Pompous leftist Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes couldn’t stand that the world’s richest man just made her look like a complete idiot in front of cyberspace.
The sniveling Beddoes took to CNBC Squawk Box July 24 to kvetch over her bully Elon Musk, and how she needed to restrain her own frustration over how he's enabling the extreme right. He's unfairly scaring Americans about how mass migration is ruining Europe:
BEDDOES: I said to him that he supports not just the populist right in Europe, but the far-right fringe groups that are, you know, nowhere near the mainstream, and do actually propagate not just, you know, the three characteristics, he said, but but really divisive far-right politics. I think that's undoubted.
And I think many of these politicians wouldn't be anywhere without Elon Musk's support. And I asked him why. And the reason I did that is because he also propagates a kind of caricatured view of Europe, that it is some sort of hellhole overrun with Muslim immigrants, incredibly violent. And as, as you heard him say, he has said that England is heading for civil war. And I wanted to know when he was last there, because I feel very strongly that this is a profound mischaracterization of Europe and not -- it's irresponsible for someone who has 240 million followers to propagate things that are simply not true.
In effect, she repeated the same ludicrous line of questioning that Musk shot down during their July 23 interview. The only difference now was that Musk wasn’t there to directly retort to her in front of a national audience. Talk about lame.
.@TheEconomist Editor-In-Chief @zannymb on her wide-ranging interview with @elonmusk:
"It's irresponsible for someone who has 240 million followers to propagate things that are simply not true." https://t.co/uN9YV1zYp0 pic.twitter.com/1xzM2yHK32— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) July 24, 2026
Musk’s implication that Europe is becoming more dangerous is not a caricature. In fact, the European Travel Information and Authorization System reported in April that not only is one out of four Germans now an immigrant, but “new police data shows that foreign nationals appear more often in violent crime reports.” Following the number of residents with a migrant background skyrocketing 67 percent, non-German nationals make up about half of all violent crime suspects “[i]n states like Bavaria, Berlin, and Baden-Württemberg,” ETIAS continued. In fact, even as early as 2018, the liberal BBC itself reported the following, “Germany: Migrants 'may have fuelled violent crime rise,'” based on government data released at the time.
In 2024, Uppsala University Professor of East European Studies Stefan Hedlund wrote in an op-ed that Sweden was facing a “national crisis” because of its failure to “successfully integrate record numbers of immigrants.” Hedlund’s analysis further grounded Musk’s disillusionment with the European experiment in mass migration:
“Sweden has transitioned from being a model of inspiration to becoming a warning example. As gangland violence is spreading across borders, its Scandinavian neighbors experience growing fears of ending up in what is known in Denmark as the ‘Swedish condition.’”
These aren’t anomalies. It’s the natural correlation reasonable people make when their government leaders throw open their borders to mass migration because of political expediency and then bad things follow.
Here’s another fact for Beddoes: Her follow-up fulminations about the "far-right fringe" proved Musk was spot-on when he stated to her face that “the media is despised … So the shoe is on the other foot. They hate you! They hate you far more than they hate me.” Data reported by the BBC in June found that global trust in the media fell to a record low of 37 percent.
