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We'll see who wins. They way your reply is written, it's ambiguous, to my readings at least, who you are saying has hurt whos credibility. I think you mean Elon hurt the NYT, but frankly it goes both ways. To the sorts of people like my in-laws who swear by neoliberal propaganda, Elon hurt himself by opposing the neoliberal media establishment. Elon's "approval rating" has been dropping. Is that even a real thing? Does it matter? Who knows! But you don't goto war with the neoliberal media establishment and come out unscathed.
I'm reminded when Trump went to war with the machine. Everyone, myself included, loved how Trump got the media to beclown themselves. Expose their naked hypocrisy. And yet at the end of the day, most of his policies were stymied, and they still made him a one term president. In all the ways that mattered, they won. Credibility be damned.
It's hard for me to expect this fight with Elon to go much different. The media will build this unquestionable narrative that Elon has gone insane, that Twitter is harming people, it will be taken off the app store, he'll declare bankruptcy, he'll lose controlling interest in SpaceX and Tesla, and the neoliberal establishment will take them over and shit them up same as they have everything else. That they will have further burned their credibility among non-NPCs doesn't matter. A boot on your face does not require you to believe in it's moral integrity.
The media won against Trump in the end, but it cost them some amount. If they win against Elon, it will cost even more. Eventually they won't have enough left to burn.
With numerous assists from Trump himself, who repeatedly made life for his supporters much harder than it had to be.
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