The huge four-column headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on Saturday was ominous and insinuating: “Musk Held Secret Discussions With Putin Since Late 2020.”
Secret!
This supposed exposé, published just 10 days before the election, seeks to tie Musk, now an ardent campaigner for former President Donald Trump, to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the boogeyman the media and the Democrats have used against Trump since 2016.
It reminds me of the old Seinfeld joke about the Chinese: They’re “really hangin’ in there” with the chopsticks 1,700 years after the fork swept over Europe. Indeed, the media and Democrats are really hangin’ in there with the debunked Russiagate hoax.
This front-page attempt at guilt-by-association, which never delivers the goods on what the two men discussed and what damage this supposedly did to the United States, likely will spark yet another investigation of Musk. “I don’t know that that story is true. I think it should be investigated,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said after it was published.
But it’s a nothingburger.
Musk meets with plenty of leaders — Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Javier Milei of Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. He has a visible crush on Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. (Who wouldn’t?) He operates a huge Tesla plant in Shanghai, though China is our biggest rival in global, economic, and military affairs.
But the Wall Street Journal story warns us: “Putin is on a different order of magnitude. The Russian leader has created an authoritarian system that oversees fraudulent elections and the assassinations of political opponents.” In some eyes, this starts to sound like the pot calling the kettle black.
“Putin has become the U.S.’s chief antagonist,” my favorite paper reports.
Only because the Democrats have made him so. Russia is in actuality a horsefly on an elephant’s backside. The U.S. economy is 12.8 times the size of Russia’s, our per capita gross domestic product ($66,400) more than six times as large. Our stock market, at $55 trillion in total value, is more than 900 times the $60 billion Russian market. We spend more than twice as much on the military as Russia does.
The Wall Street Journal story says Musk’s talks with Putin “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.” “Musk’s dialogue could signal re-engagement with the Russian leader, and reinforce Trump’s expressed desire to cut a deal over major fault lines such as the war in Ukraine,” the outlet claims.
Says who, and what would be so wrong with this, anyway?
The article, by five Wall Street Journal reporters plus two contributors, fails to attribute, support, or explain this observation.
The story points out that “Musk gave airtime to Putin” when X carried Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with him. X is the foremost, freest media platform in the world, with more than half a billion posts every day, and this story apparently would hold Musk responsible for all of them.
It also cites a Kremlin spokesman who said Putin and Musk have had only one phone call. “But more conversations have followed,” the Wall Street Journal says, citing one chat with a Putin deputy chief of staff. “What the two talked about isn’t clear.”
Thus, it barely may be worth mentioning.
This was a common tactic in the spoon-fed media coverage of the Russiagate hoax: show a photo of a Trump adviser with a supposed Russiagate figure, and caption it with, “It is not known what, if any, business dealings they had.”
The story also cites Musk’s refusing the request of Ukraine military officers to turn on satellite service over Crimea so they could guide underwater drones to strike Russian ships. But it neglects to say that Musk was obeying U.S. law: Starlink service was blacked out over Crimea under U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Musk has, in fact, been a staunch supporter of Ukraine since the Russian assault began in 2022. He has donated hundreds of millions of dollars in Starlink satellite service and terminals to help Ukraine rebuild communications destroyed by Russian rockets. Some 15,000 Starlink terminals operate there today.
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Almost all sources in this story are, of course, anonymous, just as in the Russiagate hoax. One Biden-Harris administration whisperer says that no alerts have been raised “over possible security breaches by Musk.” Meaning, nothing untoward has happened — so, why is this a story at all, and why now?
Answer: because this is Elon Musk, and now Musk is a Trump supporter.
Dennis Kneale is a media strategist and host of the podcast What’s Bugging Me on Ricochet. He worked at the Wall Street Journal for 16 years. His book, The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk, will be published in January by HarperCollins.