Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix. His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism, and this week his AI company sued the state of Minnesota to block a law targeting nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.
The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now, they have to live with it.
A mild interview lit the fuse
A lot of the latest escalation traces back to one sit-down.
On July 23, The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, interviewed Musk. It wasn’t a hit job. There was no Epstein question. She calmly pushed back on his claims about Europe, telling him “London is a much safer city than any city in the United States” and that violent crime in the UK is coming down. She pointed out that he’d painted the UK as “overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants,” with “rape on every corner,” despite not having visited in years.
