Musk, murder and ‘Moonlighting’
The magazine format series “Frontline” (9 p.m., PBS) does the best job on television of presenting journalism on the fly, of writing “the first draft of history.”
Tonight’s installment “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover” offers a profile of the world’s richest man and his accomplishments as both a carmaker and rocketeer as well as his personal and political transformation during the COVID era, a time when he chafed at workplace regulations and medical mandates.
This would result in his decision to buy and transform the social media platform Twitter, rebrand it as X and remake it in his own image.
So far, Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach to Twitter has resulted in an exodus of talent from the company, a loss of millions of users and a public relations fiasco that distracts from his other achievements.
But many fear what effect Musk’s ethos of “bro” libertarianism may have on X and political discourse, particularly when an increasingly erratic, authoritarian, violenceprone and seditious former president seems on the verge of locking up the Republican nomination.
The two-hour profile offers firsthand accounts from Musk’s former colleagues, journalists, authors and academics who speculate about what makes Musk tick, what turned him into the world’s most powerful man and what his sole ownership of a platform like Twitter/X might bring.
While so much about Musk seems specific to our own era, American industrial, social and political history has other examples of such “titans of industry” who seemed like beneficent geniuses to some and dangerous monopolists to others — and at least two examples of men whose lonely place at the pinnacle of power seemed to play havoc with their mental well-being.
Musk can seem larger than any one government. His Starlink satellite communication system is key to Ukraine’s war efforts. It’s frightening to some that just one man has the power to pull the plug on that operation. Given
his wealth and position, Musk has offered to “negotiate” between Russia and Ukraine.
At the outbreak of World War I, Henry Ford also saw himself as a peacemaker. His assembly line revolution made him the envy of the world. In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World,” the word “Ford” replaced the word “God.” But after decades of adulation, Ford would spend years praising Nazis and promoting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
Howard Hughes became the world richest man in the mid-20th century, amassing a fortune in the oil business, aviation and military contracts. Throughout World War II and well into the Cold War, he could seem larger than
life and more important than any one government. But he would succumb to crippling paranoia and retreat from the public eye.
It remains to be seen where Musk’s penchant for megalomania will take him in the coming years. But if history is any guide, it might not be pretty.
› Viaplay, the streaming service specializing in Scandinavian programs, imports the Danish truecrime series “Deadly Women,” profiling some of the most notorious killers in Danish history. One is the nurse who inspired the Netflix series “The Nurse,” and another is a woman who got away with murdering her husband until she bumped off her son-inlaw many years later.