During a lengthy live interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit earlier this month, the world’s wealthiest man — Elon Musk — addressed the advertisers who have pulled their advertising from Twitter — er, I mean, ‘X’.
The exodus of major advertisers has included Disney, IBM, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony, Comcast, NBCUniversal, and Lionsgate. Those marketers suspended ad spending after Musk endorsed a certain post on ‘X’ that mentioned certain Jews in a less-than-favorable light.
Responding to a question from Mr. Sorkin about ‘X’ losing advertising dollars, Mr. Musk dismissed the idea that advertisers could ‘blackmail’ him with money, and he then advised the departing advertisers to perform a certain crude act, that begins with the letter ‘F’, but that would be — from my understanding of the human anatomy — physically impossible.
Mr. Musk is a lot smarter than I am, however, so maybe it’s not as impossible as I thought.
Mr. Musk told Mr. Sorkin, “I have no problem being hated… hate away,” adding that it’s “a real weakness to be liked.”
This comment, I found to be incredibly liberating. All these years, I’ve been worried that I was not liked, especially by people who actually know me. But if the world’s richest man says it’s a weakness to be liked, I will gladly take him at his word.
Not that I think being hated — like Mr. Musk — is necessarily going to make me wealthy. A person can be dirt poor, and still enjoy being disliked. Right?
A few other things that Mr. Musk said give me hope for the future. He said one of his many innovative companies — Neuralink — is going to soon allow paralyzed people, who have lost the use of their hands, to navigate the Internet just by thinking thoughts. Unfortunately, this might allow them to post antisemitic comments on ‘X’, but probably Mr. Musk will figure out a way to keep that from happening.
If that’s something he wants to do? He seems able to figure out solutions to difficult problems, in some situations. Not all situations, though.
I like his leather flight jacket, and his boots. While Mr. Sorkin appears in a well-tailored blue suit obviously chosen to match the blue backdrop for the DealBook Summit, Mr. Musk looks like he just came from the set for a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ sequel. And maybe he did, considering his close connection to the people of Israel, who had somehow lost the Ark along the way.
I think if I had a flight jacket like that, I could be as disliked as Mr. Musk, without putting so much effort into it.
And also, the boots.
Really, though, Mr. Musk doesn’t appear to be as disliked as he pretends to be. He has 166 million followers on ‘X’. His mother, Maye Musk, has 1 million followers. She is an author, a doctor of dietetics and a supermodel. With a mom like that, we can understand how Elon became so successful.
I didn’t have a mom like that, but still became successful in my own small way. And disliked.
One of Mr. Musk’s latest projects is Grok, a large language model Artificial Intelligence network that joined ‘X’ last month and already has 273,000 followers. The network is being promoted as having a sense of humor — something missing from certain other AI networks that will remain unnamed.
Take for example, this brief conversion with a fellow ‘X’ user.
I decided to follow Grok, after learning the Elon and his mom are also followers.
You can watch the entire 1-1/2 hour Sorkin-Musk interview here.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.