You come at the X trolling king, you better not miss. And unfortunately for The Economist, all of cyberspace saw its editor-in-chief get torn to shreds in a debate battle with the world’s richest man.
The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes tried to box X owner Elon Musk in on a number of issues that she twisted into cudgels against him (DOGE cuts, likeability, Islam, etc.) during a July 23 interview. But Musk just smacked her pious line of questioning down for the leftist drivel that it was over and over again.
Arguably the most entertaining part of the interview was when Beddoes sneered to Musk that “people loathe you.” The cheeky Musk just spun it back around on her and her colleagues in the media: “I don't care. The fact that a quarter billion people follow me means a lot more people like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media than you realize!”
Once Musk flipped the script, it was game over: “Do you realize the media is despised? Do you realize that the favorable view of journalists is like 15 percent? So the shoe is on the other foot. They hate you! They hate you far more than they hate me.” He even repudiated Beddoes and her colleagues for their characterizations of the political “far right” writ large, which he argued were completely embellished for rage bait. Musk even took the role of the interviewer away from Beddoes and played the part himself:
Tell me which of these [“far-right” policies] sound terrible: That we should have secure borders? That we should have safe cities? That we should have sensible spending? Which of those three are far-right fringe? And I would just like to admonish you and the media for the absurd characterization of the “far-right,” which is false and misleading and nonsense.
Musk then turned to the camera crew: “Please keep this part in!”
Talk about giving a masterclass on how to deal with pompous elitist journalists with an axe to grind!
Watch the entire interview blow!
The Economist Elon Musk July 23rd 2026 pic.twitter.com/xti3kXcZFc
— Lord Withers (@_lordwithers) July 24, 2026
Musk wasn’t fazed by virtually any of the slanted line of questioning Beddoes attempted to skewer him with, especially as it came to her attempts to make him seem like a killer for using DOGE to gut the wasteful bloat replete throughout USAID and other government agencies.
Musk listed off a few examples of the kind of stonewalling DOGE would face when asking agencies to give specifics about their intended grant recipients. Beddoes had no choice but to concede the existence of “a lot of waste,” but then she pivoted to arguing the way Musk made the cuts led to people’s deaths and "unnecessary suffering.” Musk retorted immediately, “It caused a lot of complaining.” Beddoes then tried to pin Musk with a hyperbolic hypothetical that was completely off-the-rails: “You don’t buy the idea that anybody — and to put it really crudely — any kid in Africa died because of the suddenness with which …” Musk interjected: “Zero!”
A flabbergasted Beddoes then editorialized her whole question, “I just don’t think that’s right,” as if viewers care about what the interviewer thinks. But Musk didn’t hesitate to poke holes in the logic by pointing out the “tens of thousands of NGOs” like the “$50 billion” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that could immediately fill in the gaps theoretically left by the DOGE cuts. When Beddoes saw that Musk wasn’t buckling, she tried to shift the conversation entirely: “I don’t want to have an argument about that.” But Musk had her completely on the ropes:
When funding is stopped for fraudulent organizations, do you think they’re going to say, ‘Please keep funding the fraud,’ or come up with a sympathetic story to get the funding restored? Obviously, it will be the latter. The amount of funding we’re talking about is far less than what could be supported by private foundations like the Gates Foundation or MacKenzie Bezos’s foundation. They have tens of billions of dollars and are capable of acting very quickly. If they didn’t, I would say they’re equally responsible. Zero people died because of DOGE. Zero.
As NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino suggested previously, the “Musk is a killer” narrative is as idiotic as saying he could be blamed for a kid dying in Tajikistan from toxoplasmosis because somehow we stopped paying for his Mucinex.
