Ian Hislop’s unfiltered take on Elon Musk | LBC

I mean it's almost impossible to avoid him and he has enormous power because of um uh his a his money and B his reach to people who um have been persuaded over the last 5 years or so that the mainstream media hasn't covered any stories and that the only people who've noticed anything happening in the world are people sitting in their bedrooms um sending messages to each other it's an amazing feat of deception um and I think we should have got on to him early on when he quite gratuitously called someone who was trying to

help those boys in Thailand a pedophile an American cour let him off the pedo guy um and uh I think he thought from then on I can say anything I like it doesn't have to be true it's better if it's not true and no one will stop me and that's what's happened uh we've seen lots and lots of powerful media figures over the the the decades and centuries probably the ramir and the murdocks and so forth but we have never had somebody like this who is tweeting speaking in his own name several times a day

many times a night no I mean and uh it's not merely that he's a sort of a classic um uh social media adolescent who hasn't grown up I mean the temper tantrums the lack of responsibility yeah I mean the the whole business was set up by a group of ungrown up men who are now um running companies in their own image um and to see them now sucking up to Trump when they were quite happy not to suck up to him before um p early on the grounds that um this is to their commercial Advantage

they have no morality at all literally none and if we having this conversation 48 hours ago we would have said well in the end it's only one organization it's only one part of social media it's only X but since then zukerberg who is Facebook and Instagram and threads um has come and done exactly the same thing saying he is going to mimic musk in effect yes and I mean the idea that you you have this vastly powerful organization and uh about 5 minutes ago it was very important for you to have moderators and fact Checkers

and now because you want to suck up to Trump you don't um is appalling and Bezos is exactly the same his newspaper in the States has just pulled a cartoon you can see where I'm coming from here in which all the the tech Bros are seen worshiping at The Shrine of trump and then the newspaper uh oh no we can't publish this um it's repetitive it's boring we don't want to publish this I mean who do who do they think they're kidding we were in a sort of an era of total fuity total ferity and

as somebody you know who has lots of connections with proper investigative journalists just your Reflections on the actual grooming Scandal itself this is something that's been covered what for 10 15 years by those prepared to look yes and you know the idea that the mainstream media had no idea about this the story broke on the front page of the times um not exactly the most obscure publication in Britain Andrew norford very who won lots of awards for it and yeah he won the foot award he won the um uh he won the allwell prize um

and in the citation it said this is amazing this has given rise to public inquiries prosecutions and whatever it it is totally totally untrue to suggest that there have been no inquiries into this we had a historic um sexual abuse inquiry which has reported um the fact that the previous government managed not to implement any of its recommendations might be the subject for people to get exercised about and this is you know what poor old Jess Phillips has said is is is can we do something can we not have another inquiry this is a real

problem for everyone involved in journalism and involved in politics you either um suck up to musk um or you're abused by musk neither of these things are terribly attractive he is already tweeting approvingly what KY badeck has been saying in the House of Commons a couple of hours ago for instance so this goes on and on yes I was very excited that he's supporting k or not cuz that means presumably by the time most people hear this he'll have attct her um it is the only positive sign is that the ridiculous musk farage um uh

falling out may be a a preview of a a musk Trump falling out well I I think that's the only possibility is that he is going to blow up possibly I mean he's got JD Vance to contend with who also thinks that he's vice president and that's going to be an interesting one to watch yes and and and I I think musk has just noticed that quite a lot of Maga supporters don't like immigrants including ones from South Africa and India um and and the rest of the tech boys uh they don't want these visas

to go through and they're racist in a very particular way um which isn't entirely to musk's um uh uh taste so we can't ignore him we can't mimic him we can only sit him out I think you either sit him out or refuse to take him seriously which I think is you know unsurprising for me is the best idea I mean there's a cartoon in this week's private eye in which there's a man talking to someone dressed in full SS regalia and the um the SS man is saying look you can't just call everyone who

disagrees with you a fascist I mean this is going to be a problem for you however Ian which is that musk is such a grotesque and weird figure and produces so much material that you're going your entire publication is going to be Musk from beginning to end if you're not careful yeah well then we tell Telegraph um very good no I'm I'm I'm hoping that what one of my problems is I've been editor a long time and in the old days we used to break stories and nowadays we spend half the time pointing out stories

that aren't true so when you get musk pretending to be a champion of women um and young girls and then he calls Jess Phillips an evil witch I mean how's that on a scale of many evil misogyny is that is that part of it that's straight back to the ducking store it's gross yeah grotesque he is riddled with contradictions and at some point I am hoping that even his followers will begin to notice that from sentence to sentence he makes no sense Ian I think it's almost exactly six months that we sat around this table

discussing the election result six months on your view about how's it gone uh not not so well would be an understatement no I mean they they've done very badly and that's partly why all this stuff is blowing up now to be fair I mean uh the Telegraph and the mail and the express and various other parts of the media literally said on day one well starma should resign it's a disaster and they said it on day two and theyve literally said it every day since now there is some truth in the fact that he hasn't

done very well but the overwhelming negative response to literally everything um has been extraordinary um uh I think they two things he's the the politics is is beyond me I'd get you to explain that um well all I was say is we were saying earlier in the show today that there simply isn't enough money you know they they can't raise taxes anymore they can't borrow anymore the bond markets are after them and every single public service is demanding very very angrily more spending it is impossible at the moment yeah I mean it's an incredible bind

and I think if you come in saying I'm not going to raise taxes it's a real problem and this is again the a legacy of populism if you tell people um you can have whatever you like and um we won't have to pay for it then the other parties who want to say well you can have some of what you want but we will have to pay for it look pathetic and mey mouthed um I me it's extraordinary that they won but um the the manifesto really made them very very limited in terms of what

they could do and suddenly saying look we haven't got any money we're going to have to put taxes up people don't like it they won by hamstringing themselves which is a novel strategy um let me ask you since you're here about you've got a play coming on I think in the West End called The Autobiography of a cad yes this is this is a a 1930s book which um we've adapted which is about populism and about the 30s which you may remember it it didn't go so well