Elon Musk’s Tesla electric-car and power company has been getting some bad press lately, and today the tech billionaire pushed back with a tweetstorm criticizing “the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies” and laying out a plan for a crowdsourced media credibility rating site.
The fast-moving discussion suggests Musk is adding yet another venture to his smorgasbord, in addition to Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, the Neuralink brain-computer interface company, flamethrowers, tequila, candy and his campaign to fend off an AI apocalypse.
Musk and other Tesla executives will also have to fend off an investor challenge at the company’s June 5 meeting, focused on questions relating to Tesla’s Autopilot sem-autonomous driving system as well as to the slower-than-expected ramp-up of Tesla Model 3 electric car production.
The news reports about such questions have caused Musk to gripe in the past, and the issue came to a head today when he retweeted an analyst’s assessment that the criticism was “increasingly immaterial” and that Tesla’s shares “could appreciate significantly with execution.”
Here’s how the tangled thread unwound on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999355619390865408
https://twitter.com/teddymonacelli/status/999357108759023616
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999363031996948480
https://twitter.com/andyjayhawk/status/999356301644791808
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999357298861486080
https://twitter.com/jaspar/status/999360422267453440
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999361510915768320
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999364333674024960
https://twitter.com/JessicaHuseman/status/999370018449248256
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999376607662952448
https://twitter.com/JessicaHuseman/status/999370535086718976
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999378223661137920
https://twitter.com/SophieWarnes/status/999369906142445568
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999370318383742976
https://twitter.com/dancow/status/999365504438489089
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999365829761249280
https://twitter.com/CodyBrown/status/999364863725096960
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999365292684861441
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999367582271422464
https://twitter.com/DetroitVictoria/status/999367815353298945
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999369022280843264
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999369623484039168
https://twitter.com/scotch_io/status/999370309810704384
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999371548053000193
https://twitter.com/sakiwebo/status/999367705793875969
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999367998078042114
https://twitter.com/Virtualanom/status/999367847951421440
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999368393420488704
https://twitter.com/AntVenom/status/999367839474704384
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999368671972622336
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999374720368689153
https://twitter.com/iShashankBhatia/status/999375051735486464
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999375777882750976
https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/999377507215343618
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999385249720057856
https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704
https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999377177396199424
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999382070848770048
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999389139551248384
The California corporate information form says Pravda Corp.’s president is Jared Birchall, who happens to be Neuralink’s president as well.
If Musk does go with Pravda, that’d set an unfortunate precedent: Few veterans of the Cold War will forget that Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party between 1918 and the Soviet breakup in 1991.
“Pravda” is also the Russian word for “truth,” which was an ironic name even for the Soviets. A famous phrase played off the lack of truth in official papers such as Pravda and Izvestia (which means “news” in Russian): “There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.”
After the Soviet breakup, the publication’s online presence devolved into a notorious clickbait factory.
It’s great that Musk is interested in supporting reality checks amid the “fake news” crisis, but crowdsourcing may not be the best way to do it. Supporting the independent organizations that already exist, including Snopes and Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, would be a better way to go.
For more about countering the ills of the information business, check out this discussion from last year’s GeekWire Summit:
Update for 6:50 p.m. PT May 23: Musk is still tweeting about the media-watchdog idea. He says calling it Pravda was just a joke, despite the corporate filings. “I thought it was so obvious,” he tweeted. Here are some more chirps:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999465692859527168
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/999433480797872128
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/999466717112745985