Elon Musk Reveals His Super-Stupid Plan for Twitter’s Endgame

Elon Musk appears to be running out of people to blame for what has been a cataclysmic collapse of X (formerly known as Twitter) during his tenure as that platform’s overseer. But in a public appearance on Wednesday, he sketched out his dubious strategy for avoiding responsibility for the site’s demise: As you might expect, it involved turning the finger of blame toward everyone but himself and naming corporations as the culprit for destroying the site through an ongoing advertising boycott of the platform.

Musk blurted this all out during an expletive-laden tantrum, during which he told a bevy of the company’s biggest advertisers that he didn’t want their money to support the platform anymore—which, in his own words, has lost 90 percent of its value since he bought it out just over a year ago.

“If somebody is going to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail with money? Go fuck yourself,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin during the New York Times DealBook conference.

“I hope that’s clear,” he added, before calling out Disney CEO Bob Iger by name.

When pressed by Sorkin about the economics of a decision to peel back X’s reliance on advertisers, Musk spelled out, “G-F-Y.”

Advertisers have long been in revolt against Musk’s designs for the site, which have consistently made the platform less appealing for brands to appear upon. But in recent days, advertisers have found new reason to flee the site, after an explosive Media Matters report published earlier this month revealed that X was routinely placing antisemitic and pro-Nazi content alongside advertisements from reputable companies. The aftermath included the mass hemorrhage of some of X’s biggest and most risk-averse advertisers, including Apple, IBM, Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount.

But in the billionaire’s world, his own actions—which included undermining X’s content moderation abilities, using his personal account to spread Nazi conspiracies, and allowing 105 percent more antisemitic hate speech to spread on the platform—are never to blame. Between the lines of his obscenity-laced freakout, Musk all but admitted that the site was in a death spiral and that he was pivoting to a new plan to absolve himself of any blame for its downfall—one in which, according to his telling, was spurred by a conspiracy among the site’s major advertisers to starve X of revenue.

“What the advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company,” Musk said, adding that “Earth”—by which he seemed to mean the population of the planet—will ultimately render a verdict on who killed one of the largest tech companies of all time. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we’ll document it in great detail.”

It’s far from clear that “Earth” will respond to X’s demise with anything other than indifference. As TNR has noted elsewhere, Musk consistently overestimates the user base of his platform: “A study by Pew Research found that fewer than one-quarter of U.S. adults use Twitter at all. Of this sliver of the population, an even tinier cohort is responsible for the vast majority of tweets: “The top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of all tweets, while the bottom 75% of users produce just 3%.” As it stands, the only people likely to take up Musk’s cause will be the small rump of Musk die-hards that he’s trapped on his dying platform.

Musk’s comments were made just steps away from a stone-faced X CEO Linda Yaccarino, who was brought on partly to woo advertisers and will now be tasked with the futile endeavor of finding more in the wake of Musk’s rant.

As is her wont, Yaccarino responded to this most recent controversy with another one of the saccharine and detached-from-reality posts that have made her, in the eyes of Defector’s David Roth, “the last funny Twitter bit left.” “X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people. We’re a platform that allows people to make their own decisions,” Yaccarino posted, hours after the event. “And here’s my perspective when it comes to advertising: X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street—and the X community is powerful and is here to welcome you.”

Good luck with all that.

Here in the waning days of its most recent session, the Supreme Court is turning its attention toward some key abortion cases left on its docket.

On December 8, the court is expected to make a decision on whether to hear a case challenging the availability of a common abortion pill, mifepristone—a decision that could have some of the most dire outcomes for abortion access since the court’s conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Mifepristone was first developed in the 1980s and, along with misoprostol, it comprises one of a two-pill prescription jointly referred to as “the abortion pill.” Together, they account for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute.

