The end of the calendar year brings Christmas music to airwaves, shoppers to malls, families to therapy, and Time Magazine's Man of the Year (now "Person of the Year"). This year's shortlist just went live, and it includes Taylor Swift, Xi Jinping, and Barbie. But whatever the editorial board of Time says, there's no doubt that if the Person of the Year was a fair contest, it would be awarded to one man and one man alone: Elon Musk.
A little over a year ago, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion dollars in a bid to protect free speech, Tweeting "the bird is free." Musk re-branded Twitter as "X", cut the staff by half, and told the remainder: Work hard or quit..
At the time, Musk made it clear that he bought Twitter for humanity, not to make money. Cynics doubted his ability to make Twitter profitable, but millions of X users embraced his new subscription model and the promise of creator generated revenue streams.
Indeed, it was members of the liberal media and woke elites who were hardest hit by Musk's acquisition. En masse, they threatened to leave and boycott the platform. Then, in a bold move bolstering his free speech bona fides, Musk invited independent journalists to look behind the curtain at Twitter with respect to some of the biggest news stories of our time.
In so doing, Musk single-handedly flipped the script on the censorship in the digital public square. Twitter and other social media giants like Facebook/Meta previously had a near monopoly on information. The political Left loved that, as did the Biden administration, enthusiastically embracing a treacherous private-public model to suppress speech.
They have one less tool by which to enact their anti-democratic censorship enterprise, thanks to Elon Musk.
What makes Musk so interested in cultural and civilizational shifts and motivated him to take a leadership role? Hailing from South Africa, he had lived experience of the evil apartheid regime and a willingness to publicly call out genocidal aspirations against whites. He also regularly interacts with leading X accounts on medical transitioning of children and how "woke" ruins everything. A father many times over, he's also famous for encouraging people to follow in his footsteps and have more children.
Musk seems to have a genuine concern with truth and the free exchange of information. He understands that without free speech, there is no freedom. The suppression of free speech during COVID-19 lockdown policies or the government sanctioning the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as "mostly peaceful" may have sounded further alarm bells, and he was in a unique position to do something about it.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration and woke media, licking their wounds about losing the digital public square, sought ways to destroy Musk. The opportunity presented itself recently when Musk replied to an X post in an unfortunate way. "Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," the post read, to which Musk replied, "You have said the actual truth."
Musk could have been more precise, which he later acknowledged. Because there is truth in what he was trying to get across: It's undeniable that certain liberal Jewish groups have promoted suicidal mass migration and refugee policies that have brought hundreds of thousands of antisemitic and anti-Western persons to Western nations. It is insane to import people who hate you, and there's nothing antisemitic about pointing that out. Musk further clarified his remarks. Though it was obvious he was not referring to all Jews, the Left-wing smear machine went all in on antisemitism and ad boycotts.
Days later, Musk hopped on a plane to Israel, where he bore witness to the biggest murder of Jews since the Holocaust with none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He watched raw footage of Hamas' attacks and held a Twitter space with Netanyahu. They discussed parallels to the end of World War II and the American de-Nazification of German civil society. Then, Musk met with relatives of the hostages. A father of a hostage held in Gaza presented him with an engraved army diskette with the words "Bring Them Home." Musk promised not only to wear it but not to take it off until all the hostages were home. It was a heartfelt, magnanimous, and righteous act of solidarity.
But Musk was not done yet. Safely back in America came his glorious piece de resistance of media appearances of all time. In a live interview with with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, in a room full of advertising executives and CEOs and still wearing his "Bring Them Home" army diskette, Elon Musk said anyone boycotting X could "Go f*ck themself." And in case there was any confusion, he said it again.
Commeth the hour, commeth the man.
And this is to say nothing of his leadership in the arena of electric cars and space travel.
Elon Musk is an intriguing, self-made man of means, a savant with a prescient pulse on the cultural and political zeitgeist. He's not of the Left or the Right. He is quite simply a man of great historical consequence. This is certainly his hour, and indeed his year.
Laura Rosen Cohen is a Toronto-based writer.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
If Person of the Year Was Fair, Only One Person Deserves It: Elon Musk
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04.12.2023
The end of the calendar year brings Christmas music to airwaves, shoppers to malls, families to therapy, and Time Magazine's Man of the Year (now "Person of the Year"). This year's shortlist just went live, and it includes Taylor Swift, Xi Jinping, and Barbie. But whatever the editorial board of Time says, there's no doubt that if the Person of the Year was a fair contest, it would be awarded to one man and one man alone: Elon Musk.
A little over a year ago, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion dollars in a bid to protect free speech, Tweeting "the bird is free." Musk re-branded Twitter as "X", cut the staff by half, and told the remainder: Work hard or quit..
At the time, Musk made it clear that he bought Twitter for humanity, not to make money. Cynics doubted his ability to make Twitter profitable, but millions of X users embraced his new subscription model and the promise of creator generated revenue streams.
Indeed, it was members of the liberal media and woke elites who were hardest hit by Musk's acquisition. En masse, they threatened to leave and boycott the platform. Then, in a bold move bolstering his free speech bona fides, Musk invited independent journalists to look behind the curtain at Twitter with respect to some of the biggest news stories of our time.
In so doing, Musk........
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