Letters to the Editor: Elon Musk runs Twitter. You don’t like that. So ignore Twitter. Just don’t do it. That’s actually a sensible strategy, but it’s not being talked about enough. You don’t read about it because it’s a non-story.
That’s why it’s worth spending some time thinking about how to cover the story on Twitter, or how to be a better reporter. In short, you need to know all the facts. You need to not just tell your readers (and probably your bosses and your bosses’ bosses) that Elon Musk uses Twitter to tell stories. You need to tell them why Musk does that.
The fact that some people don’t like to talk about Musk’s use of Twitter probably means that it is used in ways that are illegal, unethical or even outright criminal. That is a fact.
So the first problem with ignoring Musk’s Twitter use is that journalists don’t need to understand the specific ways in which he’s violating the law. This is the point that most people miss. It isn’t just that the law might be different here than in other countries.
It’s that Elon Musk has already broken the law, often repeatedly, at least in his own country. He is one of the most powerful people in the world, and some people seem to think that he doesn’t have to answer to the laws of any country.
The fact that he is, however, a billionaire — he made as much as Bill Gates, for heaven’s sake — doesn’t change the fact that he has a legal responsibility to answer to the laws of the state where he is. And that means he has to obey the laws of that country.
I’m pretty sure that people like him who break the law in the US, in China and everywhere else have every reason to obey the laws of their own countries. But this isn’t a case of people just obeying the rules that they could have changed. Musk has broken laws in nearly every country where he has lived.
In countries where he’s lived and done business, he is not above the law in the way that he breaks it. If he were I suspect that his actions on Twitter would be subject to criminal penalties