2024-01-09 05:01:00
Elon Musk, the all-powerful businessman who, with a personal fortune valued at $241.3 billion, is today the richest person on the entire planet, plans to land in Argentina in the second half of 2024. He would be one of the main external beneficiaries of the economic plan Javier Milei’s neoliberal approach based on two key resources: lithium and satellite internet.
On a political level, Musk has been, to say the least, eclectic in his tastes and interests. Although until a couple of years ago he recognized himself as a traditional Democratic voter, who even voted for Joe Biden, his identity is much more marked by pragmatism and a reactionary ideology that brings him closer to certain currents of the extreme right of the Republican Party. .
He remained close to Donald Trump when he was president, but the former president’s resistance to supporting the production of electric cars, and therefore, without the use of conventional resources such as oil, was the determining factor that marked the break between both figures.
With his comings and goings, Musk has since remained within the Republican universe, close to right-wing leaders with presidential ambitions, such as Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida, not without also calculating his own electoral chances in case he At some point soon it was decided to take the leap to fully enter political activity.
Meanwhile, and as a good bettor (politics can be understood by businessmen as a great casino), Musk has also financially supported both Republican and Democratic candidates. The important thing for him has been to have a good number of representatives in the legislative branch or even in the White House, depending on his contributions to George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
But beyond his various supports, the truth is that the main businessman in the United States never really needed party life to do politics.
The dominant position in the market thanks to companies such as Space Furthermore, his global desire for lithium, an essential element for the manufacture of electric cars, gave him a first-rate international influence.
Despite his irreverence and his criticism of political power, he is the businessman who can finally compete against China, which is why he is considered a protégé of the establishment, with an appreciable international impact.
In this sense, and in search of the coveted lithium, he is still pointed out today as one of those responsible for the crisis that in 2019 put an end to the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia, after which he stated, without any filter, that in order to obtain vital resources, Washington was capable of favoring coups d’état anywhere in the world.
The pandemic was used by Musk to encourage debate on health measures, betting on misinformation and conspiratorial and anti-scientific theses, not without also calling for rebellion against confinement and vaccination. The businessman thus placed himself on the front line of a rising far-right willing to cast doubt on the existence of Covid 19.
Reconverted into a kind of entrepreneur, visionary and influencer, Musk ended up consolidating his power in public opinion through the management of “X”, formerly Twitter, a company that, not without controversy, he ended up acquiring in October 2022 for 44 billion Dollars.
Since then, Musk’s public profile has continued to grow, largely due to the elimination of restrictions that allow anyone to express themselves without limitations on Twitter. A condition that, naturally, is used at the discretion of the powerful businessman to provide his opinion on any matter, without measuring its consequences, and as if it were just another user, protected by the freedom of expression of he.
One of Musk’s first political gestures as owner of Twitter was to restore the account of Donald Trump, who had been sanctioned by the platform following the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and, especially, for inciting violence. attributed to the former president.
The violent and offensive statements, at this point a personal hallmark of Elon Musk, only increased, both to defame and to promote conspiracy theories, always with the aim of denouncing all those who supposedly seek to harm him. In this context, one of his obsessions on Twitter has been his anti-Semitic statements against the Jewish community.
With some background such as the comparison that Musk established on Twitter, in February 2022, between Justin Trudeau and Adolf Hitler, when the prime minister resolved to vaccinate all drivers entering Canadian territory and which triggered a strong protest from the extreme right in Against them, opinions against the Jews tended to increase.
Musk also did not seem concerned about the complaint from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish human rights entity, about the growing number of anti-Semitic messages on X, published mainly by supremacist and far-right entities.
In fact, at the beginning of September 2023, he blamed the ADL for what he considered an operation to remove sponsorship from different brands and thus reduce Twitter’s advertising revenue by 60%. Musk suggested that he would file a “defamation lawsuit” against the ADL while holding it responsible for being “the biggest generator of anti-Semitism on this platform.”
A similar response was later directed against the left-wing organization Media Matters for America, which pointed out the appearance of Nazi symbols in various brand advertisements published on X.
On November 16, in an increasingly aggressive climate marked by the war in Gaza, and the rise of hate speech, Musk seemed to cross all limits when he stated that the post in which he He criticized the Jewish community for promoting hatred “against whites”, a central idea of the conspiratorial theses in favor of the “Great Replacement”.
The simple statement from the owner of
With a timely trip to Israel at the end of November, the businessman tried to calm things down and turn the page, although several lawsuits for violation of employment contracts of former directors of the Twitter network once again worsened his already negative image just one more month. late.
Elon Musk is seen by Javier Milei’s government as the panacea for all the ills suffered by Argentina. But the reading may not be the most accurate to reality. It is no coincidence that, in November 2023, the European Commission urged the suspension of all advertising campaigns on X due to its recurring hate speech and misinformation. A management that in just over a year has already devalued the former Twitter to half its original price.
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