Elon musk

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray, Angus Colwell, Matthew Parris, Flora Watkins and Rory Sutherland

From our UK edition

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: after President Biden’s debate disaster, Freddy Gray profiles the one woman who could persuade him to step down, his wife Jill (1:05); Angus Colwell reports from Israel, where escalation of war seems a very real possibility (9:02); Matthew Parris attempts to reappraise the past 14 years of Conservative government (14:16); Flora Watkins reveals the reasons why canned gin and tonics are so popular (21:24); and, Rory Sutherland asks who could possibly make a better Bond villain than Elon Musk? (25:00).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How Elon Musk could solve the housing crisis

From our UK edition

People sometimes ask me why I don’t go into politics. Why on earth would I do that? No, if you want to exercise power and imagination, the only remaining role which appeals is to be some kind of Bond villain. To anyone familiar with modern bureaucracy, there’s something hugely attractive about an organisation where the HR department is replaced by a pool full of sharks. I think this fantasy largely explains why electorates are now drawn to candidates who seem a tiny bit sinister or weird. ‘Who knows?’ they think. ‘They might actually do something different.’ Never mind Trump: my guess is that if Elon Musk were eligible to run for president, he’d get 60 per cent of the vote.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Kamala prepares for power… with wince-inducing BET Awards skit

If you thought the Democrats couldn’t humiliate themselves any more, well, think again. In a cringeworthy pre-recorded skit played during the Black Entertainment Television Awards on Sunday night, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on a phone call with host Taraji P. Henson where they both expressed their concern about the upcoming presidential election. https://twitter.com/MeghanEMurphy/status/1807896843738927469 The skit was done as a parody rap song, quoting Kendrick Lamar’s song "Not Like Us," part of the Drake-Kendrick rivalry. The song specifically mocked Drake for dating younger women, accusing him of being a pedophile. “Madam VP Harris,” Henson starts off, “I’m worried about the election.

kamala harris bet awards

Friday

Cockburn

Taylor and Elon, sitting in a tree?

Elon Musk has often clashed with members of the tech press — irritated by their “targeting” of him over minor matters such as how he runs his businesses and who he fires. He has a longstanding feud with contentious Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz — but is that all for show? That’s the astonishing claim of self-described “investigative journalist” Nicole Slaski, @coolndizabled on TikTok. In a video this week, Slaski talked about how she’d been speaking to a Thiel Fellow, John H. Meyer, who alleges he has been “falsely” imprisoned for arson — and says that Meyer had told her that Lorenz and Musk were in fact romantically involved with each other.  https://www.tiktok.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, June 2024

The rise of reverse gaslighting Sir — To an otherwise excellent article, I have a small correction. In 1860, the Southern states did not keep Lincoln off the ballot. Unlike today, where voting ballots are printed by the states, in 1860, voters were not presented with official ballots at polling stations that allowed them to check off which candidate they were voting for. Instead, a nineteenth-century ballot or “political ticket” was a slip of paper, provided by each party, listing their candidates for whatever offices were up for election. This allowed voters to easily “vote the ticket” for their party without having to know the names of every candidate and office.

letters

Tuesday

Spectator Editorial

Is the West ready to face the challenges of advancing technology?

The theme of this month’s edition is technology. The advancement of space exploration, defense technologies, artificial intelligence and the like should excite us. Yet the geopolitical issues they present are great and Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with them. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top autists if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class on p.12. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on, as tycoons seek to cash in on the final frontier.

space technology

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

X and the return of the social-media sandbox

Elon Musk’s X, the social media site once known as Twitter, is a wasteland. It consists of uncontrolled pornography, crypto spambots, broken “mentions,” unpaid invoices for subscriptions, a useless search algorithm and unverified accounts spreading baseless conspiracy theories and being financially rewarded for juicing controversial or untrue content. It has become practically unusable as a functioning social media platform. But old Twitter, after what it had become, had to be absolutely and unequivocally destroyed for the sake of the future of open online discourse. The Jack Dorsey-Parag Agrawal iteration of Twitter had become part of an intelligence and corporate media censorship apparatus, which would spring into action against any user it viewed as an ideological opponent.

