OPINION:
Elon Musk has learned how fickle the left’s adulation can be. When the African American entrepreneur (he was born in Pretoria, South Africa) devoted his considerable energy to building rent-seeking businesses such as Tesla Motors and SolarCity, his foibles were brushed aside. He could do no wrong.
Tolerance gave way to disdain as soon as the billionaire dissented from leftist groupthink by endorsing free speech — meaning he would no longer censor conservative views — on his social media platform.
The policy shift at Twitter, which Mr. Musk later renamed X, made him enemy No. 1 at big-name media and technology corporations such as Apple, Disney, IBM, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros., all of which announced they had pulled advertising from the social media platform.
These companies do significant business with China, a regime with a long history of repressing ethnic minorities, so it is unlikely that they are truly upset merely because Mr. Musk endorsed a post on X being spun as antisemitic.
The corporate attempt to bully the world’s richest man isn’t working.
“If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go [expletive] yourself,” a feisty Mr. Musk said at a New York Times event last week, calling out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who was in attendance.
The drama was orchestrated by Media Matters, which released a report last month meant to spark the boycott fire. The left-wing activist group claims that advertising from the big-name brands regularly appears next to posts from extremists. The veneer of plausibility of a report from a nonprofit organization gave the multibillion-dollar conglomerates the excuse they sought to punish Mr. Musk for his sins against leftist orthodoxy.
The dubious report inspired Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to open a criminal fraud investigation of Media Matters. X Corp. has also filed its own lawsuit seeking damages, claiming it has the data required to conclusively disprove the smear.
“In Apple’s case, only two out of more than 500 million active users saw its ad appear alongside the fringe content cited in the [Media Matters] article — at least one of which was Media Matters,” the lawsuit asserts.
It is Mr. Musk’s access to data unraveling the left’s false narratives that’s at the heart of the matter. In purchasing Twitter, Mr. Musk became custodian of a trove of documents proving the U.S. government colludes with technology companies to censor any speech conflicting with the Democratic Party line. For example, this unconstitutional power was wielded to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election campaign, a move that polls show likely saved Joe Biden’s presidential bid.
Big business hasn’t leaned Republican for decades. WikiLeaks previously exposed how tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google conspired during the 2016 election cycle to assist Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential run. They redoubled efforts in light of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory.
The left will never forgive Mr. Musk for shining a light on these backroom efforts, yet the savvy businessman isn’t seeking redemption.
“It’s a real weakness to want to be liked,” Mr. Musk said. “I do not have that.”
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