Hating On Elon

PEOPLE seem to either love or hate Elon Musk, most usually, it seems, the latter. For me, he's a mixed bag, but I am beginning to think that my negatives on Elon outweigh the positives. What I despise most about him is his apparent extreme right wing conservatism, about which I knew nothing until quite recently. Evidently his conservatism is especially closly associated with economic matters, surprise surprise, he being an evident neo-liberal laissez faire keep government out of the free market, all of that blithering nonsense. And yes, it is blithering nonsense Serious economic research always concludes that some degree of government involvement in and regulation of the economy is necessary for a healthy capitalist economy. Also, progressive taxation benefits everyone, including the very wealthy. Like all rich people, Elon simply doesn't want to pay taxes. Now, the pompous ass, (oops, did I really say that?) is after National Public Radio (NPR), on Twitter, Twitter being the big social medial company which Musk bought for billions and has been trying to destroy ever since, witih some degree of success thus far. So big Elon tweets out some idiotic comment about NPR, calling it "state radio", then later defending his lie by remarking that NPR is heavily funded by the government. This is another lie. NPR gets about one percent of its funding from government sources, the rest comes from private donations, including a lot of money from wealthy benefactors and big corporations. NPR is proud to be independent of corporate control; the donars get nothing in return for their gifts, no promises concerning program content, no influence, nothing. They aslo get no advertising, free or othwrwise. So, wisely, NPR has dropped Twitter as one of its promotional platforms. Complete divorce. This event does more damage to Twitter than to its former corporate associates: if they all leave Twitter, Twitter has nothing, but the big corporations, including nonprofit ones like NPR, can carry on quite well, on other social media platforms.