A direct challenge to Elon Musk’s “conspiracy theory” tweets left the billionaire pausing — at length — before paraphrasing a cult classic in a one on one interview.
(Video: CNBC)
Fresh off passing his role of Twitter CEO to Linda Yaccarino, allowing himself to focus on the product, software and system operations, and following Tesla’s annual meeting, Musk sat down with David Faber of CNBC. Cutting to the chase during one segment of the interview, the host said Tuesday night, “Let’s talk a bit about your tweets because it comes up a lot.”
“Do your tweets hurt the company?” Faber would go on to ask after raising several examples that “seem to be…conspiracy theories.”
The host specifically wondered at Tesla owners finding disagreement with political positions or advertisers turning away from the social media platform, “because of some of the things you tweet.”
For roughly twelve seconds, the tech mogul left the host hanging with dead air before he replied, “You know, I’m reminded of — there’s a scene in ‘The Princess Bride’ — great movie — where he confronts the person who killed his father and he says, ‘offer me money, offer me power, I don’t care.'”
The reference to the 1987 film based off of William Goldman’s 1973 novel related to the character Inigo Montoya’s quest for revenge against the six-fingered man, Count Rugen. Ultimately, there was nothing the count could offer Montoya to stop him from righting the wrong that he had experienced.
Warning: Language
“So you just don’t care,” Faber offered in return, seemingly missing the point the billionaire was making.
To clarify, Musk added, “I’ll say what I want to say and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
Earlier in the discussion, when the host had brought up the idea of “conspiracy theories” the Tesla CEO noted, “Well, yes, but I mean honestly, you know some of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.”
For example he brought up the Hunter Biden laptop story, one of the focuses of the “Twitter Files” that exposed the manner in which certain content was suppressed and censored from the public.
As a counterpoint, Faber called out a recent comment from Musk that referred to progressive billionaire George Soros as reminding him of a Marvel Comics supervillain, “Soros reminds me of Magneto.”
Negative remarks about the dark money facilitator typically stray from the influence he wields to his ethnicity, and such was the case with Musk’s comparison as the fact was raised that, like the fictional Magneto, Soros had lived through the Holocaust.
One defense of Soros brought up “good intentions” that Musk countered by tweeting, “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilizations. Soros hates humanity.”
He continued to laugh at the exchange as he told Faber people should “make a federal case out of it.”
Faber made one more attempt to single out a detrimental tweet from Musk and brought up his comments on the murderer responsible for the death of eight people at an outlet mall outside Dallas. “Ok, but, I mean, when you link to somebody who’s talking about the guy who killed children in a mall in Allen, Texas, and you say something like it might be a bad psyop, I’m not quite sure what you meant.”
“In that particular case…obviously the people were killed, but it was, I think, incorrectly ascribed to be a white supremacist action and the evidence for that was some obscure Russian website that no one has ever heard of, that had no followers, and the company that found this is Bellingcat. And do you know what Bellingcat does?” Musk asked rhetorically. “Psyops.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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