Billionaires get to cry in the Times. The rest of us just have to get on with it.

The Times’ treatment of Elon Musk shows how the rich are held to a different standard

Last Friday, the New York Times published a profile of Elon Musk where the billionaire was reportedly on the verge of tears over what he described as “the most difficult and painful year of my career” given the myriad problems that have arisen at Tesla and, in particular, with the Model 3.

As Musk complained about having to work on his birthday, the reporters involved in the story described the events of last week when Musk tweeted he was taking Tesla private at $420 and that funding was secured — it wasn’t. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating Tesla over Musk’s tweet and his previous bold claims on production numbers.

The Times story is not, however, overly critical of Musk, and while it describes some of the issues he’s had to deal with in the past year, it ignores the key point: the problems that have made the past year so “difficult” are largely of his own making. Musk’s lies and exaggerations are what keep getting him into trouble, and even as he whined to the Times, he couldn’t stop himself from making even more.

Elon Musk makes his own problems

Why was there so much focus on Model 3 production numbers earlier this year? Elon Musk. He set overambitious targets and after delaying and reducing them several times, people were simply getting impatient — investors had expectations that Musk set for them, while customers had put down deposits and their delivery dates kept getting pushed.

And why did that happen? Musk tried to automate the production line without learning the lessons of other automakers which had already tried (and failed) to automate final assembly — something which he admitted in a recent interview with YouTuber Marques Brownlee (which we’ll return to in a moment). Meanwhile, other production issues led to fires in the paint shop and parts waste at an unprecedented scale.

As the problems at Tesla have escalated, Musk has perplexed everyone by massively increasing his use of Twitter and convincing his diehard fans (and himself) that his “enemies” — oil companies, other auto companies, and short-sellers — were spreading lies about the company aimed at bringing it down. Let’s not ignore the fact that those “lies” usually ended up being true and remember that the source of these problems is, almost always, Musk himself.

Twitter has gotten Musk into a lot of trouble, from his suggestion that journalists should be rated on a website called “Pravda” and that the man responsible for developing the rescue operation for the Thai kids stuck in the cave was a “pedo” because he insulted Musk’s dumb submarine.

And that’s all before his now-infamous tweet that set off this latest mediastorm where he lied about having the funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share — a number he claimed to the Times had nothing to do with marijuana since he didn’t use it because when you’re stoned “[y]ou just sit there like a stone.” Words of a genius, which have now been called into question after Azealia Banks shared her texts with Grimes where the singer said she got Musk into weed and that he rounded from $419 to $420 “for a laugh” because it was the same as the number associated with weed culture.

The media is always there for a billionare ego boost

How did Musk even get the innovative, entrepreneurial image that many now associate with him? It’s largely thanks to the media, and his incredible ability to play them. The praise of Musk began in tech publications — a branch of the media that’s always looking for a messiah they can uncritically elevate — and after the death of Steve Jobs, the deification of Musk only accelerated.

After a time, this treatment of Musk, which ignored his faults and failures while ascribing him all responsibility for anything good that came out of the companies he founded, seeped into other media outlets until it finally infected the mainstream media that most people consume, just as they were further shifting from serious reporting to a style more reminiscent of sports and entertainment journalism. In-depth reporting of issues was replaced with political play-by-plays where the elevation of figures from various industries into celebrities intensified.

This explains why Musk now feels victimized by the media. After a decade or so of largely uncritical coverage where he was presented as a visionary and (inter)national treasure, even parts of the tech press can’t ignore his growing failures with Tesla. However, that doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned him. The media loves a billionaire, as the Times interview shows.

When regular people fail in their jobs or lose their positions, the media often frames it as being their own fault. Individual responsibility is a core tenet of the neoliberal set of values that have been endlessly shoved down our throats and imprinted on our minds since the 1970s, so when something bad happens, there’s an effort to look at how the victim failed or deserved their fate — but that’s not the case with billionaires.

We generally shrug our shoulders, as a society, when our fellow poor and middle-class people fall through the cracks and into destitution if they lose their job, are scammed by a financial institution, or need health care that isn’t covered by insurance — but that isn’t the case with the rich.

Thanks to the framing of media organizations — which are not coincidentally controlled by some of the richest people in our society, if not the world — when the rich fail, we rarely ascribe the blame to them or at least look for the ways they can be redeemed and soar like a phoenix from the ashes of their failure. We love a redemption story when it involves a celebrity or a billionaire, because we’re told that one day that could be us — yet nothing could be a bigger lie.

The Times did this for Musk, even though it’s clear he’s learned nothing and just wants the media to go back to uncritically boosting him and everything he does. They pointed out that the tweet about taking Tesla private was inaccurate, but they still went along with his pity party about having to work on his birthday, putting in 120 hours a week, not seeing his kids very often — a situation that would sound pretty familiar to a growing segment of the working class. Taking a private plane to Catalonia for his brother’s wedding, however? Maybe that’s relatable to high-level media personalities, but not to those who relate to the work schedule he experiences as a terrible imposition.

There’s another important difference here, too. The working class is often blamed for not working hard enough or being committed enough if they get laid off, when the blame should lie with mismanagement much further up, but Musk’s failures are truly his own, yet he rarely acknowledges that fact and certainly doesn’t learn from them.

Indeed, the “difficult” year which put Musk on the verge of tears over is only so hard because he seems unable to give accurate timetables and can’t put his phone down long enough not to get himself into trouble with his tweets. Just as Banks called out his lies by keeping the receipts from her conversations with Grimes, Musk also couldn’t help himself from making even more bold timelines that will not be met in his interview with Brownlee, which was published the day after the Times piece.

Musk told Brownlee that Tesla could produce a $25,000 electric car within three years, continuing on the plan to use expensive models to develop more affordable ones. However, the $35,000 Model 3s still aren’t being delivered because Musk claims that production needs to scale to 5,000 units per week before they can be produced at a profit, even though analysts at UBS now say that the $35,000 Model 3 will never be profitable and that Tesla will lose $6,000 on every base model it produces.

More fake news, or another of Musk’s lies exposed? The latter seems like a much safer bet.