The Media Research Center has continued to defend Elon Musk, and that extended to him becoming a trillionaire. Mark Finkelstein was defensive in a June 14 post:
Saturday’s edition of MS NOW’s The Weekend offered up a full-throated class-warfare kvetch over Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
Co-host Eugene Daniels grew visibly agitated as economist Justin Wolfers claimed Musk “bought” the 2024 election for Donald Trump with $250 million in campaign spending. Daniels declared the discussion made him “very angry” — not at Wolfers, but at the country for allowing it.
Wolfers argued Musk’s spending was enough to flip the election’s narrow margins in key states and left him with enough wealth to “buy” thousands more. Yet neither Daniels nor Wolfers mentioned that Kamala Harris’s campaign and aligned groups outspent Trump’s by roughly half a billion dollars, with Harris’s side topping nearly $2 billion compared to Trump’s roughly $1.45–1.5 billion.
Finkelstein didn’t mention that Musk’s $250 million for Trump meant that he outspent every other donor to either campaign — even George Soros, whose political donations the MRC loves to demonize — and he didn’t explain the difference between Soros’ and Musk’s donations beyond ideology. Instead, he lashed out at co-hosts Jonathan Capeheart, insisting that “Capehart has enjoyed a string of cushy gigs, with an estimated MS NOW salary in the million-dollar range and a personal net worth of $2–5 million.” He didn’t mention that this is a tiny fraction of Musk’s fortune. He then defended Musk further:
Conspicuously absent from the outrage: Musk’s wealth creation for thousands of ordinary Americans. SpaceX’s recent IPO has turned more than 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires — including welders, cafeteria workers, and support staff. Estimates suggest that virtually all of the roughly 22,000 employees who worked there for a few years pocketed at least $100,000 in gains.
[…]MS NOW loves to stoke resentment against successful innovators while ignoring the broad prosperity they generate. The real story isn’t oligarchs “buying” elections or stealing from NASA — it’s American enterprise delivering results that government bureaucracies never could.
Again, Finkelstein did not explain why Musk can’t be accused of buying elections but his MRC colleague Joseph Vazquez can repeatedly hurl that allegation at Soros.
Jorge Bonilla offered a similar defense of Musk:
CNN’s Kasie Hunt is no fan of Elon Musk, and she wastes no opportunity to make that clear to viewers. As fill-in host on CNN’s State of the Union, she fretted whether Elon’s new net worth subsequent to the recent SpaceX IPO was “a sign of American decline.”
[…]Her introduction to the panel segment was worse. Hunt questioned whether Elon’s new status is representative of a new Gilded Age, went straight to class warfare, and basically wishcast that Bernie Sanders now begin railing against trillionaires.
[…]The panel libs’ arguments were best distilled to: Elon has too much money, and is unduly influencing our political process. Scott Jennings finally shut that nonsense down, exposing the hypocrisy of such arguments:
Of course he did — it’s Jennings’ function to push right-wing talking points as far as the MRC is concerned. Bonilla huffed further:
The Elitist Media now fall all over themselves to try to downplay Graham Platner’s many scandals. They outright hid the Nazi tattoo until it was impossible to continue to do so, and now downplay the Totenkopf tat as “a Nazi symbol.” This wasn’t the case when Elon told the crowd at Trump’s inaugural rally that his heart was with them.
Central to creating the Elon Nazi Salute Hoax: you guessed it.
We’re going to guess that it wasn’t a hoax and that the MRC is still trying to deflect attention from Musk’s salute because it knows what it really is.
Tim Graham raged in his June 15 podcast:
You can tell the leftists are authoritarians when they proclaim “billionaires shouldn’t exist.” Their money should be confiscated for the “public good.” So Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire on paper after the initial public offering of SpaceX was sure to spark a tizzy in the leftist media. If any Americans are designated as billionaires, they can go Full Soros and fund the leftists, and then they are “admirable” philanthropists. But Elon funded Trump’s campaign for president and then ran the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort, so he’s like a Darth Vader figure.
Graham also made sure to engage in childish name-calling, insisting that members of the “leftist media” are “effete snobs,” whatever that means.
Joseph Vazquez served up a comprehensive defense of Musk’s vast wealth:
For all the media bluster that Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter could ultimately nuke his net worth, the goalposts have since been moved and those same media talking heads are having a meltdown over the fact that the world’s richest man just proved all of them wrong.
Musk’s SpaceX skyrocketed in value per share by 20 percent June 12, eclipsing the IPO price at $135. This effectively lifted Musk’s net worth past the $1 trillion milestone and cemented him as the globe’s first trillionaire.
When Musk first purchased Twitter with a $44 billion bid in 2022, a number of disgruntled lefty outlets seething over one of their censorial narrative gatekeeper platforms being hijacked projected holistic financial doom for Musk. Business Insider beamed October 2022 that “[t]aking control of Twitter left Elon Musk $8 billion worse off overnight.” Fortune magazine sneered in May 2022 that while Musk was “busy” announcing “changes to his political leaning and thrashing ‘wactivists’ on Twitter, the share price of Tesla sank to its lowest level of the year, wiping $12.3 billion from his net worth.”Forbes was quick on the draw as early as April 2022, finger-wagging that “Elon Musk’s Proposed Twitter Takeover Has Already Cost Him $9 Billion.”
[…]Now, instead of admitting that Musk’s business acumen once again outplayed his detractors in the long term, the lefty media have descended into a wacky tailspin by whipping out the exhausted bourgeoisie vs. proletariat binary to make Musk seem like an arch-villain in Corporate America who doesn’t deserve his wealth. Like we haven’t heard that one before.
To that end, MRC Business compiled a list of the top 10 media freakouts over Musk’s trillionaire-achievement that have blanketed the airwaves and internet the past few days.
Vazquez didn’t explain why he praises Musk’s wealth while he regularly trashes the wealth of Soros.