Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
It’s the most wonderful time of year… for snowflakes. While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might be supplanting former President Donald Trump in the GOP, all anyone can talk about is the man replacing Trump as Twitter’s troll-in-chief. That would be yet another hypocritical, thin-skinned billionaire: Elon Musk.
Musk subscribes to the new right’s facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings philosophy. That is, until someone calls him on his bullshit and forces him to play by his own rules. Then, he clutches his pearls and whines that people are being mean to him and that it’s the death of Western civilization as we know it. Sound familiar?
This week, Musk banned and threatened to sue a 20-year-old college student who runs the Twitter feed @elonjet—a feed using publicly available information to track Musk’s jet. (Musk supporters have argued that because he uses a Privacy ICAO Address—also known as a PIA—to disguise his plane’s identifying information, that the information is not public. Others have countered that the information isn’t truly “private,” but rather, “still public, just harder to obtain.”)