Elon Musk Wants to Run Twitter So He Can Have Friends
Media Matters President and CEO Angelo Carusone talks Elon Musk’s questionable desire to buy and become CEO of Twitter and Tucker Carlson’s reaction to The New York Times’ pieces.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast is still confused by Elon Musk’s desire to buy Twitter and become its CEO, but she and Media Matters President and CEO Angelo Carusone came up with a theory on Tuesday’s episode: He wants to make the right-wing trolls who are nice to him happy.
“Worship is a strong word, but there’s a little bit of like a fetishization. And they hype him,” says Carusone. “I mean, they have been appealing to him to buy a social media platform for about a year and a half now, maybe a little longer, and he’s constantly dabbled with it. But the idea that they run to him to sort of as, like a little bit of a savior is a part of it. Because when he says free speech, what the audience that gives him the most engagement and positive feedback hears is not free speech. They hear free-for-all.”
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She agrees: “A lot of these guys are quite good at being nice and sucking up and they’ve been doing that. I think Elon’s like very, very rich, but pretty insecure, and so he’s pretty happy with that.”
Carusone also breaks down Tucker Carlson’s “happy” reaction to the New York Times’ pieces detailing his evolution into a white nationalist mouthpiece.
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“He’s a monster. And yet his life is kind of sad and I don’t think it portrays him in the way that I think he would want to be portrayed,” he says.
Speaking of Tucker, TNA co-host Andy Levy has a pretty in-depth explanation for why Tucker Carlson does what he does.
Plus! Robin Marty, communications director for the West Alabama Women’s Center, makes predictions on what’s next when it comes to abortion bans: lots of felony charges.
“There is no better way to target all the people that you are most terrified of having access to vote than saying, ‘OK, let's make abortion and abortion access a felony,’” she says.
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