Elon Musk isn't 'the media' — and he should be happy about that

Jim VandeHei, co-founder of the news site Axios, accepted a journalism award last week at the National Press Club and was “talking his book” — a financial term for promoting a stock or investment in supposedly neutral ways that actually helps your own position. There’s a lot of “book-talking” within the media these days.

VandeHei “inspired and energized” the audience, “with a passionate, ad-libbed defense of free and fearless reporting,” according to an unbylined write-up about the speech in his own media outlet. “We do it because it matters,” he said, yelling at times. “The work that we do matters.”

VandeHei got literal applause from the hosts and his fellow panelists on “Morning Joe” for his “passionate defense” of his profession when he appeared on Monday. “Critics of the press are feeling more empowered than ever,” said host Joe Scarborough.

It’s not far-fetched to think Scarborough was thinking about a single billionaire critic of the press more than any other when he praised VandeHei — aiming his critique at X owner and “first buddy” Elon Musk. The rant from MSNBC’s morning show host comes as Musk is currently engaged in a bit of trollery over the prospect of buying the very network on which Scarborough appears five mornings a week.

It had begun as a joke from Donald Trump Jr. after it was reported that MSNBC was one of the many cable networks getting spun off into a separate company from Comcast’s core properties. It then became meme material for Musk — teasing an interest in running the liberal cable channel that boasts such talent as Rachel Maddow.

The story has now become fodder for outlets like CNN to take seriously, with media correspondent Brian Stelter reporting this week that Musk’s supposed interest is “adding to the anxiety that MSNBC staffers are feeling about the reelection of Donald Trump.”

Stelter also reported that other “benevolent” billionaires (unlike the terrible Musk, apparently) have inquired about purchasing the distressed media asset too — and, more importantly, that MSNBC is not at all for sale and is simply part of a cable-bundle company that is a “tax-free spinoff” from the main property.

But the reality is that Musk was never going to buy MSNBC in the first place. The network is a legacy news dinosaur, perhaps only one era younger than fossils like CBS News and ABC News, but barely more relevant.

Musk is interested in media and freedom of speech broadly. He’s had fun with his toy, the social media site X. But owning a cable news channel — even just for the fun of replacing Scarborough or Maddow with a Shiba Inu "DOGE" dog — would be neither a smart business move nor a particularly fun endeavor.

But Musk has been “talking his book” recently, too. In the minutes after Trump’s victory, Musk posted on X — likely literally from Trump’s side, where he had been at Mar-a-Lago all evening — a phrase that set the establishment press into hysterics: “You are the media.”

That post, seen more than 106 million times, according to X’s analytics, has hit a nerve with the journalists who “are the media” for a living.

From within their bubble, the Acela media missed the Trump wave once again in 2024, just like they had in 2016. They tried to make Vice President Kamala Harris happen and, like fetch, it just wasn’t happening.

But their failures don’t make some random poster on X “the media.” And Musk should be happy his platform doesn’t represent “the media,” as this is the central conceit of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects social media companies by defining X, Facebook and YouTube as “platforms” rather than publishers.

That makes these companies exempt from the legal repercussions of what users of the sites post. If people who post on X are on the same level as CNN or the New York Times, Musk’s company would be exposed to the same legal liability these publishers face, for example, in defamation lawsuits.

At the same time, trust in the press is at all-time lows. Why would you even want to be “the media,” anyway? And that is even more reason why you wouldn’t want to try to rehabilitate a dying media brand on a platform — linear television — that is seeing churn with each passing week.

There’s growing agita among the overall media about the language coming out of Musk and the Trump team related to fourth estate norms and institutions. Trump Jr. teased that discussions are underway about allowing more independent media outlets into the White House briefing room, possibly by kicking out some of the less friendly legacy outlets. We’ll see if this fairly irrelevant reshuffling takes place at all.

In the meantime, Musk will continue poking the establishment media bear, and the bear will react in predictably hysterical ways — and all of it will be performance. It’s yet another exhibit in the growing list of reasons the public is losing trust in the self-absorbed clowns at the helm of an industry shedding relevance and influence by the day.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.