Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Musk?

"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" —attributed to King Henry II

"Come see the violence inherent in the leftism." —Me, riffing on Monty Python all the time.

The Verge, ostensibly a tech publication, just put out what I can only describe as an incitement to assassinate SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

"The world’s first trillionaire is a killer," TC Sottek's headline screams, whose "empire of wealth is built on suffering."

"While his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books," the screed continues, "one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully."

Italics in the original, because otherwise some lefty freakazoid with a rifle might not get the subtle shout-out to assassinate the man who gave the world cheap access to space, universal high-speed internet access, the first mass-produced electric vehicles, and Neuralink brain implants for the disabled.

More from the execrable author of The Verge's call-to-hit piece:

In the months that followed, public health models would indicate Musk was a killer, at a far greater scale than any Coen brothers villain. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols projected over 780,000 deaths — mostly of children, many of infants — due to the Trump administration’s early-2025 USAID cuts, caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. These deaths were widely predicted from the beginning, a direct, known, and undeniable consequence of DOGE’s actions. We don’t know the precise number of deaths, but multiple experts working on identifying the scale of the tragedy have generally agreed it’s in the hundreds of thousands.

Generally agreed, eh? Where are these hundreds of thousands of dead bodies? I feel exactly unlike the little boy from The Sixth Sense: I don't see dead people.

Sottek, it seems, is in a hurry to see at least one dead person. What other conclusion are readers supposed to draw — particularly readers who might be unhinged in the same way as Tyler James Robinson or Thomas Crooks — when Sottek uses language like this about Musk:

His abuse of the world is deadly serious.
Public health models would indicate Musk was a killer.
Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss.
The guy is also a huge racist.
An agency isn’t more efficient if it doesn’t exist; it’s simply been murdered.
He probably shouldn’t even be let within 500 feet of a school.

Those are all direct quotes. You can read the whole thing here, if you're so inclined.

The Verge is the same site that, back in April, insisted that the Artemis moon base project is "legally dubious," before getting Community Noted into oblivion on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Reporter Georgina Torbet quoted a couple of lefty space "experts" without bothering to quote the actual Outer Space Treaty before concluding that "it’s hard not to draw a parallel between this approach and the history of land grabs across the American West in the 19th century."

No, it really isn't hard at all, and the Community Note on X was brutal.

I don't need to remind you who owns X, do I? Or who turned it into a more-or-less free speech platform, effectively ending the Left's monopoly stranglehold on permissible thought?

The Verge is owned by Vox Media, cofounded by hardcore lefty Markos Moulitsas.

And Another Thing: Company policy won't let me post links to free archive versions of paywalled content, but I did use one of those archive sites to read Torbet's full article. It reads like a stupid person's take on space and space law, written for stupid people. I'm old enough to remember when The Verge at least pretended to be highbrow.

Still, it's one thing for a lowly Verge reporter like Torbet to effectively simp for Communist China and Russia against the Artemis program, and quite another for a Verge Senior Editor like Sottek to signal every crazy person in America that, and I quote, "the world needs saving from" Elon Musk.

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Steve launched VodkaPundit on a well-planned whim in 2002, and has been with PJ Media since its launch in 2005. He served as one of the hosts of PJTV, a pioneer in internet broadcasting. He also cohosts "Right Angle" with Bill Whittle and Scott Ott at BillWhittle.com. He lives with his wife and sons in the wooded hills of Monument, Colorado, where he enjoys the occasional adult beverage.

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