‘You lost your credibility a long time ago’: Musk’s idea to take on the media with new website

ELON Musk says he is going to start a new project to take on fake news, partisan media and erroneous journalism.

The serial entrepreneur and billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX wants to create a website which lets the public rate “the core truth” of news articles and track a credibility score of publications and journalists over time.

Taking to Twitter this morning, Musk said he wanted to call the service Pravda.

Pravda was the name of a Russian propaganda newspaper for the Soviet Communist Party.

“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,” he wrote.

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 …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2018

“Even if some of the public doesn’t care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors and publications will. It is how they define themselves,” he added.

MORE: Is everything okay with Tesla and Elon Musk?

For a man who courts the spotlight so fervently, he sometimes doesn’t seem to like what the scrutiny brings and he’s not afraid to announce his displeasure with the media. He has previously complained that fatal crashes involving Tesla autopilot have become such big news and thinks reports about factory injuries at Tesla are unfair compared to coverage of the traditional auto industry.

“We are not perfect, but we’re doing our best to make clean energy real and be a good company,” Musk tweeted.

In the financial markets there has been a growing number of commentators critical of his cash-burning electric car company and in a recent Tesla conference call with investors and media, Musk become erratic and combative.

In what’s been dubbed his Enron moment, Musk cut off analysts and avoided rudimentary questions because he said they were “boring” and “not cool”.

Of course such behaviour draws inevitable comparisons to Donald Trump, and this morning’s Twitter activity was no different.

Senior transport reporter for tech publication The Verge described Musk’s latest outburst as a continuation of “his slow transformation into a media-baiting Trump figure screaming irrationally about fake news”.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss was quick to snap back, writing: “Why do you think he got elected in the first place? Because no one believes you any more. You lost your credibility a long time ago.”

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