Putting aside the fact that I cannot think of a least fun person to watch a World Cup Final with than Jared Kushner, Musk’s subsequent Tweets were as normal and straightforward and dull as you’d expect anyone’s to be from a World Cup Final: There is something depressing about the world’s richest person spending his time at such a glorious event staring at his phone. It didn’t strike me as that big of a deal: Rich guy goes to rich guy event.
But later that day on CNN — before Musk posted his should-I-step-down-at-Twitter poll — the network ran a long segment asking very serious questions about whether it was hypocritical of Musk to post a Tweet revealing his real-time location after spending the last couple of days defending his (very dumb) suspension of several journalists for (supposedly) revealing his “assassination coordinates” by linking to a site that tracks (via public information) Musk’s private jet. And while it probably is a little hypocritical, sure, it was hard to miss the subtext of what CNN was doing: It was covering Musk as Twitter CEO the way it covered Donald Trump at President. “LEADER SAYS X, THEN ACTS LIKE Y” was the fundamental construction of just about every Trump story when he was President. Trump would do something horrible, lie about it,