Elon Musk and "Tucker Carlson Tonight": A distracting match made in misinformation paradise

After months of flirtation and overtures Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk finally consummated their relationship when the billionaire sat down for an interview that aired on Monday's and Tuesday's editions of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

The two-night yammering touched on everything from the rise of Artificial Intelligence to the fall of Twitter and the existence of aliens, thumping on a few of Musk's greatest hits in the spaces between. This includes Musk's expert opinion, shared on Tuesday, that "birth control, abortions, and whatnot" would lead to the end of humanity.

"The urge to have sex and to procreate is, after breathing and eating, the most basic urge," the heir to the Swanson frozen foods fortune says before asking Musk, "How has it been subverted?"

Musk broke it down by explaining that procreation used to be guaranteed by "simple limbic system rewards." But ever since the "whatnot" has come into play, Musk explains, "Now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate. So we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent in the last 50 years or so before birth control."

"I'm sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization's going to crumble," Musk warned.

Regardless of one's partisan leanings when it comes to reproductive rights, there are plenty of scientific studies warning about the ramifications of the Earth's current overpopulation problem. But "Tucker Carlson Tonight" viewers do not care about environmental degradation or anything related to scientific findings by experts, so Musk's proclamation amounts to an illuminative confirmation of How The World Works.

None of them expect the host to correct his guests when they make easily disprovable statements like this. Such an expectation would imply that Carlson is a journalist interested in disseminating facts. He is not, and neither is Musk.

Carlson has been making eyes at Musk from afar since he took over Twitter. At some point, Musk was going to figure out the best time to make Carlson into the Sean Hannity to his Donald Trump.

For a few possible reasons, that time is now.

Carlson's sit-down with Musk in a Los Angeles hotel room purported to dig into such lofty issues as the dangers posed by the rise of AI, the state of Twitter and whether aliens exist – a subject about which Musk claims the ultimate authority since he is, and this is an actual quote, "very familiar with space stuff."

A top talking point in Monday's broadcast revolved around his criticisms that OpenAI's ChatGPT is being "trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of saying untruthful things."

To combat this, he told Carlson, he's going to create "TruthGPT," which he describes as "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.

"I think that this might be the best path to safety," Musk adds, "in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe. Hopefully, they would think that."

Uh-huh.  

Musk makes a lot of grand pronouncements that few bother to check. Some of them remain dreams – remember Hyperloop? Some are alleged to have gotten people killed, like Tesla's Autopilot feature, which he assured rapt consumers worked just fine before it was associated with a string of fatalities.

Tucker Carlson speaks during 2022 FOX Nation Patriot Awards on November 17, 2022 in Hollywood, Florida. (Jason Koerner/Getty Images)

Carlson would never question anything Musk says, making "Tucker Carlson Tonight" a vital platform for self-promotion at a key time in his ongoing degradation of Twitter, the company he bought for an overpriced sum of $44 billion in October.

Musk knows that amplifying his celebrity reputation is key to being perceived as a successful, trustworthy thought leader. Allowing Carlson to be his head cheerleader promoting him to a captive and entirely uncritical audience may have more value than his Twitter presence in the long run.

Apologies – we should say X Corp. Twitter, Inc. no longer exists, as confirmed in an April 4 court filing related to a lawsuit filed in 2022 by far-right troll Laura Loomer, whose account was banned in 2019, leading to her accusing the site and former owner Jack Dorsey, along with Facebook, of violating federal racketeering laws.

Loomer's account was restored after Musk's takeover as part of the flood of other white nationalist accounts, along with Holocaust deniers and QAnon adherents. Hate speech has spiked along with an array of misinformation peddling.

The X Corp. update, revealed to business users in an email sent on Tuesday and to Twitter users in an alert that appeared in their feeds, also brought to users' attention the site's removal of language that protects transgender users from its hateful conduct policy.

A Quartz report that investigated the change cites Internet archive records indicating that the passage once read, "We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals."

The sentence specifying the prohibition of misgendering or deadnaming was removed between April 7 and 8, Quartz found.

The X Corp. redesignation is another step toward Musk's long-stated vision to transform Twitter into an "everything app" to rival China's WeChat, which supports social media as well as instant messaging and mobile payments.

