Two weeks ago I was in a large policy forum discussing Elon Musk’s long standing connections to China and Russia, when someone asked me “is this known publicly?”

“Yes” I said, of course knowing at the same time that some people’s definition of public is different than others.

Anyway, in case you’ve been asleep for the past five years, this is as public as it gets:

Elon Musk has stayed unusually silent after The Wall Street Journal revealed Thursday night that the tech CEO has been speaking regularly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The newspaper reported that Musk has corresponded with Putin since 2022, discussing personal topics, business, and geopolitical tensions. Putin even made a request of Musk in one conversation: to refrain from setting up his satellite internet service, Starlink, over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Musk has been tweeting around the clock since the story broke at 9 p.m. EST Thursday, but has not mentioned the Journal article once, mostly sticking to right-wing conspiracies and promotion of Donald Trump. According to the Journal, Musk not only had conversations with Putin, but with other high-ranking Kremlin officials as well. He even faced “implicit threats against him,” one source said.

It has become increasingly clear that Russia bought Twitter by using Elon Musk as their puppet. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been discussed enough before now.

Elon Musk’s secret talks with Putin ramped up during his Twitter takeover. […] Russia’s KGB, and its successor agency the FSB have, for decades, been interested in controlling media narratives and reaching as many people as possible with anti-Western or pro-Kremlin messages. The conversations between Musk and Putin, who once ran the KGB, reportedly occurred as Musk was in the midst of a leveraged buyout and takeover of Twitter.

Did I say the past five years? Oops, maybe that isn’t as public yet as these types of stories popping up lately.

“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous [xTwitter] persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

Black insurrectionist on xTwitter is a white guy? Color me surprised.

At this point, xTwitter seems primarily to be a platform funded by Russia and run by FSB.

Researchers at ISD found that Russian disinformation agents exploited weak content moderation on U.S.-owned social media platforms such as X to spread their content far and wide. Before it was purchased and renamed by Elon Musk, the platform once known as Twitter required labels on content from authoritarian state media. Musk rescinded that rule and gutted the platform’s content moderation efforts, leading to a surge in foreign propaganda, hate speech and extremist recruitment.

As one pundit put it, Elon Musk has been selling out America and destroying democracy for less than the cost of Russia replacing their lame aircraft carrier.

Security experts in the EU showed me their Twitter feeds are flooded with pro-Trump fascist campaign messages sent by Elon Musk himself… as if to expose not just American national security failures but the global threat.

For years the Tesla CEO has deceptively marketed his cars as ready for driverless and, as they failed, asked his victims for increased advance fees to achieve his promises of the future.

And now the Tesla CEO has just officially warned his victims that they will never get the driverless features he promised them. It turns out, unfortunately still surprising some, that his advance fee fraud schemes were always in fact… fraud.

After a disappointing earnings call, the CEO softly landed the awful truth beneath years of unaccountable lies.

We are not 100 percent sure. HW4 [a hard pivot made last year, admitting failure of earlier versions] has several times the capability of HW3. It’s easier to get things to work on HW4 and it takes a lot of efforts to squeeze that into HW3. There is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD.

Talk about an understatement. The CEO has some doubt that his cars can ever achieve the safety level that allows for driverless?

This is the man who had said if anyone ever criticized Tesla for safety issues, he would accuse them of killing people.

That’s not an exaggeration or a misquote. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk took an aggressive stance against critics of his company’s autonomous driving technology, making two notable declarations. In 2016, he claimed that those who criticized Tesla’s technical approach were directly responsible for causing deaths. He escalated this position in 2018, arguing that any criticism of Tesla’s driverless technology would result in fatalities by eroding public trust in autonomous vehicles and deterring adoption.

Let me be even more clear.

In this new 2024 earnings call the Tesla CEO claimed that FSD will somehow be safer than a human by Q2 2025. The future! Got that?

Ok, now watch his investor call in 2016 when he coldly declared that Tesla had already surpassed this milestone.

Mission accomplished 2016.

So here he is, eight years later, being critical of all the HW3 on the roads like nobody yet should trust it… after arguing that such criticism will kill people.

Who’s the real killer, by a real measure of intentionally misleading people? The data speaks for itself, with Tesla clearly being far less safe than any other brand.

Also what is this nonsense about it being easier to work with HW4? Is the Tesla motto now that they can’t work on the hard things?

Driverless is known for being one of the hardest problems in transit to solve. The CEO is admitting (albeit subtlely) his company will never actually solve it — as they can only work on the easy things.

Futurism now literally refers to Tesla as an “astonishing screwup.” That’s a funny way to spell F-R-A-U-D.

Police say this Tesla had right of way when it failed to avoid a fatal crash.

A two-car collision in the center of Murphy killed a passenger in one of the vehicles, police said. Lt. Adana Barber said police and fire department units responded at 9:01 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, to a major accident at the intersection of FM 544 and Murphy Road. “A silver Nissan had failed to yield right-of-way to a black Tesla,” Barber said. “The passenger of the Nissan was pronounced deceased at the scene.”

At this point, one might wonder why we read about Indian families so frequently in the news mourning their losses to Tesla.

Four people are dead and another is in hospital after a Tesla driving through downtown Toronto at a high rate of speed crashed into a guardrail and struck a concrete pillar on Lake Shore Boulevard.

It happened in the eastbound lanes of the busy road, east of Cherry Street, shortly before 12:15 a.m.

“The vehicle lost control, struck a guardrail and then struck a concrete pillar. Upon impact, the vehicle then caught fire,” Duty Inspector Phillip Sinclair told reporters Thursday morning.

Apparently some people still haven’t got the memo that Tesla are such poor quality they become death traps. Many Indian upwardly mobile families apparently fall victim to targeted fraud, buying into a false privilege ticket that ends up killing them.

One person survived the crash, thanks to bystanders with a metal pole who rushed to smash a window after the doors failed to open. Tesla has a long-standing door release defect that causes many of its crash victims to be burned to death while trapped inside.