Did you catch Elon Musk on 60 Minutes last night? It was weird, to say the least. The billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla said that he didn’t respect the SEC, that his Twitter habits are normal, and that reports of dangerous conditions at Tesla are all part of a conspiracy to unionize the company.
If you didn’t catch the interview, conducted by Lesley Stahl, you can watch it over on the CBS website, or you can watch our GIF Cliff’s Notes (GIF’s Notes?) version below. Either way, it’s a strange interview for anyone to give, let alone a billionaire who clearly does whatever he wants whenever he wants and yet still considers himself a victim being persecuted by the mean SEC.
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2018/10/elon-musk-claims-420-tweet-with-20-million-sec-fine-was-worth-it/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/mya9is2nfgufltpym0py.jpg” title=”Elon Musk Claims ‘420’ Tweet With $US20 Million SEC Fine Was ‘Worth It’” excerpt=”It’s arguably unfathomable that any human being slapped with a $US20 ($28) ($US28 ($39)) million fine for a bad tweet would ever consider returning to the platform, much less continue to fire off word salad at all hours of the day and night. In the face of any logical explanation, however, one such man seemingly continues to insist that he is not owned.”]
When Elon Musk was asked if the new chairman of the board at Tesla was installed because Musk needs a babysitter:
When Musk was asked about his erratic tweets, he said that he uses Twitter to “express himself” with a good chuckle:
When Musk was asked why he can’t keep production deadlines he manged to pull off the combination, eyeroll-sideeye:
When Musk was asked by Stahl about unreported worker injuries at Tesla, which he calls “a load of nonsense.”
When Stahl pushes the point, listing off the hazardous workplace conditions, Musk again says that’s not correct:
When Musk is asked if lawyers are reviewing his tweets before they go out:
Again, you can watch the entire interview over at CBS News, though the only part of the conversation where Musk seems like a normal human being is the very end when he talks about Tesla’s broader mission to make electric cars mainstream. It’s like watching a completely different person who’s not Extremely Online™:
Investors are probably wishing that they’d get a lot more of the Musk they saw in the last part of the interview, and less of the one who says that he doesn’t respect the SEC. But we’ll see.
Arrogance hasn’t really backfired for Musk before. People can do pretty much whatever they want as long as they’ve got the billions to pay for it after the fact. At least that seems to be the calculation that Musk is making as he shit-talks the SEC. Only time will tell.
[CBS News]