LOS ANGELES.–Fake news hit new heights with the Wall Street Journal [WSJ] reporting Jan. 6 that unnamed board members at Tesla Motors and SpaceX are concerned about 52-year-old founder and CEO Elon Musk’s drug abuse. WSJ reported that anonymous sources at a SpaceX board meeting were concerned about Musk seeming incoherent or slurring his speech, all of which was not verified by the WSJ, constituting par-for-the-course fake news that exists in today’s journalism. Rumor and innuendo have replaced facts in today’s journalism, where any vicious, disgruntled employee or enemy of a CEO or politicians can circulate vicious rumors in credible news publications. But if former President Donald Trump’s experience over the last nine years has taught anything, it’s that responsible journalism is dead in the United States, most likely everywhere. Nefarious political and corporate interests advance agendas through fake news wherever they appear.
U.S. intel agenicies make the artificial distinction between credentialed news organizations and social networks where they claim disinformation and propaganda flourish on the Internet. Attaining meteoric success to become the worlld’s richest man at $243.5 billion, Musk invites the kinds of vicious attacks from anyone with an ax to grind, largely due to unbridled envy and jealousy. Must almost singlehandedly created the zero-tailpipe emissions electric car revolution and resuscitated the dead U.S. manned space program. When NASA retired the Space Shuttle Program in 2011, U.S.-manned space operations were in the mausoleum. Musk founded Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX in 2002, anticipating the end to the Space Shuttle program. Musk launched his first Dragon spacecraft manned flight May 30, 2020, becoming the first and only private space company to develop a next generations rocket and space craft to get the United State back into space.
Envy doesn’t begin to express the brewing hatred of Musk’s many accomplishments, doing more for civilization as we know it than any entrepreneur on the planet. When Musk became a co-founder of Tesla Motors in 2004, it took eight years to see the luxury Tesla Model S to hit the market June 22, 2012, starting the electric care revolution at a time when the auto industry was floundering in the failed hydrogen platforms. Musk had many skeptics in the auto industry and on Wall Street but eventually proved them all wrong, reaching a $1 trillion market cap in Jan. 2022. Even at its current $750 billion market cap, Tesla is more than double Toyota at $305 billion, and more than his closest Chinese-made electric car competitor at $600 billion. But unlike BYD, Musk creates aesthetically pleasing cars, comparable to designs of Daimler-Benz, BMW and Audi, all top German auto brands. Musk has been known as a relentless workaholic, a rumored slave-driver to employees.
So, when it comes to WSJ publishing anonymous reports of Musk’s allege drug abuse you can take it with a grain of salt. Musk denounced the WSJ reporting, saying, after that he’s been randomly drug-tested by NASA since his pot-smoking appearance on the Joe Rogan Show Sept. 7, 2018, prompting NASA to order random drug testing for contractors. “After that one puff with Rogan, I agreed, at NASA’s request, to do 3 years of random drug testing,” Musk tweeted on his X platform. “Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs and alcohol,” Musk tweeted. Musk said the WSJ was “not fit to line a parrot cage for bird,” attesting to the nature of fake news. Musk has sympathy for former President Donald Trump who’s been the subject of the biggest government witch hunt in U.S. history. Newspapers like the New York Times and broadcast outlets like CNN routinely publish and report fake stories about Trump for the last nine years.
So, when it comes to the WSJ not naming its sources, how can a credentialed newspaper smear anyone without offering a scintilla of facts? Facts don’t seem to count for the government in its multiple cases against Trump who faces 91 felonies on his way to the GOP nomination. Musk finds himself smeared by the WSJ, reporting his alleged drug-or-alcohol abuse without attribution, a kind of journalistic plagiarism that eventually did in former Harvard President Claudine Gay. Gay has turned her recent troubles at Harvard, including her failed testimony in Congress, into a racial witch hunt to hound her out of her job. Musk now faces unfounded rumors about his alleged drug-or-alcohol abuse possibly driven by BYD or some other hater, angry that Musk is the top of the heap of the world’s richest and most successful men. Newspapers, like government agencies, are easily duped by clever propagandists spreading malicious fake news.
WSJ should be ashamed of itself spreading unfounded gossip about Musk from unknown sources but obviously out to besmirch the world’s richest man. Without naming sources, the WSJ falls into the category of fake news, using unverified sources to launch ugly rumors to affect Wall Street’s perception of Musk’s many businesses. Musk doesn’t need to dignify the WSJ with a defamation suit, not only because he doesn’t need the money, but, more importantly, because he can’t waste his precious time on lawsuits. Musk’s smart enough to know that that fake news is a staple in the U.S. and around the world, brainwashing viewers with unverified rubbish. “SpaceX was a NASA contractor and they are big believers in the law,” Musk told biographers Walter Issacson. “So I had to be subjected to random drug test for a couple of year.” Credentialed news organizations, broadcast and print, need to report sources or stop filing fake news stories.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and
