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“Few folks on this planet know what it’s to be actually despised,” says Nick Naylor, the tobacco lobbyist on the heart of 2005’s Thank You for Smoking. Almost 20 years after the movie’s launch, Elon Musk, who many don’t understand was one among its government producers, has come to know the sensation nicely.
“I’ve no downside being hated. Hate away,” Musk told Andrew Ross Sorkin throughout final November’s DealBook Summit. His remarks got here as advertisers had been fleeing the Musk-owned social media platform, X, following his endorsement of an antisemitic post claiming Jewish teams have lengthy pushed “hatred against whites.” Till embarrassingly latest days some nonetheless thought of Musk’s political opinions elusive. That’s no longer the case. He now openly feasts on a media weight loss plan of far-right bloggers and acts as customer support on X for the controversial @LibsofTikTok account. However whereas Musk as soon as managed to fly underneath the radar as a largely apolitical tech tycoon, the worldview of Thank You for Smoking appears to have lots in widespread with the Tesla founder’s private POV at this time.
Shortly after eBay acquired PayPal in late 2002 for $1.5 billion, the corporate’s then-COO David Sacks sought to make use of a few of that windfall to break into the film business. He got here throughout the screenplay for Thank You for Smoking, primarily based on a novel by chief speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, Christopher Buckley. It’s the story of a tobacco lobbyist, ultimately performed by Aaron Eckhart, working to get cigarettes into cinemas as stealth product placement, whereas keeping off assaults from the media and the U.S. authorities. Sacks was smitten.
“In some other film the principle character, this spin physician, could be the villain,” he told Forbes in 2006, “however on this film he’s defending our freedom, defending our gadgets in opposition to priggishness.”
Together with 4 others from the so-called PayPal Mafia—Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Mark Woolway—Sacks produced the movie. He was the one one of many group to take a creatively hands-on function. Though Musk’s involvement seems restricted to a monetary stake, a brief cameo, and a extra utilitarian cameo from his private jet, the movie appears proper up the alley of his 2024 incarnation. It’s not as a result of Musk is a fan of smoking (he isn’t—although he did infamously smoke a joint on Joe Rogan’s podcast), and even that he can establish with somebody having an adversarial relationship with a Democratic senator from Vermont, just like the one William H. Macy performs within the movie. No, it’s that all the cynical-bordering-on-nihilistic outlook of Thank You for Smoking performs like one thing Musk would react to proper now with a string of ROFL emojis.
Debate me, you coward
The lobbyist character Nick Naylor is launched within the movie on the set of a chat present, alongside a Well being and Human Companies flak and a 15-year previous smoker recognized with most cancers. Throughout this look, our hero manages to show the tables on the HHS rep, accusing him of hoping that {the teenager} will die in order that his division’s price range will increase—directing the studio viewers’s ire like an orchestra conductor. As Naylor explains to his younger son later, the best way to win an argument is just not by convincing one’s opponent of something—it’s by convincing whoever could also be watching.
Musk seems equally enamored with the spectacle of public debate.
Since buying Twitter in 2022, he has regularly spoken of the platform as “a standard digital town square, the place a variety of beliefs will be debated in a wholesome method.” As tech analyst Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter, although, “The digital city sq. is the web, broadly; Twitter is extra akin to a digital cage match, maybe finest monetised on a pay-per-view foundation.”
As anybody who has ever been in an argument on that platform can attest, it’s someplace between troublesome and inconceivable to steer anybody of something through delayed bouts of level and counterpoint—particularly when coping with somebody who enjoys arguing earlier than an viewers. All that may come of it’s circus theatrics, slightly than enlightenment, which appears to suit Musk simply nice. Off the platform, Musk has aligned himself with “Debate me, you coward” conservatives like Ben Shapiro, who’s at all times spoiling for an argument he can turn into content–and dabbled in some public debating of his personal, challenging former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in 2022. (What he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to final yr was extra of a literal cage match, in order that doesn’t fairly depend.)
All people is an amoral phony with a price ticket
No person believes in something besides the almighty greenback in Thank You for Smoking. Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s cigarette endorsement will be purchased for $25 million, we’re instructed, because of an influence dealer performed by Rob Lowe. The righteously pissed, cancer-ridden Marlboro Man, performed by Sam Elliott, will be bribed to cease from talking out in opposition to Huge Tobacco. And all politicians are inclined to regulatory seize, just like the Washington senator who takes marketing campaign contributions from Boeing, and the Michigan one who accepts them from Ford.
As sultan of spin Nick Naylor places it, “99% of the whole lot accomplished on the earth, good or dangerous, is to pay a mortgage.”
Anybody who isn’t purchased and paid for within the movie is at the least a hypocrite, like Macy’s Vermont Senator who, in the identical day, “held a press convention calling for American tobacco fields to be slashed and burned, then jumped on a non-public jet and flew right down to Farm Help, the place he drove a tractor onstage as he bemoaned the downfall of the American farmer.”
