SpaceX Chief in Interview: Journalism is Helpless Against Musk's Calculated Lies

In a frequent exercise of engaging with those on the right, Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, embarked on yet another attempt this week. Perhaps this experiment should now be considered a failure. While Beddoes cannot be faulted for much, and she handled many aspects of her hour-long interview with Elon Musk correctly, her approach might have been flawed. Maybe starting the conversation by admiring Musk as someone who "does more to shape the future than any other living person" wasn't the best strategy, though it could have been a tactic.

Perhaps instead of confronting him about no longer believing his prophecy that killer robots will destroy humanity, she should have deflated some of his apocalyptic rhetoric. She also might not have let him get away with dismissing the notion that many consider him a racist by the classic deflection that his partner is "half Indian" and one of his children with her is named after a famous Indian physicist.

Maybe she could have at least chuckled or shaken her head in disbelief when Musk answered the question of whether he is against Muslims by stating that he, the great advocate of free speech, is only against people with "antithetical views" entering a country – and against "rape and murder." Describing Alice Weidel as a "thoroughly thoughtful person" also seems somewhat truncated.

Alright, perhaps those were too many caveats.

However, she was genuinely persistent and clear on one point: the number of lives lost due to the cessation of funding for the USAID development agency.

She pressed the issue, refusing to be sidetracked by Musk's whataboutism, and presented stronger arguments. She confronted him with the fact that other aid organizations could not compensate for the shortfall due to the abrupt decision of the Trump administration. Musk, however, repeatedly claimed there were no deaths. "Zero!" But when funding for antiretroviral drugs is cut overnight, people die, don't they? "No."

He dismissed these as mere claims, absolute nonsense, and just a sad story put out by a "fraudulent organization" because its funding was cut. But deaths? Zero. Still, considering the suddenness of these decisions? "Zero people died. Zero."

Studies suggest that up to 14 million people died due to the cessation of aid. But this isn't about truth; it's about power. The writer Masha Gessen once termed this tactic "power lying" – the lie of a bully, "the lie of the older child who has taken your hat and denies it while wearing it." There is no defense against this kind of lie, because "the point of this lie is to demonstrate power, to show 'If I want to, I can say whatever I want.'"

If being humiliated in such a way doesn't bother you, you can continue talking to liars. Or should you stop?