Over the past two weeks, Elon Musk has been at war with the media. Musk, who usually manages to get an optimistic coverage from the media, was unhappy with the recent media coverage of some of Tesla's shortcomings. This led him to launch a tirade against media outlets calling them "misleading".
Elon Musk criticised the press and said that journalists were "under pressure to get maximum clicks and earn advertising dollar" so that they do not get fired. He pointed out that Tesla does not advertise.
The Tesla CEO even engaged in a Twitter spat with mediapersons like NBC News reporter Ben Collins and veteran tech editor and founder of The Outline, Joshua Topolsky.
Elon Musk went on to tweet: "The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them".
But Elon Musk embarrassed himself when he retweeted a link to an article written by The Knife, a website that is associated with NXIVM, a self-help organisation founded by Keith Raniere who was arrested in March for forcing followers to have sex with him. The article was meant to back his claims that the press had become unreliable. The article itself gave 'objectivity ratings' to various news articles that covered Elon Musk's recent campaign against the press.
When one of his followers alerted him of the link to NXIVM, he promptly deleted the tweet.
But the highlight of the Twitter rant was when Elon Musk announced that he is "going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda …"
Pravda, meaning truth, was the name of the propaganda newspaper brought out by the defunct Soviet Union. While many hailed the idea and joined Elon Musk in criticising the media, others said the idea needed more thought.
He went on to create a Twitter poll for people to vote on the media credibility rating site.
Elon Musk also promoted the poll by asking journalists who did not want Pravda to exist to write an article telling their readers to vote against it.
He then tweeted that he had tried to buy Pravda.com, but could not as it was already owned by Ukraine. He then tweeted that he bought Pravduh.com, a play on words for Pravda.
The world now awaits his next move.