As a headline writer, you’re essentially in the business of getting people’s attention. The team at the Globe and Mail certainly hit that mark with a recent column titled “SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him.” This spurred all sorts of noisy pushback from Canada’s tech elite, with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke suggesting that “we all clearly don’t hate the media enough.” Eventually, the Globe changed the headline on the basis that it didn’t meet its editorial standard. If anything, I’d say it met it a little too well.

Even so, the tech sector’s sensitivity here is understandable. Musk has become the unofficial avatar for their industry, one whose leaders have repeatedly cozied up to a quasi-authoritarian regime in the United States in exchange for regulatory relief and tax breaks. His short-lived tenure as a cost-cutting government official has also caused all sorts of untold damage to people in America and abroad, most obviously from the decision to, as Musk so eloquently put it at the time, “[feed] USAID into the woodchipper.” The results of that have been predictably tragic, as any number of journalists have documented over the last year. 

In certain circles, this chumminess with the Trump regime has turned Musk and his fellow tech bros into objects of scorn. To their growing number........

© National Observer