Elon Musk v Mishal Husain = Frost v Nixon
The BBC presenter-turned-Bloomberg editor made news. It has largely been ignored.
Imagine if David Frost had gotten Richard Nixon - or at least Haldeman or Ehrlichman - to sit for an interview in the middle of Watergate. Well, yesterday the equivalent happened at the Bloomberg-organised Qatar Economic Forum.
First, context.
Musk was beaming in remotely from Austin to the event in Doha. These events, particularly when hosted in gleaming Gulf cities, are not typically news-making affairs. Having worked in the region, these are usually events that are expected to be conducted with the precision of a Swiss watch and about as exciting. 1
When these events do make actual news, not a tightly-choreographed narrative everyone knows the ending of before it even starts, the news is not usually planned.
When Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted his “Davos in the Desert” Future Investment Initiative event in 2018, it was the circumstances surrounding the grisly murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that drove coverage - and largely on what CEOs had decided to skip the event.
Even COP28 in Dubai offered a masterclass in a highly-orchestrated communications. News-making encounters between its president, Dr Sultan al-Jaber, with former Irish president Mary Robinson, and a notable interview with the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, happened outside the confines of the conference itself.
Qatar, where I lived for a bit and worked for a nonprofit, to some extent fits the same mould. In the sense, like its neighbours, that it has been hugely and rapidly enriched by oil and, more significantly, natural gas deposits - and resulting social and political tensions that are usually just below the surface2.
The lazy, ignorant, and frankly racist, framing too many US and UK commentators and news outlets (from across the spectrum) have leaned on when covering the region - especially in light of Trump’s “get that bag” collections tour last week - not only does no credit to those using it who should know better, it obscures the real differences.
Tiny Qatar - half the size of Wales and with just about 300,000 citizens - has long been an outlier in the region. Willing to be defiantly awkward and sometimes arrogant, especially supporting its Al-Jazeera news outlet as a place where critics of neighbouring regimes could get airtime, the sole Arab country that flew missions in Libya supporting Western intervention there, its natural gas field shared with neighbouring Iran, a significant Shi’a minority, both the country that - long before the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ - opened economic ties with Israel and yet playing host to the political leadership of Hamas. For its heterodoxy and despite hosting an enormous US air base, at one point hosting the US military’s CENTCOM regional command and from which US combat missions into Iraq were flown in 2003, blockaded in 2017 by its neighbours and hours away from invasion only halted by a last-minute intervention by US Secretary of State (and former oil major CEO) Rex Tillerson.
That Qatar would see one of its marquee annual events be the setting for a showdown between the world’s richest man and a dogged but unflappable interviewer was still shocking, if not completely surprising. One thing it was not, was unplanned.
Former BBC presenter Mishal Husain, now an editor with Bloomberg, did not come into this interview without a plan.
“Tesla is an incredibly aspirational brand. People identified with it saw it at being at the forefront of the climate crisis. And now people are driving around with stickers in their cars saying, ‘I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy’.”
Not even 3 minutes in, after a seemingly anodyne opening question that sounded empathetic with his Elon’s busy schedule, you can see the barely-suppressed shock (later turning to near-rage) when Musk is asked about Tesla:
Husain: if we start with Tesla, the company has suffered in recent months, what you've called ‘blow back’3.
So what is your plan for turning that around the declining sales picture and by what stage do you think you're going to be able to turn it around?
Musk: Oh, it's already turned around.
Husain: Give me some evidence for that. I've just been looking at the sales figures for Europe in April, which show very significant declines in the big markets.
Musk: Uh, Europe is our weakest market. We're strong everywhere else. Um, so, uh, now our sales are, are doing, doing well at this point. Um, we don't anticipate any, any meaningful sales shortfall and, um, the, I, you know, the, obviously the stock market recognizes that since we're now back over a trillion dollars in market cap.
So, um, clearly the market is, uh, aware of the situation. So it's, it's already turned around,
Husain: but sales still down compared to this time last year.
Musk: In Europe.
Husain: In Europe, okay.
Musk: but that, but that's, that's true of, of all manufacturers. There's no exceptions.
[cross-talk]
Husain: Okay, but you would acknowledge, wouldn't you, that what you are facing, okay, let's just take it as Europe, what you are facing is a significant problem. Tesla is an incredibly aspirational brand. People identified with it, it saw it, uh, they saw it at being at the forefront of the climate crisis. And now people are driving around with stickers in their cars saying, I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.
Musk: And that there are also people who are buying, buying it because, uh, Elon's crazy or. However they may view it. Um, so yes, we've lost some sales perhaps on the left, but we've gained them on the right. Uh, the sales numbers at this point, uh, are strong and, uh, we've, we've, we see no problem with the demand.
For Musk, it sort of went downhill from there. To the point of hectoring his interviewer to “move on”.
Over nearly 40 minutes, while Husain remains sounding confident, warm, and unperturbed, Musk grows increasingly snappish and hostile. He levels the ultimate incel insult at her - calling her “an NPC” [non-player character].
At one point, after asking about a Bloomberg-broken story that the government of South Africa is considering changing its procurement rules to allow Starlink to enter the market, Musk has a tantrum:
There’s a lot more in the 40 minutes. We haven’t even touched on Musk’s hit on Bill Gates for his association with Jeffrey Epstein, a timely question on SpaceX moving into defence that may have foreshadowed a later announcement on the “Golden Dome” - an SDI/StarWars missile shield on meth - Trump announced overnight, in which SpaceX is expected to play a part.
Reax in the Room
I spoke with someone who is at the Forum, to gauge reactions. As you can hear during the interview, Musk got cheers in the room for - amongst other things - threatening the organisers of anti-Tesla protests with prison.
Many in the room seemed taken aback that this was such a contentious conversation. But the source pointed out that, to a surprising extent - if you don’t know Qatar - there was “hard talk” rather than just log-rolling. They pointed to the second question asked of the Qatari prime minister in an interview was about “the plane” - the $400m luxury 747 offered as a gift to the Trump Administration.
Reax Online
For those who pay attention to these things, it will not be a surprise to learn that Musk defenders had flooded the comments in the YouTube postings of the interview. The virulence would suggest that someone touched a nerve.
Media Reax
I admit to being surprised the interview hasn’t made more of an impact - though perhaps too soon to be clipped by late-night comedy show writers, so time will tell. I suspect there are so many nuggets in there it will enter the lore. The diversity of headlines that followed - and there were a few - showed how much Husain managed to get out of Musk during that 40 minutes.
Read More
Once we get around to finishing this cycle of stupidly-long long-reads, we will have to add this encounter - especially his AI comments - to an edit of this piece on Musk:
But we’ll leave it at this: Mishal Husain, once again, showed people how it’s done. If there is pushback - and there will be - I hope that she finds her management at Bloomberg to be better endowed with strong vertebrae than their counterparts in some other US media companies.
And I for one am delighted that it happened in Qatar - a place, and a region, a lot of commentators could benefit from resisting their pre-judgments about.
Unless you like spectacle and pageantry. Spectacle is rarely in short supply. I once went to an event where a troupe performed a complicated interpretative dance suspended from ropes above a stage as part of what was in effect a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of a technology business park. This was considered unremarkable, and yet also a source of frustration to some organisers that it was not news-worthy.
The American-Qatari memoirist and artist Sophia Al-Maria memorably described the ‘Gulf futurist’ tension these cities embody: “One of the most ancient ways of living came head-on against extreme wealth and capitalism – glass and steel against wool and camels”.
Here she is quoting Musk himself from Tesla’s most recent earnings call.