June 9th, 2018(Nyamilepedia) —– Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, recently took to Twitter and announced that he be starting a new media outlet soon. No one’s sure if he actually meant it, or if it was just another one of his pranks.
A tweet posted by him on May 23, linked out to a negative media story on his car company, Tesla, went like this, “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.” This comment doesn’t come as a surprise as such tweets are just one of the many fascinating facts about Elon Musk.
Why did he do it?
Thereafter, he wrote a series of Twitter messages lamenting the current state of journalism and wanting to change it for the better. He emphasised that the problem with the journalists is that they are under constant pressure to gain maximum number of advertising dollars for their organisations, or risk getting fired.
As Tesla doesn’t believe in advertising, quite differently from the diesel/gas-based car companies, he feels that his company is being targeted by the media businesses.
It’s worth mentioning that companies like Tesla can be a huge boon for Sudan that has been battling major fuel shortages for some time.
Twitter public approved
Musk then expressed his keenness to start a new portal that would allow public to rate the truth behind any new story, while also tracking the credibility scores of different journalists, publications and editors.
He mentioned that he might name it Pravda, which means truth in Russian language, and is also the name of the official newspaper of the former Soviet Union Communist Party.
He further reiterated, “Even if some of the public doesn’t care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors & publications will. It is. how they define themselves.”
Thereafter Musk created a Twitter poll that asked readers if they would support his idea or not. The poll closed on May 24 and by then it had received over 680,000 votes, with 88% of the respondents wanting to support his proposal.
Musk asked the media to promote his poll if they were against Pravda. Sometime later he retweeted again that he might call the website ‘You’re Right’ instead. Interestingly, he owns that domain name already (youreright.com), but it currently points to the Facebook news.
Well known for Twitter pranks
After some time, a Wall Street Journal article pointed out that Elon Musk is well-known for making not-so-serious proclamations. For instance, in one of his recent posts he had claimed that Tesla was about to go bankrupt and he’d be launching a candy company soon; and that he’d also be launching a company for drilling tunnels in order to avoid traffic. It’s a different matter that all these were posted on the April Fools’ Day!
The last one didn’t actually turn out to be a joke as Elon musk launched a new tunnelling company named The Boring Co. that’d be building an underground Hyperloop Transportation System. He’s even got the authorities’ permission to start digging process in DC.
Musk’s tweets attracted everyone’s attention on Twitter, including various journalists and even Donald Trump Jr, son of President Trump.
One journalist even retweeted Musk, adding a link to a business filing in California last October for a company named Pravda Corp. It’s a different matter that the filing involved a person related to the other ventures of Musk.
Published on behalf of Emori Media LTD.
