The problem with being the most popular account on your own social media platform is there’s just no way of discreetly deleting an embarrassing post before millions of people have already read it.
Despite his better efforts to make his criticism of MacKenzie Scott disappear, screenshots are circulating the web of Elon Musk sniping at the wealthy philanthropist and former wife of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who unseated Musk as the world’s wealthiest man just days ago, for giving away billions to causes she deems worthy.
“‘Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should … be listed among ‘Reasons That Western Civilization Died,’” the Tesla CEO wrote. It’s the sort of all-too-human behavior for which Musk has become known since buying the social media giant, but on occasion, even the free speech absolutist himself takes down posts that crossed a kind of line.
Oh my god dude pic.twitter.com/1Qgh2gqUy0
— evan (@esjesjesj) March 6, 2024
Musk’s criticism came in response to a report that Scott had already donated to charity $16.5 billion of her fortune, awarded following the end of her quarter-century of marriage to Bezos, when she received 4% of Amazon’s stock.
What appears to rankle Musk is that the money Bezos earned and Scott is now giving away seems to be directed at primarily at social causes dedicated to race and gender. At least that was the conclusion drawn by the well-known alt-right account to which Musk had responded.
The world’s third-richest person (behind Bezos himself and French luxury titan Bernard Arnault) espouses a strict ideology of meritocracy, and is a loud and vocal critic of identity politics that he believes unjustly redistributes wealth to minorities in pursuit of greater economic equality. (Musk himself grew up in apartheid South Africa with a father who, by his own admission, possessed part of an emerald mine.)
Previously, Musk has claimed to care little if what he says hurts himself or indeed others, shareholders and customers included. “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” he said last May. Few can forget his expletive-filled rant at former X advertiser Disney and its CEO, Bob Iger, in November.
But for whatever reason, Musk has thought twice about condemning Scott for exercising her freedom to donate to charitable causes.