Elon Musk, the first person in history to destroy $200 billion in a year

According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk was worth around $340 billion in November last year. That has melted together in the last few months. In total, the Tesla and Twitter boss lost $200 billion.

This is primarily due to the crash in Tesla shares. Although it is still not a bargain and is ahead of the renowned car manufacturers Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen in its rating, it is still far below the value of the previous year.

Musk would get bogged down in the Twitter chaos, according to his critics, who blame him for the stock’s plunge. Musk himself locates the problems in a completely different place, because he thinks Tesla is in an excellent position. He tweeted: “We have no control over the Federal Reserve”, alluding to the monetary policy of the American central bank, which, like that of the ECB, has been criticized by many experts due to the massive interest rate hikes.

Whoever is to blame, it’s a record for history that is unlikely to be contested anytime soon.

‘Twitter Files’

The new Twitter boss nevertheless dropped another bombshell: He is making large amounts of internal documents and emails publicly available that reveal massive censorship and manipulation by the former Twitter management during the Corona “pandemic”. Unwanted critics of the official Corona line were blocked and their statements censored on a large scale.

Musk himself bluntly stated on a December 24 podcast: “To be honest with you, almost every conspiracy theory that people have had about Twitter has turned out to be true. Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that hasn’t turned out to be true? So far all have turned out to be true. If not truer than people thought.”

The “Twitter Files” provided by Musk, show how the administration of US President Joe Biden put massive pressure on the online service. But even under Donald Trump, the US government was not idle. Both administrations urged Twitter and other social media platforms to block information that did not fit their Corona narrative and highlighted others that suited them. As a rule, those responsible for Twitter bowed down.

Trump as bad as Biden

At the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration urged tech companies to fight “misinformation” about “grocery store rushes”. However, there was really a rush to grocery stores. Far from being misinformation, it was a real phenomenon that the Trump administration did not want to bring to the fore.

Then, when Biden took office in January 2021, his administration was concerned about “anti-vaccination accounts” and particularly that of journalist Alex Berenson. The latter’s Twitter account was suspended hours after Biden claimed that social media companies were “killing people” for allowing “misinformation” about vaccines. Berenson later sued Twitter and was eventually able to reach a settlement.

According to the Twitter Files, Biden’s team was “very upset” that the online platform was not being more aggressive in removing accounts it did not approve of. More seriously, Twitter censored unwanted views, including those of doctors and scientific experts, whose opinions conflicted with the official White House position.

This applied, for example, to the tweets by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School: Kulldorff has repeatedly contradicted US health officials and the American left. One of his tweets about vaccines was flagged as “false information” by a moderator, despite the fact that it was essentially expert opinion, consistent with vaccination policies in several other countries. His “offence” was that he had deviated from the “Covid guidelines”.

Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island doctor, was also permanently banned from Twitter for spreading alleged “misinformation,” including a tweet referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study of mRNA vaccines. After Boston’s lawyer contacted Twitter, an internal review found only one in five alleged violations was actually one – and that is only because he cited data that, while legitimate, did not fit the narrative of the public health establishment.