X

Friday

The Spectator

Mike Johnson’s olive branch

Speaker Mike Johnson is extending a high-profile olive branch to one of his biggest intra-party foes of the day: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Johnson made her one of the impeachment managers as the House hands the reins of the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas to a less-than-excited Senate. Just days ago, Greene was performatively threatening to oust Johnson hours before Congress headed into a multi-week recess. Now, she’s joining with a group of Republicans in asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to expeditiously schedule an impeachment hearing for Mayorkas. It’s not just Greene who is obviously being helped out by Johnson with this announcement.

Thursday

Cockburn

Elon Musk cans Don Lemon

Just when Cockburn feared Don Lemon might be able to salvage the remnants of his career, the former CNN host's shot of success slipped away. Lemon, who had cut a deal with X to host The Don Lemon Show, announced on Wednesday that Elon Musk had ended their partnership. The news came just hours after the two had sat down for an interview for the upcoming show.  “Elon Musk is mad at me,” Lemon said in a video while sipping his Starbucks latte. “Apparently, free speech absolutism doesn't apply when it comes to questions about him from people like me.” On Wednesday night, Lemon came crawling back to CNN to spill tea with Erin Burnett and share some tense moments from the interview. https://twitter.

don lemon

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Of course Taylor Swift deserves to be TIME’s Person of the Year

Well, it had to happen. Taylor Swift has been the most talked-about person in the world for some time now. After 2023 saw her conquer both stadiums and the world’s cinemas with her Eras Tour film — which, with a current gross of $249 million, is now the highest-earning concert movie ever made — her remarkable year has been capped off both with the enormous success of her re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and now, the news that TIME magazine has awarded the thirty-three-year-old musician the accolade of Person of the Year. She follows in the footsteps of everyone from Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. There are several noteworthy features of the accolade.

taylor swift

Friday

The Spectator

Santos kicked out of Congress

The House of Representatives kicked out its only Jew-ish member today, sending George Santos into the pages of history as one of only a handful of House members to be booted from the body. Former congressman Santos had an eventful second wedding anniversary yesterday, as he held a feisty, fiery press conference to proclaim his innocence — but declined to ask any of his colleagues to defend him against the latest charges. This third attempt at expulsion proved to be the charm for Santos’s foes, who rode the wave of an almost-comedic House Ethics report that alleged Santos spent donor dollars on everything from OnlyFans subscriptions (which he somewhat denied) to Botox (which he basically confirmed).

tesla cybertruck
Ross Anderson

The Cybertruck is a dud

The Cybertruck is here. Finally. Maybe. Sort of. Thursday was the “Cybertruck Delivery Event,” where they finally rolled off the production line and were handed over to waiting customers. Musk served as chaperone, host and speaker, and the event was a hype-fest for fanboys. As the presentation started, it was hard to tell whether some in the crowd were shouting “Elon” or “hallelujah” (I think the latter). He presented a polished marketing video, markedly sparse on specs, but promised that the Cybertruck was one of those rare products that change how we see the world; that it is “more truck than truck,” while also being “a better sports car than a sports car” and the best product Tesla had ever made. It’s not.

Wednesday

James Ball

What would life on Mars actually look like?

From our UK edition

Just as extreme altitudes have notable effects on the human body and mind, so too does extreme wealth seem to have a particular effect on psychology. Or at least that’s how it appears when you look at the shared ambition of two of the world’s most prominent billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Both men are fixated on the idea that humanity’s future lies beyond Earth and are funnelling fortunes into the vision that we will soon have significant human settlements off-planet, whether on the moon, Mars or elsewhere. It’s an argument grounded not just in exploration and discovery, but in survival. If humanity’s future on Earth looks to be in doubt, is living off-world not the ultimate insurance policy for our species?

Friday

Oscar Edmondson

Was Rishi Sunak’s AI summit a success?

