MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough compared Twitter CEO Elon Musk to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a Monday segment of “Morning Joe.”
Scarborough compared Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, arguing both men acted against their own self-interests. He and CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin criticized Musk for his Sunday call to prosecute White House senior medical adviser Anthony Fauci.
“There’s something almost irrational to me about what’s happening here, both because you would think that advertisers wouldn’t want to be around this, and you think about … last night, [Musk] was at the Chappelle concert last night in San Francisco, he gets booed on the stage, and you think about all the people who may not want to buy Teslas, genuinely and literally, because of some of this … I wish I could make sense of it, but I’m struggling,” Sorkin said.
“I’m with you,” Scarborough replied. “It’s like when I’m looking at countries and how they react. Like I never thought, at the end of the day, that Putin would be illogical enough to go into Ukraine. He did, right? And he keeps taking the country down a rathole, and so it is disconcerting, because he’s acting everyday against Russia’s own self-interest. And in a much smaller area, you have a billionaire, the richest guy in the world, he can afford to lose $44 billion, but again, what’s the logic in playing to a small slice of conspiracy theorists? Who’s he playing to? … I don’t get it.”
Musk has become a divisive figure since his purchase and takeover of Twitter in October, in which he reinstated former President Donald Trump’s permanently banned account and dissolved the platform’s policy against alleged COVID-19 misinformation. Left-wingers have criticized reports of an alleged uptick in hateful speech and misinformation on Twitter, which has led prominent celebrities to depart the platform. (RELATED: Joy Reid Says Elon Musk ‘Misses The Old South Africa Of The ’80’s’)
Apart from his call to prosecute Fauci, the Twitter CEO opened an investigation known as the “Twitter Files” in December. The “Twitter Files” are probing former Twitter executives’ efforts to suppress the New York Post’s 2020 report on the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as the suspension of Trump’s account and those belonging to other prominent conservatives.