Elon Musk: The Henry Ford Of Our Times, Without The Pesky Antisemitism, Whew

Of all the people to compare Musk to.

Let us say that you are Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. An important gig, especially in these unsettling times for Jewish people, what with the white nationalists marching and shooting up synagogues and taking over one of our two major political parties and whatnot. Good for you!

Now let us say that as Jonathan Greenblatt, you are also a fan of Elon Musk. Okay! Some people are, for some reason! Defensible, we suppose.

Now let us say that you, as Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization born in the wake of the case of Leo Frank specifically to fight antisemitism, you want to compare Elon Musk to a famous industrialist. Might you want to think twice about choosing as that industrialist Henry goddamn Ford ?

And yet, here is Greenblatt doing just that on CNBC on Friday while talking about Musk’s possibly-maybe-yes-or-not impending purchase of Twitter :

“"I'm hopeful it will go through," says @JGreenblattADL on @ElonMusk buying $TWTR. "To think what he could do with the public square...I'm hopeful he'll be able to apply his penchant for innovation to this company."”

— Squawk Box (@Squawk Box) 1665143550 

 As we’ve said before, Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur, an extraordinary innovator. He’s the Henry Ford of our time. 

Really? Did Musk also think The Protocols of the Elders of Zion laid out a real plan for the Jews to achieve global dominance? And then found an antisemitic newspaper premised on fighting that plan? And saw that newspaper influence the thinking of notable anti-Semite Adolf Hitler, who supposedly revered Ford? And that’s just off the top of our head.

Ford, like Musk today, did viciously hate unions. So we suppose Greenblatt has us there.

Greenblatt stumbled into this line of what we guess we’ll call thought while musing about all the amazing innovations he thinks Musk could bring about for Twitter, which he likened to “the public square,” which might mean something if this was an accurate description of Twitter’s function. But only 23 percent of voting-age American adults use the site, and somewhere around probably 75 percent of that 23 percent are only there to yell at Marco Rubio for sucking.

In other words, it’s the equivalent of the public square in the same way CNN is the equivalent of yr Wonkette – less than one-fourth as funny, though nowhere near 75 percent of that one-fourth involves telling Marco Rubio he sucks, even though it should.

Twitter has put some effort -- halting and inconsistent, but still effort -- into cleansing the platform of just the kind of white supremacists and keyboard Nazis and former presidents who have used it to harass all sorts of minorities, including Jews.

But one of the fears Twitter users have if Musk takes over is that he has pronounced himself eager to let those voices back on . Those voices are in fact eagerly anticipating this move, and began crowing about it six months ago. Greenblatt should know, in April he was sounding the alarm himself .

Were there no other innovative industrialists to which Musk could have been compared instead? A Vanderbilt or a Rockefeller or one of those other rapacious capitalists with facial hair like the overgrown yard of an abandoned haunted house?

Let's all meet back here next week, when someone calls Tucker Carlson the Father Coughlin of our time. That person we're going to buy a beer.

[ CNBC on Twitter ]

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