“In the history of spaceflight, only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the earth — the United States, Russia, China, and Elon Musk.”
That’s how Scott Pelley, a CBS correspondent, introduced Musk for a “60 Minutes” segment in 2012. Musk was portrayed as a wealthy big dreamer and an even bigger disrupter who silences his doubters by achieving what others believed impossible.
The segment was so gushy, it could have been a Musk infomercial.
Nearly 13 years later on the same news program, Pelley was again talking about Musk — not as a visionary but as the man who, with President Trump’s invitation, has infiltrated the government, engineered unjustified mass firings of federal workers, and commandeered access to sensitive data belonging to nearly every American.
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This time, Musk did not respond to Pelley’s request for an interview. But he had a lot to say about “60 Minutes” after the Feb. 16 segment aired.
“60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X to his more than 218 million followers. “They deserve a long prison sentence.”
Musk was referring to the false right-wing talking point that CBS favorably doctored an interview last fall with then vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
In his first term, Trump echoed Russian dictator Joseph Stalin when he branded the media “the enemy of the people.” Now Musk is parroting Trump by declaring that journalists belong behind bars.
Trump and Musk have this in common: They are both, to an extent, media-made creations. In love with the sound of their own voices, they each burnished their public reputations and personas in numerous print and television interviews that often made them seem more interesting or brilliant than they actually are.
In Trump’s case, that includes an infamous New York Post cover story in the 1990s with Marla Maples, who became wife No. 2, supposedly saying that sex with Trump was “the best” she ever had. Years later, the reporter who wrote the story said it might have been Trump himself impersonating Maples’s voice.
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Both Musk and Trump measure the media’s value by the amount of hagiographic copy or airtime afforded to them. But they’re coiled to strike when a story separates their mendacious, self-serving narrative from the truth.
During Trump’s first term, he took glee in ginning up anger against the media at his rallies, where his supporters regularly jeered reporters. Those he mentioned by name were deluged with online harassment and death threats. Some Trump followers wore T-shirts with the words “Rope. Tree Journalist. Some Assembly Required.”
Nothing has changed with Trump’s return to the White House. He’s attacking every institution to reshape the government and nation in his own image. What’s different is the presence of Musk, who not only amplifies Trump’s rage but has more than a few of his own manufactured grievances with the media.
Of course, that does not include Fox News, where the two men did a chummy sit-down interview with a typically compliant Sean Hannity only two days after the “60 Minutes” piece aired.
The point, beyond trying to show in the most superficial way that Trump isn’t sick of Musk, was to assail the media’s coverage of the elected president being overshadowed by the billionaire’s domineering and probably illegal tactics.
Hannity gave Musk and Trump more than 30 minutes to whine about the “horrible” people in the “bad” and “dishonest” media. But it’s also a setup for the ways that this destructive duo will attempt to restrict and control coverage.
As of this writing, the Associated Press remains barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One for its proper usage of Gulf of Mexico instead of Trump’s made-up “Gulf of America.” It’s a warning to other journalists to bend to Trump’s will or lose access.
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It won’t stop there. Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission, is investigating NPR and PBS, and Musk keeps making noises about defunding them. Trump has never made a secret of his desire to strip TV networks of their broadcast licenses if their coverage has displeased him.
Trump and Musk will continue to threaten journalists with jail and further delegitimize the beleaguered profession. What they want the media to be is the kind of propaganda machine that’s anathema to democracy but remains a crucial weapon for authoritarians executing a coup — including the two presidents, one elected, one not, currently occupying the White House.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.
