Elon Musk Wants To 'Gawker' Mickey Mouse To Death

The existence of billionaires is a policy failure, Exhibit 44 billion

In 2007, the Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag outed tech billionaire Peter Thiel in a column titled "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." Six years later, Thiel financed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Valleywag’s parent company, Gawker Media, after the site published a video of the wrestler having sex with his friend’s wife. The $150 million verdict bankrupted the company and gave rise to the term “Gawker” as a verb.

Outing people is shit, of course. And Gawker editor AJ Daulerio testifying in deposition that he’d air the sex tape of any celebrity over the age of four probably didn’t help either. But shorn of its nastier aspects, Gawker died because a billionaire threw money at lawyers to punish a media company for saying true things about him. And, in that sense, it’s become a model for a whole industry of garbage litigation.

There’s no greater fan of this maneuver than Elon Musk, the world’s richest ketamine aficionado and self-described “free speech absolutist.”

In 2022, Musk bought the most important social media platform on earth and turned it into a festering fever swamp of Nazis and trolls. Thanks to his increasingly erratic public behavior and open embrace of white nationalism, advertisers were already edging toward the door by 2023, when a series of articles appeared, demonstrating that the site was monetizing racist and antisemitic content. Naturally Musk and his team swung into action to make sure this never happened a—

JUST KIDDING.

What actually happened was that Twitter (you cannot make me call it “X”) sued a non-profit and a small media company for saying mean, true things about the company in an effort to shut them up.

In July, Twitter filed a breach of contract claim against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) alleging that the media watchdog improperly used a borrowed password to access a third-party vendor’s site. The vendor data formed the basis of CCDH’s calculation of the millions of dollars Twitter reaped when it let incendiary figures like Andrew Tate and Andrew Anglin back on the platform. Twitter does not deny that it profits from posts by the indicted sex trafficker and the Neo-Nazi, but the company demands “at least tens of millions of dollars” from CCDH to compensate it for advertiser revenue lost as a result of the article.

CCDH moved to dismiss the case as a SLAPP suit — i.e. a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

“X Corp.’s grievance is not that the CCDH Defendants gathered public data in violation of obscure (and largely imagined) contract terms, but that they criticized X Corp. (forcefully) to the public,” the non-profit alleged in its motion. “In essence, X Corp. seeks to dodge the requirements that the First Amendment imposes on defamation claims by asserting other claims that are no less entwined with the CCDH Defendants’ speech.”

That motion is still pending, but, in the meantime, Twitter sued Media Matters for America (MMFA) for demonstrating that major companies might find their ads next to explicitly Nazi content — something CEO Linda Yaccarino had assured them could never happen. Musk went apeshit, promising to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit . . . the split second court opens on Monday” against MMFA’s “board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them.”

Twitter did indeed file a lawsuit the next day, although it once again failed to deny the truth of what had been reported. Nevertheless, it accused the non-profit of interference with contract, business disparagement, and interference with prospective economic advantage. The case was docketed in the Fort Worth Division of the Northern District of Texas, where none of the parties reside, on the theory that lots of people in Texas use Twitter, and you can access MMFA’s website from Texas, ipso facto venue is appropriate there. By this logic, venue would be appropriate in literally any federal court in America, but, if Twitter had filed in California (where it lives) or Maryland/DC (where MMFA lives), it wouldn’t have been able to get Judge Reed O’Connor, a jurist so Trump-y that he might not dismiss this turkey out of hand.

Last week, MMFA and reporter Eric Hananoki, also a named defendant, moved to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, improper venue, and failure to state a claim.

“It is blackletter law that a statement made on a passive website—one that just posts information that people can see—cannot support specific jurisdiction in Texas simply because readers in Texas could access the statement as easily as readers in other states,” they argued, noting that MMFA’s website doesn’t even have a comment section. They also got some digs in at the extremely sloppy complaint, which alleges that MMFA interfered with and caused breaches of contract without bothering to allege that any such contract existed. Indeed, advertisers were under no contractual obligation to continue buying ads on Twitter. There’s also the small matter that, under Texas law, business disparagement requires malice as to the falsehood of the statements, something Twitter does not and indeed cannot allege.

“Because X’s own pleadings admit that the gist of the reporting is substantially true—even if X finds it to be unpleasant or objectionable, the business disparagement claim must be dismissed,’’ MMFA argues, adding, “Given that X does not plausibly allege that Defendants’ statements were false, it necessarily follows that X cannot plausibly allege that Defendants ‘knew [their] statements were false.’”

