Axios CEO Jim VandeHei got fired up over Elon Musk’s claims that users on Twitter-turned-X are replacing legacy media.
While delivering a fervent speech at the National Press Club last Thursday, VandeHei slammed the tech billionaire for suggesting that social media users who aren’t professional journalists can provide news coverage without formal training.
“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,’” VandeHei, a former political reporter for The Washington Post and co-founder of Politico, said at the time. “My message to Elon Musk is: Bullshit. You are not the media.”
VandeHei continued, “You having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter. … 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.”
In the clip, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough cosigned VandeHei’s speech, noting it “needed to be said.”
On Monday, Musk publicly disagreed with VandeHei’s response in a post on X, the platform he purchased in 2022.
“Yeah, whatever lmao. You are the media now. And legacy media know it,” the Tesla CEO wrote alongside a clip of VandeHei’s speech.
Musk has ramped up his use of the phrase “you are the media” since Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
“The reality of this election was plain to see on X, while most legacy media lied relentlessly to the public,” Musk posted days after the election. “You are the media now.”
Trump taxed Musk to cohead his proposed “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
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“Please encourage more citizen journalism! You can do live video easily from your phone,” the SpaceX founder wrote in a separate post on X in September 2023. “More on-the-ground reporting from regular citizens will change the world.”
In a clip uploaded to X on Nov. 2, Musk claimed “citizen journalism” is “better than conventional journalism” because “you’ve got real-time aggregation of the collective wisdom of tens of millions of people.”
Watch a clip of VandeHei’s speech below.