Elon Musk, new Vincent Bolloré? After the acquisition of X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, Elon Musk seems interested in purchasing the American television channel MSNBC.
At least that’s what a meme suggests. [image détournée dans un but humoristique, ndlr] with sexual connotations that he posted on X on November 24. We see a monk praying on which it is inscribed “Elon Musk trying not to buy”next to a woman on whom MSNBC is listed.
HAS according to some Internet users, this meme would not have made Rachel Maddow laugh at all, presenter of the American television channel MSNBC, known for being “the antithesis” from the conservative television channel Fox News. A video circulating on social media, just under 30 seconds long, shows her breaking down live on MSNBC after seeing this meme. We can read on the channel’s information banner: “Breaking news: Elon Musk posts dangerous memes”.
An edited video
By doing a Google reverse image search (we never tire of it), we find lots of occurrences of this video… which date from 2018.
In the 2018 video, which lasts about a minute, Rachel Maddow collapses on air, but for a completely different reason. The Associated Press then announced that “The Trump administration has established at least three shelters for “young children” to detain babies and other young children who have been forcibly separated from their parents at the United States-Mexico border”. In the 2018 video, it is listed on the channel’s information banner: « Associated Press: Youngest children separated from their families are sent to reception centers for children in Texas ».
In the video shared in 2024 with the Elon Musk meme, Internet users retouched this extract by modifying the information banner and adding the said meme. They only kept the end of the original 2018 sequence, where Rachel Maddow, overcome by emotion, remains almost silent.
Another detail betrays the real origin of this video: at the bottom right, the announcement of the program to follow remains similar. This is a “direct from the border” (which actually makes sense with the theme of the original video).
In 2018, the presenter apologized on X and shared the article she was trying to read live.
Will Elon Musk buy the channel?
The Elon Musk meme appears as Comcast, a media and telecommunications giant, announced on November 20 that it wanted to consolidate its television channels, including MSNBC, into the same entity.
If some see this as a sign of sale, Comcast has not confirmed it. CNN also points out that if Comcast CEO Brian Roberts wanted to sell the television channel, he could have already done so. The objective rather seems to be to increase profits by separating the company’s activities, in a context where television channels face competition from streaming platforms.
That being said, Elon Musk’s meme is oddly reminiscent of the comments he made on Twitter in 2017, before buying the social network… To be continued.
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