RUSSIAN TO JUDGMENT
With new ‘Pravda,’ Musk is a comrade in harms
Elon Musk is taking his Twitter tantrums to a whole new level.
The increasingly irascible Tesla chief executive went on a 24-hour, anti-media tirade from Wednesday to Thursday, culminating in an online poll that saw nearly 700,000 people showing their support for his plans to create a Web site to vet journalists’ credibility.
Musk said that he is thinking of a site where “the public can rate the core truth” of news stories, as well as track “the credibility score” of journalists and publications.
The Web site would be called “Pravda,” the Russian word for “truth” and also the name of the official newspaper of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
Musk’s tweets were light on details, but suggested that the site would “restore the credibility of the media” by allowing the public to vote on how objective or accurate they feel publications and journalists are.
The electric-car maker has been fighting negative press for several months over production bottlenecks for its Model 3 sedan, crashes involving its cars and doubts raised by Wall Street over its cash position.
“The holier-than-thou hy- pocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” Musk vented.
He continued by telling his followers that Tesla’s negative headlines are due to journalists being “under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars” lest they lose their jobs.
Thursday morning, Musk gleefully noted that the results of a poll he posted, asking Twitter users whether or not they thought his planned “media credibility rating site” was a good idea, were decidedly in his favor.
“Come on media, you can do it!” Musk taunted. “Get more people to vote for you. You are literally the media.”
Late Thursday afternoon, 88 percent of the poll’s 680,000 respondents were in favor of Musk’s proposed Web site, while 12 percent were opposed.
Tesla shares ended the day down 0.4 percent, at $277.85.
Musk’s frustrations boiled over following recent negative media reports about Tesla, including Consumer Reports’ decision this week to not recommend Tesla’s Model 3 sedan after criticizing it for its long stopping distances and difficult-to-use controls.
The billionaire contended that the hostile media’s advertising clients include Tesla’s biggest competitors — “fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies.”
On Wednesday afternoon, he shared with his nearly 22 million followers a tweet linking to posts on the auto blog Electrek criticizing recent coverage of fatal Tesla crashes.
The 46-year-old billionaire has been particularly sensitive about negative coverage of recent Tesla crashes that have made headlines, including a fiery March wreck that saw the driver of a Model X die after hitting a concrete median while in Autopilot mode.