In April, a Trump-appointed judge halted access to the drug. Four months later, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiffs, the right-wing Christian organization Alliance Defending Freedom, ruling that while the pill was safe for market, the Food and Drug Administration had overstepped its role by taking several steps that expanded access to the drug in 2016: allowing women to access it 10 weeks into pregnancy instead of seven, lowering the standard dosage, and allowing the prescription to be accessed via telemedicine. None of those changes have been felt, however, thanks to a Supreme Court stay on the case. But all that could change should the nation’s highest court decide to hear the appeals.

“If the portions of that order affirmed by the Fifth Circuit are now allowed to take effect, it would upend the regulatory regime for mifepristone, with damaging consequences for women seeking lawful abortions and a healthcare system that relies on the availability of the drug under the current conditions of use,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings.

Given the chance, the plaintiffs would like to see more than curtailed access to mifepristone. In court filings, the Christian legal group made it clear that they hope the court would instead examine the drug’s original 2000 approval.

“FDA’s actions concerning mifepristone—spanning from the 2000 Approval to its most recent removal of safeguards—have consistently elevated politics above law, science, and safety,” they wrote.

But other challenges to reproductive health care may come even sooner than that. One case, centered on Idaho’s emergency request to fully enforce its own state abortion law, could see a ruling as early as this week. Then, on Friday, the justices will consider whether to take up an appeal that would effectively allow challenges to state bans that currently prevent anti-abortion activists from harassing people approaching abortion clinics.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will speak at a Christian nationalist event next week, making it very clear that the extreme wing of the Republican Party is now fully in control.

The National Association of Christian Lawmakers revealed last week that Johnson will be the keynote speaker at the organization’s annual gala, but the announcement didn’t get too much attention until Rolling Stone reported it on Wednesday.

The NACL is a Christian nationalist organization that says its goal is to codify a “biblical worldview” into law. On its website, the NACL says its mission is to “bring federal, state and local lawmakers together in support of clear biblical principles.” Because who needs the separation of church and state?

The organization is quite far to the right in terms of its worldview: anti-abortion and, as you might expect, anti-LGBTQ rights as well. The NACL has had a key role in the passage of several anti-abortion laws, including the horrific abortion vigilante law in Texas, which deputized ordinary citizens to serve as de facto bounty hunters, with cash rewards going to those willing to snitch out people aiding patients seeking abortions.

NACL founder Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state lawmaker, has also personally worked to block abortion access. While in office, he wrote a law banning abortion at 12 weeks. He also wrote the abortion ban that was triggered into effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Rapert also flies the Christian nationalist “Appeal to Heaven” flag. He managed to have that flag flown over the Arkansas state Capitol in 2015. Johnson flies the same flag outside his office.

It’s hardly surprising that Johnson is being embraced at the NACL gala. He has a well-documented history of opposing abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and environmental policy on the grounds that they are non-Christian. His new chief of staff, who previously served as his director of operations, is just as extreme.

Johnson has historically been a mainstay at right-wing events, although his appearances flew under the radar in the years before he moved from the GOP backbench to the top spot in the caucus. In 2019, he gave the keynote speech at a conference for the Council for National Policy, an elite right-wing event. He failed to report the trip on his financial disclosure forms, and it’s still not clear who paid for him to get there or how much the trip cost.

The Louisiana Republican was also scheduled to give the keynote address for the Worldwide Freedom Initiative in early November. Johnson spokesman Raj Shah assured TNR that Johnson did not travel for any events that weekend, but he refused to explicitly confirm whether Johnson had spoken virtually or why the speaker was featured so prominently on WFI social media and event publicity if he did not speak.

Johnson’s willingness to appear at these events, especially now that he holds the most powerful position in the House, lays bare his ideological leanings and suggests that the issues he supports and plans to prioritize in legislation will stray further and further into the fringes.

If Democrats continue to work with Johnson, as they did to pass a temporary government spending bill, then he will continue being able to wield that kind of power over social issues—and possibly democracy.

“Stop laughing at his strange accountability software setup & his avowed biblical worldview,” Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar who specializes in Christian nationalism, tweeted late Tuesday. “Mike Johnson is associating with some very dangerous Christian leaders, who were central in instigating #January6th.”