TL, DR? This complaint is bullshit, and maybe charging into the courthouse with a half-baked lawsuit because the mad king demands retribution is a dumb legal strategy.

And speaking of dumb …

Faced with an exodus of advertisers, Musk did what any normal company owner would do: He bellied up to the microphone and shouted GO FUCK YOURSELF.

“If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” he vamped to New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin back in November.

“Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is,” he repeated proudly, adding, “Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience.”

This last was a special shoutout to Bob Iger, the legendary CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which had just yanked its ads from Twitter after Musk replied “You have said the actual truth” to a poster who accused “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred against whites.”

Musk has since proved his philosemitic bona fides by visiting the former Auschwitz concentration camp with Ben Shapiro and attending a multimedia presentation on Tweets that could have prevented the Holocaust if only Twitter had been invented in 1939. Yes, for real.

With that box checked, he returned to the important business of making Disney pay. First he removed the Disney+ icon from the in-car entertainment platform in Tesla vehicles. Then he went looking for someone to file harassing litigation against the “woke” entertainment company.

Enter Gina Carano, a former star of the “Mandalorian,” a “Star Wars” spinoff franchise, who was axed in early 2021 after a series of inflammatory social media posts wherein she mocked trans people, flogged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and whined about public health restrictions.

One particularly offensive (now deleted) post showed a black and white picture of a woman in her underwear being chased down the street and beaten with the caption, “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realise that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbours hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

Likening American conservatives to Jews in Nazi Germany did not endear her to Disney or Lucasfilms, which put out a statement on February 10, 2021 saying “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

It did, however, endear her to Elon Musk, for whatever reason, and so he picked her to star as his own personal Grogu puppet in a trollsuit against the Woke Empire.

Take that, Bob!

Last week the actress sued Disney and Lucasfilms, alleging that she’d been illegally terminated in 2021. After two years wandering in the wilderness, starring in such cinemagrift masterworks as “My Son Hunter” — distributed by Breitbart News, of course! — she demanded to be let back into the evil mainstream fold and restored to her former glory as a Disney star.

The lawsuit, which was designed to get headlines first and recover later (or probably never), begins thusly:

A short time ago in a galaxy not so far away, Defendants made it clear that only one orthodoxy in thought, speech, or action was acceptable in their empire, and that those who dared to question or failed to fully comply would not be tolerated. And so it was with Carano. After two highly acclaimed seasons on The Mandalorian as Rebel ranger Cara Dune, Carano was terminated from her role as swiftly as her character’s peaceful home planet of Alderaan had been destroyed by the Death Star in an earlier Star Wars film. And all this because she dared voice her own opinions, on social media platforms and elsewhere, and stood up to the online bully mob who demanded her compliance with their extreme progressive ideology.

Defendants’ wrath over their employees’ social media posts also differed depending on sex. Even though “the Force is female,” Defendants chose to target a woman while looking the other way when it came to men.

The complaint spends several pages showing mean tweets by internet randos directed toward Carano, followed by an admission that she had completed her existing contract with Disney in 2020, and had been told by the director that she would star in upcoming productions — a tacit concession that she had no extant contract with the studio at the time it decided to stop working with her.

Nevertheless, she alleges wrongful discharge and refusal to hire, along with sex discrimination, because Disney didn’t fire her male co-stars Mark Hamill and Pedro Pascal for their pro-trans tweets. This last contention is rather undercut by whining that Disney supported Krystina Arielle, the Black, female host of an official fan series dedicated to hyping the new “Star Wars” offerings, when she faced online harassment for her own social media posts.

Betting against Disney’s lawyers is generally a losing proposition, although Carano may be entitled to recovery, since California law protects employees who engage in political speech. She’s certainly not entitled to be hired back to play Cara Dune, as her lawsuit demands. But, if you’re Musk, the publicity around the case is the win itself.

“Please let us know if you would like to join the lawsuit against Disney,” he tweeted, amplifying Carano’s claims. And while he probably knows he’s not going to Gawker the House of Mouse out of existence, he can subsidize vexatious claims while using his giant platform to hurl insults at it.

The process is the punishment, and, for Elon Musk, the punishment is the point.

[X Corp v. MMFA / X Corp v. CCDH / Carano v. Disney]