We all knew it was coming.
It’s almost laughable just how perfectly predictable the impending attempt to #MeToo Elon Musk was. When the world’s wealthiest man takes a stand to liberate Twitter from its woke corporatist overlords, what is the mob to do but resort to the most insidious of character smears? And, like clockwork, the media did exactly that, publishing one of the most stunningly irresponsible sexual harassment accusations in recent memory, just hours after the former Obama and Clinton donor pledged to vote Republican in the future.
Conservatives have been quick to brand the Insider article an outright hit piece due to the timing alone, but it’s worth sorting through the substance of the piece to understand just how reckless the ostensible news outlet was to publish such an article.
The reporter in question is, shockingly, Rich McHugh, the former NBC News journalist who tried to help Ronan Farrow get 30 Rock to publish its groundbreaking investigation into since-convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. Hence, why McHugh published a story with a single unnamed source who is not even the victim of the alleged harassment is all the more baffling. McHugh’s only source is a supposed friend of a former SpaceX flight attendant, who reportedly alleged that Musk exposed himself and sexually propositioned her while she gave him a massage on a company jet in 2016. Two years later, the flight attendant filed an HR complaint about the alleged incident. The company gave the flight attendant a quarter-million-dollar severance payout in exchange for her signing an NDA.
McHugh’s sources, beyond the friend, include her 2018 declaration corroborating the former flight attendant’s claim, “as well as other documents, including email correspondence and other records shared with Insider by the friend.”
That’s it. That is all the sourcing. A supposedly contemporaneously corroborating witness’s words without even the accuser anonymously confirming the authenticity of the account.
A quarter-million dollars constitutes mere crumbs to both SpaceX, valued at some $100 billion, and Musk, whose net worth outranks the GDPs of sovereign nations Finland and Portugal. (For historical context, Musk’s wealth, adjusted for inflation, compares to that of William the Conqueror and the last czar of Russia, though centuries of technological and scientific revolutions render any transtemporal comparisons practically meaningless.)
The last decade has exposed that plenty of powerful men have viewed their female subordinates as little more than a harem of sexual playthings. They’ve ranged from the comically wealthy and well-connected, like media mavens Les Moonves and Matt Lauer, to (relatively) less wealthy Swamp monsters like the late John Conyers. But one thing nearly all credible cases have had in common is that they’re repeat offenders.
So it bodes poorly for Insider that more than 72 hours after publishing such a shocking claim about Musk, still, not one other credible claim has been made against him. Musk has been somewhat of a public figure for some 20 years, a household name for 10, and inexplicably, a wildly controversial one for at least five. When there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, so what does it mean that, in this case, there’s neither?
The strongest case against McHugh’s story is Insider itself. The financial blog’s CEO, Henry Blodget, is famously banned from trading after committing securities fraud, and both the timing of the Musk story and its structural similarity to another hit piece calls into question the true motivation of the piece.
You may recall Insider’s nothingburger published late last year about Barstool Sports founder and prominent day trader Dave Portnoy. The piece in question charged Portnoy with two instances of rough sex, framing him as a predator, only for him to unleash a bevy of receipts proving the instances were undeniably consensual. Like Musk, Portnoy became aligned with the Right for interviewing then-President Trump at the White House and refusing to bow down to illiberal mobs, and, like Tesla, Penn National Gaming, which owns more than a third of Barstool, stood much to lose immediately. Insider dropped its Portnoy story right before Penn released its earnings report, and then it dropped its Musk story not just right after the entrepreneur came out of the GOP closet but also right after a curiously significant Tesla short position opened. That short-seller banked a 1400% profit, a success in any market, but especially one that waded into bear market territory the very same day.
Only one question remains. Did Insider publish this story because they genuinely believe a single source who, again, is not even the sexual misconduct accuser in question, was worth publishing? Or was its motivation politics, the profit for whoever banked on Tesla to fail, or some combination of both? Regardless, the more time that passes without a second shoe dropping, the worse it bodes for its attempt to take down the richest man on earth.
