded people do. They, on the other hand, remain mired in their absolutist war and its consultant contracts. Farrow left out the despicable behavior of Ukrainian officials when Musk so much as broached the topic of negotiations with Russia.
The piece, which gets the premise wrong, but nevertheless is very engagingly written, then goes into each and every wrangle that Musk has had with the federal authorities — from the FAA interfering with his SpaceX rocket launches to his Twitter purchase, which really upset them, to the Tesla factory COVID lockdowns that Musk rightly protested and then pulled his manufacturing operations over to Texas because of. Farrow leaves out the repulsive, despicable behavior of the California state elected officials who insisted on lockdowns in his description of what happened, but we all remember it only too well. I blogged about them here and here.
Farrow didn’t get into the latest harassment of Musk brought on by the Department of Justice, suing him for hiring too many American citizens at SpaceX, probably because the story is too new.
But unwittingly, Farrow did show how entitled the government feels to “control” him even as he brings one innovation after another to the market, and how many times they’ve tried to do it — the list is long and disgusting.
That’s not what he was after; the idea was to portray him as sort of a wild animal in need of taming, with big government just the organ to do it. They don’t see an entrepreneur, a visionary, or a genius. They see a problem to rein in. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Musk — and his millions of fans.
No wonder Musk keeps winning.
Nice try, Ronan, but you didn’t discredit Musk. All you did was make his Deep State opponents look even worse than we thought they were.
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