From our UK edition

14 min listen

This week the prime minister hosted his landmark AI summit at Bletchley Park which wrapped up with an interview with Elon Musk, who warned that AI will one day render all jobs obsolete. The who's who of AI were in attendance over the two days as well the likes of Kamala Harris and Ursula von der Leyen, but what was actually achieved? Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Madhumita Murgia, AI editor at the Financial Times.

Monday

The Spectator

The EV election?

You can lead an electorate to the electronic vehicle charging station, but you can’t make them plug in.   That’s the lesson President Biden is learning as American consumers reject the “green” future the administration has been trying to mandate through the EPA’s proposed emissions standards and billions in EV subsidies and tax credits.   The American people, however, just aren’t buying the climate change is “even more frightening than a nuclear war” line Biden is selling.

Saturday

Lewis M. Andrews

What exactly is the new space race all about?

The recent spate of articles about attempts by different countries to land vehicles on the Moon make it clear that a new space race is on. Just last month, Russia launched its first mission there in forty-seven years. And although the automated Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed at the last minute, India’s heavily-instrumented Chandrayaan-3 landed successfully just four days later. NASA itself aims to return humans to the lunar surface in 2025 with its Artemis program. Remarkably, more than eighty countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates, have thus far established some kind of presence in space.

space

Thursday

Aaron Gwyn

The new Elon Musk biography lacks a clear vision

In the prologue to his biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson evokes the Hero’s Journey in its most pop-culture incarnation: It’s one of the most resonant tropes in mythology. To what extent does the epic quest of the Star Wars hero require exorcising demons bequeathed by Darth Vader and wrestling with the dark side of the Force? Isaacson’s assumption is that Luke Skywalker is the hero of the original film A New Hope. His preamble is titled “Muse of Fire,” a reference to the most famous prologue in literature, the opening lines of Henry V. In Shakespeare’s play, the poet, recognizing the gargantuan feat before him, asks the Muse for help: O, for a muse of fire that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

elon musk

Wednesday

The Spectator

The (r)evolution of Lauren Boebert

Lauren Boebert first gained notoriety back in 2019 as the pint-sized, gun-toting citizen who confronted Beto O’Rourke over his “hell yes” pledge to take our AR-15s and AK-47s. Since then, of course, Boebert has been elected twice to the US House of Representatives, where her behavior — “clashing with Capitol Police after setting off metal detectors,” feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor — habitually makes headlines.   Yesterday, news broke that Boebert and a companion had been escorted out of a musical adaptation of Beetlejuice in Denver for “vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance’ during the performance.

Friday

The Spectator

Elon Musk: Ukraine hero or villain?

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Elon Musk responded to calls for supporting the Ukrainian cause by donating thousands of Starlink satellite units to the country. In essence, the move provided free internet to areas where the commodity was inaccessible via a satellite internet constellation built by Musk’s SpaceX. Yet now for CNN and the New York Times, Musk’s heroism has faded away. According to an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s new biography Elon Musk, the entrepreneur ordered Starlink’s services near the Crimean coast be switched off last year, disrupting a Ukrainian sneak attack on Russian warships, thus avoiding what Musk labels a “mini-Pearl Harbor.” “How am I in this war? Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars.

elon musk
donald trump legal reelection funds
Cockburn

Will Trump stop using reelection money on legal bills?

Donald Trump is in the process of setting up the Patriot Legal Defense Fund, a fund to help pay off legal bills for him and his co-defendants in the four indictments he is facing, according to a report in the Messenger. Up until this point, the former president’s legal fees had been paid by his Save America super PAC. “Save America wasn’t really designed as a legal defense fund, so as the legal landscape evolved, so did this effort,” a Trump official told the site’s Marc Caputo. So who can expect to be covered? Rudy Giuliani, presumably, who is named as a co-conspirator in Fani Willis’s Georgia case, and was the beneficiary of a Trump-hosted legal fundraiser at Bedminster last night. Giuliani’s fellow election attorney Jenna Ellis?