Richest men: A fly on the Super Suite wall

Gene Collier, Tribune News Service

Though it’s been only about 48 hours, I honestly can’t recall my first thought when Fox showed Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch confabulating in a Super Bowl luxury suite.

But I do remember what it wasn’t: “Hey, how did those guys get in?”

The initial visual looked like the premise of a bad joke. The world’s second-richest man and the world’s 89th-richest man walk into a Super Bowl party loft. The second-richest man says, “What, no Doritos?” The 89th replies helpfully, “I saw a vending machine on one of the concourses through the glass elevator on the way up.” The second-richest man says, “Does it take crypto?”

Hey, I said it was bad.

Just a couple of billionaire bros enjoying a great football game was also nowhere among my immediate thoughts, crowded out of my consciousness by a hundred simultaneous variations of “nothing good can some of this.”

Musk had apparently taken a few hours off from preventing World War III to take in Chiefs-Eagles in Arizona, and Murdoch might have done the same because the strain of prepping for an April trial in which your Fox News Network is accused of spreading false claims about the 2020 election can be a little nettlesome.

If you’ve been ignoring Musk to whatever blessed extent possible, maybe you’ve missed his most recent conundrum. The guy who owns Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, among a few other global mom & pop’s, finds his Starlink communications platform at the tipping point of the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Starlink has been a godsend to Ukrainian fighters, but according to Fortune, Musk fears the satellite-based broadband provider will now be used to launch long-range drone strikes into Russian territory, sparking an acceleration in the fighting.

Musk sees this as a moral dilemma, unlike his decision to let Donald Trump back on Twitter, who he subcontracted to a Twitter poll, and from which nothing ominous could ever occur. At least not until Trump actually comes back.

Musk was further boiled by the US senator whose offices are practically right down the street from the Super Bowl. “Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability,” tweeted Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, to which Musk replied that Kelly was being swayed by “media and other propaganda,” then sat down next to Rupert Murdoch.

And that’s where things got a little murky, right? Assuming the brief shot we saw on the telecast did not frame the extent of their conversation, Elon and Rupert must have talked over at least a few things. I don’t know what billionaires say to each other, but if you think that’s going to stop me from imagining that convo with just a few hundred words to go in this column, you are mistaken.

Elon: “This your box?”

Rupert: “Hmph. Thought it was yours.”

Elon: “So someone invited both of us?”

Rupert: “Someone who appreciates our earnest efforts at counter-balancing liberal bias and either doesn’t appreciate that we’ve wildly overcompensated or just doesn’t care.”

Elon: “Whoever it is, I heard they got the last suite available.”

Rupert: “Right, and for only $1.7 million, you can’t afford not to have it.”

Elon: “Uh-huh. So, tell me, Rupert, what do you think Trump thought of that halftime show?”

Rupert: “Snort!”

Elon: “I’m sure we’ll find out, but if he did it on my platform, it’d get 20 times the exposure just among followers.”