MSNBC just devoted an entire segment on their weekend show to calling Elon Musk a "clown" who "bought" the 2024 election for Donald Trump, and honestly, it was the most entertaining thing the network has aired in years — mostly because the meltdown was completely involuntary.
Imagine getting paid to sit on national television — and I use the word "national" loosely given their viewership — and whine about a guy who's saved American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. That takes talent.
The segment aired on MSNBC's "The Weekend," co-hosted by Eugene Daniels and Jonathan Capehart, with University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers as their guest star hatchet man. Wolfers, who also hosts something called the "Platypus Economics" podcast — and no, I'm not making that up — delivered the headline sound bite: "Musk is a clown." He also claimed Musk's $250 million investment in the 2024 election was "almost certainly enough to win Donald Trump the election."
Scroll ahead to the 1:22 minute mark so you don't have to sit through all of MSNBC's propaganda...
Let's do the math MSNBC won't. Trump won by 230,000 votes across swing states. Wolfers himself said that works out to needing to flip roughly 115,000 voters — about $1,000 per vote if you assume every single dollar Musk spent personally changed a mind. Then he made the laughable claim that Musk could theoretically "buy" 3,999 more elections.
Right. And I could theoretically dunk on LeBron if gravity worked differently.
But it got better. Co-host Eugene Daniels, visibly agitated, said the quiet part out loud: "You just made me very angry talking about that actually. Not at you, but at our country." Angry at the country. Let that marinate. An MSNBC host is mad at America because 77 million people voted for Trump and a billionaire had the audacity to support him.
Daniels then pivoted to complaining that SpaceX made Musk a trillionaire by "taking business that used to be done by the federal government." In other words, Musk did the job faster, cheaper, and better than the government — saving NASA an estimated $20 to $30 billion — and that's somehow the problem. SpaceX's NASDAQ debut valued the company at $2 trillion, and 4,400 SpaceX employees became millionaires through the IPO. But sure, let's be mad about it.
Capehart chimed in with his own contribution, lamenting "the yawning gap between the wealthy and the rest of us." Capehart makes a seven-figure salary at a cable news network. The self-awareness is breathtaking.
Here's what MSNBC conveniently left out of their little tantrum: Kamala Harris's campaign spent $2 billion — roughly $500 million more than Trump's $1.5 billion. So who was really trying to "buy" the election? The guy who spent $250 million supporting the winner, or the machine that burned through $2 billion and still lost?
Math was never their strong suit.
Meanwhile, as NewsBusters reported, the panelists trotted out wealth inequality stats — the top 1% holding 31% of wealth versus the bottom 90% at 32.6% — as if Musk personally caused that gap by building electric cars and rockets. They ignored the 22,000 SpaceX employees estimated to have gained over $100,000 each. Wealth creation is only evil when the wrong people do it.
The real punchline here isn't anything Wolfers or Daniels or Capehart said. It's that MSNBC's weekend programming draws fewer viewers than a decent YouTube cooking channel, and they're calling the world's richest man — a guy who literally sends rockets to space — a "clown."
With 4.2% inflation and 60% of Americans saying the economy is getting worse, maybe the network that can't crack cable's top 20 should worry less about Elon Musk and more about why nobody's watching.
