What, Elon Musk is a hypocrite? Who knew?
You may recall that last year, after directly promising that he’d leave up the ElonJet account, which reveals public information regarding the flights of Elon Musk’s private plane, he changed his mind and banned it, along with any reporter who even mentioned the existence of the account anywhere, claiming it was “doxxing.”
A bunch of Elon’s biggest fans suddenly became huge believers that revealing publicly available information about a plane, which does not identify who is on the plane, or give anyone any access to the plane itself, was “doxxing.” It was not.
As everyone other than Elon’s sycophantic fans realized how ridiculous this was, Elon made up a story about how a car carrying his young son was attacked and somehow that was the fault of ElonJet. Later reporting showed this was all nonsense. The supposed confrontation happened a day after the last post from the ElonJet account and 26 miles away from the airport, meaning the account had nothing to do with any of it. Later police reporting suggested the incident was created by Musk’s own security team, not the other individual.
Anyway, it became clear that Musk had a very unique definition of “doxxing,” which was simply revealing information about Elon Musk that Elon Musk doesn’t like. Elon has had little concern about revealing info on others, such as a former top employee of Elon’s, whose home information was posted to Twitter and kept up while Elon posted blatant lies to egg on attacks.
That takes us to late last week, when Elon hopped in a Tesla to livestream a test drive of the latest version of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving,” which has never been full self driving at all (even in the livestream). The grainy footage does not speak well to Musk’s livestreaming ambitions for exTwitter, and left many who follow Musk’s antics supremely unimpressed.
However, at about 27 minutes, Elon tried to bring back a bad joke from a few weeks ago, said he’d punch in Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home address and have the car drive to it. He admits he doesn’t actually know the address (which is… not what he’d suggested a few weeks ago), and asked Google where Zuck lived.
How it comes about is that he’s sitting there parked, talking things over with a colleague, and Elon says that maybe he’ll just put in the address for Tesla’s HQ (technically Tesla’s “official” HQ is in Texas after Elon “left” California in a huff during the pandemic, but a few months back the company shifted most things back to California, which they justify by saying California is the company’s “engineering headquarters.”).
Musk’s colleague cracks some mumbled joke about going “to the fight,” leading Musk to laugh uproariously at what must be the funniest joke he’s ever heard, and asks “where does he live?” in reference to Zuckerberg. They joke back and forth a bit about knocking on his door and inquiring if Zuckerberg would like to “engage in hand to hand combat,” which, again, is the same joke Musk made a few weeks ago.
But then he searches the address on Google and and you can see it pretty clearly on the screen. Then Elon, appears to have a moment of realization that maybe that’s worse than, you know, ElonJet, so he (in typical Elon fashion) makes up some justification for it:
So now we’re… ha ha ha ha ha… at least going to where Google says, you know, Zuckerberg lives… You know, I don’t think… this can’t be considered doxxing if we just Googled it. So. Um. [Loooooooong pause.] So now we’ll just see the drive to where Google thinks he lives.
After a short drive, during which you can see where they’re driving, they get to a house and Elon insists it’s probably not Zuck’s house because he can’t see any security, and so they leave, as Elon again jokes about how Zuck said “name the date” for a fight and Elon says “how about now?”
Either way, the exact meaning of doxxing is certainly disputed. But if you think that ElonJet (revealing public flight info) is doxxing, then you have to think that showing the address Google told you is Zuckerberg’s house is also doxxing. The excuse that “if it’s on Google it’s not” doesn’t make much sense, given that ElonJet info is… also available via Google.
I know, I know, at this point, Elon’s fans will insist that Elon must be right because Elon is always right. But it’s worth highlighting how Elon’s entire schtick is blatant hypocrisy, in which he’ll come up with excuses for suppressing those he dislikes, while insisting that it’s not wrong when he or his friends do it.