Elon Musk Cheers Striking Insider Inc. Editorial Staffers: ‘Fight on, Comrades!’

variety.com:

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the world’s richest person, is siding with striking editorial staff members of Insider Inc.

in their fight to get a new contract with the digital media outlet. “They should keep striking. Fight on, comrades!” Musk tweeted Wednesday in reply to a post about the Insider editorial strike.

In May 2022, Business Insider published a story saying Musk was “accused of exposing himself during a massage and offering to buy a horse for a SpaceX flight attendant if she were willing to perform a sex act on him.” In response, Musk called the allegations “utterly untrue” and called a person who talked to Insider a “liar.” Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Musk has laid off about 80% of Twitter’s employees, which have declined from 7,800 before he bought the company to about 1,500 as he has attempted to cut costs.

Meanwhile, none of Tesla’s 100,000-plus workers are unionized. In 2018, amid an organizing campaign at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., facility by the United Auto Workers, Musk had tweeted: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union… But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” Earlier this year, a federal appeals court upheld a decision by the National Labor Relations Board that found the tweet amounted to an unlawful threat that could discourage unionizing and ordered Musk to delete it.