Believing that hypocrisy and bribery run rampant is simply wholesome skepticism combined with widespread sense. However believing that the world solely works this fashion can lead an individual to mistrust the motives of virtually everybody—which seems to be the place Musk has landed. As he frequently bemoans no matter “the woke mind virus” is supposed to be, the super-CEO acts as if anybody advocating for DEI or ESG solely cares about enhancing their own image, and that every one “social justice warriors” are phony virtue-signalers.
In his world, no person stands for something besides their very own personal agenda.
Journalists are the bottom of the low
Whereas few if any characters from Thank You for Smoking emerge wanting like first rate human beings, the true villain of the piece is a journalist performed by Katie Holmes. Her Washington-based reporter initiates a sexual relationship with Naylor whereas researching a narrative about him, after which makes use of off-the-record data to pen a juicy hit piece. She even makes a taunting cellphone name to Naylor after the story runs, simply earlier than he’s unceremoniously fired.
In a film about an business whose product kills over 480,000 people per year, that is the particular person the viewers is most primed to detest.
Peter Thiel might have been the PayPal mafioso whose media grievances surfaced sooner—he was the driving financial force behind Gawker’s downfall—however Musk seems each bit as hostile towards the fourth property. After his takeover of the platform in November 2022, he reportedly fired all but one member of its communications team, and shortly began auto-replying to press inquiries with the poop emoji. He has since antagonized journalists on the platform, taking away the verification badges that confirmed their identities and conferred a way of legitimacy, and throttled the shareability of news links in a number of ways.
Regardless of being a supposed free-speech absolutist who abhors hypocrisy, Musk has additionally suspended reporters for vaguely defined reasons multiple times, sued media organizations for reporting on him in a way that might affect his business, and most not too long ago, broke off a deal with Don Lemon to host a present on X after Lemon challenged him through the host’s inaugural interview.
“I don’t need to reply these questions,” Musk stated at one level during that interview. “I don’t need to reply questions from reporters. Don, the one purpose I’m doing this interview is since you’re on the X platform and also you requested for it. In any other case, I might not do that interview.”
Do your individual analysis
“No matter data there may be, exists. It’s on the market. Individuals will determine for themselves. They need to. It’s not my function to determine for them. It’s morally presumptuous.”
These phrases come from Lowe’s Hollywood agent in Thank You for Smoking–a personality Naylor says he may study lots from–however they might simply as simply be enshrined because the motto of X.
Musk’s insistence that his model of Twitter could be a haven for free speech turned out in apply to imply gutting the content moderation and trust and safety departments. The corporate pledged in January to construct a 100-person “Belief and Security Middle of Excellence” in Austin, however within the meantime, the floodgates are open for hate speech and mis- or disinformation. (Throughout the interview with Lemon, Musk stated of X’s redline on hate speech, “We delete things if they are illegal.”) X additionally remained conspicuously absent from a recent pact among tech companies like Meta, Amazon and Google to place up extra guardrails round deepfakes in a pivotal election yr.
Maybe the explanation Musk desires to threat mass proliferation of pretend information is out of distaste for fact-checkers. Perhaps it actually does stem from a want for unfettered digital liberty. What appears extra seemingly, although, is that he takes trollish glee within the chaos of far-right conspiracy theories–like the one he shared in 2022 in regards to the brutal assault on Paul Pelosi–and fascinating with the people who spread them.
The ethical relativity of preventable deaths
The climax of Thank You for Smoking is a congressional listening to to find out whether or not cigarettes ought to include extra specific warnings on the packaging. (Little did anybody concerned know that cigarette-smoking would change into pariah habits inside twenty years.) As he has accomplished all through the movie, the protagonist Naylor deflects from the deadliness of cigarettes by citing different, less-persecuted merchandise that can be lethal.
“The true demonstrated primary killer in America is ldl cholesterol,” he tells Macy’s Vermont Senator, “and Vermont is clogging this nation’s arteries with Vermont cheddar cheese.”
Though this level may very well be handily refuted by the weak hyperlink on any highschool debate staff, it lands within the movie as an explosive mic-drop. Equally, Musk appeared to assume this similar rhetorical flourish was a case-closer when he and Joe Rogan mentioned COVID deaths in a May 2020 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Neither host nor visitor may appear to grasp why folks had been panicking about COVID-19 when so many different lethal risks lurked throughout them. “Tylenol additionally kills lots of people,” Musk famous.
The SpaceX CEO tends to not speak very a lot about his involvement in Thank You for Smoking today, although he did cryptically tweet the film’s title a pair years in the past. He by no means ended up producing some other mainstream movies, nor did Sacks, who at present hosts the All In podcast and moderated Ron DeSantis’s rocky presidential campaign launch on Twitter Areas. Sacks talked about desirous to do a Thank You spinoff for Rob Lowe’s character in a 2006 interview, however nothing ever got here of it. Almost a decade later, Musk tweeted a jokey pitch for a sequel that might presumably be about local weather change.
Contemplating all Musk has stated and accomplished within the years since, although, and the truth that he now appears to minimize the threat of climate change to keep away from ruffling feathers along with his ideological cohort, it has change into unclear whether or not Musk makes electrical automobiles as a result of he actually cares about carbon emissions or simply to pay the mortgage.
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