Forbes reported that Musk revealed his ultimate ambition for the app to become the "biggest financial institution in the world" at a Morgan Stanley conference. From a business standpoint in order to pull that off effectively, whatever becomes of Twitter (which is retaining its name as its parent company's moniker changes) would have to be viewed as trustworthy, reliable, and stable.

Musk has demonstrated none of these attributes in his leadership since he's taken over the company or in his personality, which has been widely reported by an assortment of media outlets that Carlson painted as "so obviously filthy and dishonest" on Monday night.

But this interview, along with the lazy tendency to soft-sell Musk as an eccentric visionary as opposed to a terrible businessman and danger to democracy, obscures that his so-called efforts to end censorship have led to decreased user safety and more restricted speech.

Among the first times Musk makes Carlson laugh hysterically is when he brags about the company shedding 80% of its workforce through his firing workers or mass resignations.

"I mean, if you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization with, and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, it turns out," Musk said, eliciting appreciative guffaws from Carlson.

Some of those "activists" to which Musk refers comprised Twitter's Trust and Safety Council, which disbanded in December. In the months since, the BBC reported that current and former employees told them that the company is no longer capable of protecting users from trolling, state-coordinated disinformation campaigns and child sexual exploitation. Thanks to Musk's transformation of the blue checkmark from Twitter's official verification of a user's identity into a feature that can be bought with a subscription to Twitter Blue, there are now blue-checked accounts belonging to Taliban officials and supporters.

The BBC also reports that since the team that battled social media disinformation campaigns conducted by trolls farms in Russia, China and Iran was also laid off, it has discovered hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts operating on the platform. That report was published last week, right around the time Twitter slapped a "government-funded media" label on the BBC which it was obliged to correct, identifying it as "publicly-funded media."

Doing the same with National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service – and, this week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – led to those three broadcasters suspending activity on their accounts. The CBC characterized this as an effort by Twitter to undermine its credibility . . . which, unlike those "government-funded" tags, is accurate. The current label on its Twitter account reads "69% Government-funded Media" which, the CBC characterized to Reuters as not "serious."

All of this is happening while Carlson promoted Musk's assortment of unsubstantiated assertions ranging from the ludicrous to the outright alarmist. Foremost among them was Musk's claim that before his arrival that government intelligence agencies had "full access" to Twitter's back end, including users' private direct messages. (Such allegations were at the heart of the "Twitter Files" hype.) The Fox host led into this by characterizing Twitter, when it was run by Jack Dorsey, as a global intelligence agency "honey trap." 

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Anyway, with these circumstances in play, Musk is hoping that one day soon you'll trust him with your money and financial information. Many people will, especially the ones who believe the billionaire's claim that restoring "truth" and "free speech" to Twitter has always been his goal without noticing the random suspensions of journalists' accounts and his flirtation with QAnon diehards.

This aligns with the average Fox News viewer's impression that any news and information that doesn't fit with their worldview is lying to them.

Fox News viewers want to be lied to. Look at a recent poll published in Variety, conducted by Maru Group: a full 45% of Fox viewers claim to still trust Fox after Dominion Voting Systems released damning testimony from Rupert Murdoch, along with private texts and emails from Fox News hosts, especially Carlson, proving they knew the Trump's voter fraud claims were lies.

Since the falsehoods were lucrative, Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others kept pushing them.

A mobile billboard deployed by Media Matters circles Fox News Corp headquarters on April 17, 2023 in New York City. (Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Media Matters)

Fox News viewers watching on Monday and Tuesday would not have known that the network's lies concerning Dominion and voter fraud, untruths Carlson was instrumental in perpetuating, cost $787.5 million to settle since its media reporter Howard Kurtz didn't state it on the air. That may be because it's the largest media-related settlement in history, by far.

But then, as Carlson touted Musk's genius and business acumen he conveniently left out that he holds the Guinness World Record for having lost more of his personal fortune than anyone in history – somewhere between $182 billion and $200 billion, thanks to Tesla's stock price plunge.

That adds another level of comedy to Musk's admission to Carlson that he overpaid for Twitter before snorting at its current valuation at around half of its purchase price.

"But some things are priceless," he added in a tone affecting nobility. "So whether I'm losing money or not, that is a secondary issue compared to ensuring the strength of democracy."

And as Musk reminded us in this conversation he's content to pass the cost along to the people trying to live safely in those democracies.