Elon musk

“We have an elite who have been in power for at least the last 40 years, who fundamentally don’t like western civilization and they wanna destroy it,” said Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days in 2022, as she spoke to a half-full room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. It was her third such speech. The Liz Truss who addresses American audiences bears little resemblance to the awkward, growth-obsessed economics nerd who somehow ascended the greasy pole of British politics, only to slide back down at staggering speed. She’s changed her vocabulary – and her talking points. The few attendees of her panel, snappily titled “Europestan: Can Europe Survive?” could hear Truss lambasting “grooming gangs” and “transgender ideology.

Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach him this: the whole strategy behind the business that made him rich, Amazon.

Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is proposing a ban on under-16s using social media, following the example set by Australia last year. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier this week, Sánchez said: "Today our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone… We will protect [them] from the digital Wild West." The Spanish premier’s announcement comes at a time when several other European nations are also attempting to combat the harmful effects of social media on children. France’s ban on under-15s using social media is expected to become law later this year, while Greece, Portugal and Denmark have signaled their intention to enact similar legislation.

There are scenes in blockbuster teen movies from the 1980s and 1990s that wouldn’t fly today. I think of Revenge of the Nerds, that classic raunchy coming-of-age tale about pocket protector-wearing geeks no woman would ever touch with a three-foot slide rule. You might recall the heroes of the story install hidden cameras in a sorority house in order to spy on naked, skinny, blonde cheerleaders. In triumph, the Byronic dirtbag yells, “We’ve got bush!” In our purportedly more enlightened age, Hollywood has forsaken making risqué teen comedies for vulgar imps; instead the vulgar imps have taken their raunch to the lawless internet. The powers of AI have multiplied their mischief. Their latest prank is to tell Grok, an AI chatbot on X.

When Trump administration figures want to do a warm, humanizing interview these days, they can’t depend on the mainstream media. It’s often adversarial or downright hostile. Chatty bro podcasters such as Joe Rogan give them room to talk, but also challenge them on policy positions. Their best bet is The Katie Miller Podcast, a show hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief policy advisor. She’s quickly emerged as the Barbara Walters, or Oprah Winfrey, of the new American conservatism.

​“Welcome to Starbase, Texas,” Elon Musk said from the stage Monday night, as the crowd whooped. “This is a city. It’s actually legally a city that thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing. And it’s now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. For people out there who are curious to see it, we’re actually on a public highway, so you can come and visit. Drive down the road and see the epic hardware. I think this is the first time that a rocket development program has actually been on a public highway.

The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say Labour’s ire for X isn’t simply about the site’s supposedly insufficient safeguarding policies Britain’s Labour party has issued its most serious threat yet to social-media giant X – whose owner, Elon Musk, has become this rudderless government’s go-to bogeyman.

“Some people will correct me. They love to correct me. Even though I’m right about everything,” President Trump was saying, but no one was about to correct the President at this December cabinet meeting, the last in a series of extremely long such affairs that TV has carried this year. At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era. Trump is always with us, and talking at us. Before the roundtable of cabinet members listing their accomplishments and kissing the boss’s butt, Trump talked for nearly 30 minutes.

DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib.  It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.