The microblogging website has implemented a stinky response to media requests.
Elon Musk plays by his own rules.
The whimsical and charismatic entrepreneur likes to challenge the conventions that dominate business circles and markets.
Sometimes this is expensive.
This is the case when he was fined $20 million in September 2018 and lost the title of Tesla’s chairman. (TSLA) – Get a free reportafter tweeting that he was going to take the electric vehicle maker private. He had also indicated that he had secured financing for the deal.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) attacked him, reminding him that one should be extremely cautious when publishing information that could affect the share price of a public company.
Unconventional
Despite the fact that Musk paid dearly for his breach of this rule, the billionaire has not stopped mocking the SEC or engaging in a new confrontation with the federal agency.
So is Musk. He is unconventional. When it comes to conventions, he wants to undermine them, push the limits if necessary, circumvent them and invent new ones.
While he avoids labels, there is one that applies to him: the billionaire is unpredictable, provocative, and likes to test the limits of others. He likes to challenge the norm. He sees himself as the leader of the world he belongs to, and at the same time feels too big for him. Therefore, he believes that he can get away with almost anything.
One of his latest taunts is reserved for the media, asking a question or requesting a comment on a topic, an article, something that requires a response. No other great company in the world, no other CEO would indulge in this latest whim.
As part of an article about a report that the billionaire has slashed Twitter’s valuation, TheStreet sent a request for comment to the platform to ask if this information was accurate. It is the general journalistic rule, when writing an article, to reach the parts that are mentioned in it.
Within a minute of sending the request, TheStreet received a response that boils down to an emoji. The poop emoji.
Nothing else.
Special treatment for journalists
A few days ago, Musk warned that the poop emoji would be the automated response anyone would receive whenever they wrote to Twitter’s media inquiry email address. At the time, the message seemed to be some kind of joke. But, the tech mogul has kept his promise.
“[email protected] now auto-responds with 💩,” the billionaire announced on March 19.
Musk has a complicated relationship with the media, especially the mainstream. He criticizes them, he believes that they have an agenda against him and are just looking to write critical pieces against him.
“Why is the ‘mainstream’ media such an unrelenting stream of hate? A real question,” he wrote in February 2022.
His criticism has become even harsher since he acquired Twitter for $44 billion last year.
“While Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, the media elite will do everything possible to prevent that from happening,” he lamented in November.
The media coverage of his early days as owner and head of Twitter did not sit well with him. He didn’t particularly appreciate the headlines about the layoffs he carried out and the chaos that followed. Musk also did not appreciate media reports of advertiser exits after he relaxed hateful content safeguards.
“For the American media to argue *against* free speech in America, within the limits of the law, is a total travesty. Shame on you! Shame on you, shame on you,” he exclaimed on November 27, 2022. .
He believes that Twitter has been called upon to play the role of the media from now on, because according to him, the media has become subservient, succumbing to power instead of holding it accountable.
“There seems to be no self-awareness amongst the legacy media that they behave like a collective of NPC drones 🤣🤣,” he posted on March 20.
But at the same time, Musk, who regularly boasts that Tesla, his other company, doesn’t advertise, regularly gives interviews to the very same media outlets whose credibility he considers non-existent.
