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Billionaire Elon Musk mocked Axios CEO Jim VandeHei for his profane meltdown over “citizen journalists” replacing legacy media.

The co-founder of Axios delivered his rant at the National Press Club last week, expressing his outrage at Musk and opining over the job of journalists whose jobs “matter.” Musk scoffed back at the criticism in a post on X.

“I hate this damn debate about like, ‘Oh, we don’t need the media.’ Like, it is not true!” VandeHei exclaimed during his speech.

**WARNING: Language**

“There’s something about freedom, capitalism, the animal spirits of democracy. But at the core of that is maybe transparency, maybe a free press, maybe the ability to do your job without worrying to go to jail. Maybe the ability to sit in a war zone and tell people what’s actually happening so they’re not just looking at distortion, matters,” he said.

“Like we do it because we love it. We do it because it matters. The work that we do matters,” he continued.

“Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day or X today saying like, ‘We are the media. You are the media.’ My message to Elon Musk is: Bullsh-t!” VandeHei raged.

“You’re not the media, you having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle, and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter any more than me looking at your head, and seeing that you have a brain and telling you have an awesome set of tools makes me a damn neurosurgeon, right?” he went on.

“You don’t proclaim yourself to be a reporter. Like this nonsense, like being a reporter is hard. Really hard,” he lamented. “You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to get up every single day and say, ‘I want to get to the closest approximation of the truth without any fear, without any favoritism.’ You don’t do that by popping off on Twitter. You don’t do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work,” he contended.

Musk responded on X, writing, “Yeah, whatever lmao. You are the media now. And legacy media know it.”

Others on the Musk-owned platform chimed in, reminding VandeHei that the media brought this on themselves.

Frieda Powers
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