Since Democrats have decided that they are going to devote all of their attention to taking down Elon Musk, Kara Swisher is in the news again. Swisher is a journalist who was at one time friendly with Musk. And because of that history and the fact that she's a progressive, she has become the go-to person to bad mouth Musk. If you need a negative quote or a theory about why Elon is so bad, she's your source. Just in the last few days we've had these stories based around her comments:
- Daily Beast - Elon ‘Has the Power’ in Codependent Relationship With Trump, Musk Chronicler Says
- CNN - Kara Swisher has theory on why Musk is hiring young men to work at DOGE
- Latin Times - Former Elon Musk Friend Speaks Out: He Is 'Losing His F--king Mind'
- Out Magazine - Kara Swisher predicts a Musk-owned TikTok, 'weaponized' anti-LGBTQ+ tech
- CNN - Swisher says Musk is bashing Trump’s AI project because he’s not part of it
- CNN - Kara Swisher says she agrees with Steve Bannon about Elon Musk
There's a lot more of this going back years at this point. Kara Swisher's job, the thing that gets her the most attention, is trading on her past friendship with Musk to trash him. Which brings me to this Ezra Klein interview with Kara Swisher published today by the NY Times. Feel free to read it all but let me give you the Cliff's Notes.
How would you describe the role Elon Musk has been playing in the federal government in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term?
Well, a little more strongly than The New York Times did. They’re sort of treating it like: Isn’t this an interesting person walking through? I think he’s a one-man show. Wrecking ball, really. And he’s being used by Trump for that purpose.
He’s — there are lots of ways you could use metaphors. You could say junkyard dog. He’s the one sort of taking all the flack, going in and breaking things. But you could be funny and call him Wreck-It Ralph. I don’t think it’s particularly funny or the right way to do it or constitutionally sound.
At one point, she reacts to something Musk said about her.
In one tweet, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, “evil.” And said that I was “filled with seething hate” — which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I’m not seething with hate.
So let me just quickly summarize the rest of this discussion by highlighting things Swisher said about Musk from that point on.
- "He also does have a really weird sense of mortality, in a way. He wants to be legendary. Again, go back to video games. I think he wants the glory of it....He’s not a hero, by the way — let me be clear."
- "I mean, he was megalomaniacal."
- "I’ve noticed that in a number of tech people who have trans children. They suddenly become — like, losing their mind, essentially."
- "He’s got an obsessive personality."
- "He’s an addictive personality, clearly."
- "He has a manic personality — and violative."
- "that’s his favorite thing — to say all manner of nonsense and inaccuracies about things he doesn’t know what he’s talking about."
- "sad little boy who wasn’t loved enough as a child is searching for meaning, is searching for love. And again, not an excuse, because I think he’s become a terrible person, and he should get therapy."
- "They’re trying to cosplay a version of a man. It seems pathetic to me. But I think it gives them great comfort."
- "Well, they don’t like women to start with. Come on. So this shouldn’t be a surprise they don’t like the ladies."
- "I think they care almost too much what people think. And it fuels their rage in a lot of ways."
- "He manifests himself by having so many children and seemingly not spending time with them, except for one."
- "I think at their heart, they do believe the version of themselves is the greatest version of man. Which would be a white-guy, supreme kind of thing."
- "I’ve heard different C.E.O.s express racism. His is a different kind. It’s more around social engineering and the idea that the best people are being replaced. I think that’s really where he lives. Which is also racist, of course."
- "they burnish it with this techno-utopianism that is really techno-authoritarianism"
- "he doesn’t care about the actual thing. These people don’t care about the actual thing. They care about laying waste to it"
- "he is a desperate attention sponge. Why would you stay up at night talking to people named Catturd?"
- "Because you have a desperately empty hole in the center of your life that you can never fill. It’s a bottomless well. And I hate to break it down like that because I’m not a psychologist, but boy, does he have a big old hole right in the center of himself."
It keeps going but hopefully you get the gist. This is the biggest piece of character assassination by a partisan hack you're ever likely to see in a newspaper. Every negative, hateful thing you can possibly say about a person is in there. She's not a psychologist but we get every BS armchair psychologist theory in the book. At some point she should turn this around and ask what it is that's driving her. If it's not seething hate it's close enough for government work.
You're going to hear a lot more of this from Kara Swisher over the next few years because she let's the media tell the story they want to tell.