The unwavering loyalty Donald Trump has managed to foster among his followers hit a new bar on Tuesday, when one of Trump’s billionaire donors said he would continue to fund the GOP front-runner’s presidential campaign—even if the former president gets convicted.

Bernie Marcus, the 94-year-old retired co-founder of Home Depot, has thrown his hat behind Trump’s latest White House bid, making it a third time, after lining up behind Trump’s efforts in 2016 and 2020.

In an interview with Reuters, Marcus made it clear that his support for Trump would be unwavering, no matter the outcomes of his several criminal trials, telling the outlet “I think it’s all trumped up.” Pun intended? Who knows?

Yet Marcus, who became one of the real estate mogul’s biggest champions in 2016 by signing checks to the tune of $7 million, clarified that there are some limits to his generosity and that he had no intention of breaking records for financial support this time around.

“Of course, I’m going to support him to some extent, but I’m not one of his big givers, that’s for sure,” Marcus told Reuters, adding that Trump was “very happy” about his support.

Trump is hardly in the position to turn away a benefactor. He’s currently staring down 91 charges across four criminal cases. He has denied all wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty in all of his trials. A possible Trump conviction has raised legitimate questions about his eligibility for the White House, though none of that seems to matter to Trump’s most ardent followers—or, apparently, his donors—who foresee him snatching the GOP nomination not long after the Iowa Caucus kicks off on January 15.

“I never discussed his legal fees or his legal problems,” Marcus said.

Despite Trump’s volatile foreign policy stances, Marcus believed it was worth backing Trump for his stances on the Middle East. He also thought Trump was a “fixer” who could be beneficial to the U.S. economy, the outlet reported.

Other potential candidates in Marcus’s hand-out pool include former Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, though he didn’t believe either of them had a fair shot against Trump, who is currently polling more than 45 percentage points higher than either of them despite skipping every GOP debate, according to a national aggregate poll by FiveThirtyEight.

Mike Johnson accidentally revealed just how weak the Republican impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is, when he failed to actually defend one of the central accusations against the president on the merits.

Johnson held a Tuesday press conference with Representatives Jim Jordan and James Comer, who have spearheaded the investigation into Biden, to discuss the ongoing impeachment inquiry. Although Republicans have been levying various accusations against Biden for the past few months, making multiple allegations of political corruption, they have yet to produce any actual evidence demonstrating that their charges have merit.

One matter that Republicans have repeatedly harped on is their claim that Biden, while serving as vice president, said the U.S. would withhold aid money to Ukraine unless Kyiv fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Republicans allege that Shokin had been investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian oil company for which Biden’s son Hunter served as a board member. This claim has been repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence, the former Ukrainian president, and the owner of Burisma.

During Wednesday’s press conference, HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney asked Johnson why the GOP continues to bring up Shokin’s firing. Delaney pointed out that during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, “a lot of State Department officials …came in and said, ‘This wasn’t Joe Biden’s policy, this was our policy. He didn’t do this to benefit his son, he did this because we wanted him to do it.’”

U.S. foreign aid is often given on the condition that the receiving country takes an official action that Washington considers important. In Ukraine, it was eliminating corruption in the government.

“So did they all commit perjury, or are you going to bring them back for more interviews?” Delaney asked. “Why are Republicans just ignoring all that testimony?”

“No one’s ignoring testimony,” Johnson said brusquely, before pivoting to listing foreign payments that the Bidens received.

Johnson also told Delaney he was “not going to answer outside questions about this,” despite the testimony clearly being directly relevant to a central pillar of the current impeachment inquiry.

Shokin was fired in 2016 for corruption. Three years later, Trump and Rudy Giuliani started a conspiracy theory that the Biden family accepted a $10 million bribe to remove Shokin to stop a probe into Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma. This claim has been repeatedly debunked by the owner of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas, and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.