Fox Business, the purported business news division of Fox News, on Tuesday conducted an interview with Maye Musk, mother of conservative multibillionaire Elon Musk.
The interview appeared on the talk show “Varney & Co.,” hosted by Stuart Varney, a conservative with a history of denigrating poor people.
Summing up the friendly tone of the interview, Varney asked Musk, “Do people like your son?”
Laughing, she responded, “Yes.”
After Varney noted Elon Musk’s immense wealth—he has a net worth of around $328 billion—Maye Musk said, “I don’t like the word ‘wealthy’ or ‘billionaire’ or things like that because I think it’s degrading. I think he’s the genius of the world, and people are loving him for that.”
Musk is worth more than the gross domestic product of several countries in the world, including Greece ($252 billion), so it is difficult to understand how accurately reporting on his wealth is “degrading.” But Varney did not question her premise.
Much of Musk’s wealth has come from attaching himself to previously existing companies like Tesla and SpaceX, not as the initial founder, unlike other well-known billionaires such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Additionally, Musk has been an enormous beneficiary of public spending, either through loans to Tesla or via government contracts to SpaceX—yet at the same time Musk has attacked government spending.
These contradictions were not presented by Varney, because the point of the interview was to give the wealthiest man in the world (via his mother) yet another venue to offer up his world view.
Fox shares Musk’s interest in promoting bigotry and misinformation, and the network similarly is invested in continuing to promote Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Interviewing Maye Musk to have a mother praise her son was an attempt to humanize Musk and aid a Trump ally, even as the two men accumulate more power than they’ve ever had before.
