I was going to say Elon Musk needs to have a clear idea of what things mean before he re-tweets them with anything like approval.

But I didn’t think it was my job to untangle the meaning that other people purported to understand and deplore.

Then, I decided to give Elon Musk the respect he deserves and assume he knows what he’s doing and means to do it, and, in this case, I think that means he knew some people would make a hostile interpretation and others would present counter-interpretations and there’d be an extensive debate about good and evil.

That is: He knew there would be virality to something on X and that’s exactly what he wanted. Clarity and restraint would not have given him what he wants, which is to make things happen, intensely, on X, to crank up the debate.

Meanwhile, what’s up with that rocket?

Here’s the NYT, 12 minutes ago: “SpaceX Starship Launch/Elon Musk’s Giant Moon and Mars Rocket Makes Progress in 2nd Test Flight/The powerful Starship vehicle reached an altitude of about 90 miles above Earth on Saturday before SpaceX lost contact, potentially because of an automated detonation.”

It blew up, so that’s bad, right? I’m not even sure. Is this some Elon Musk thing where bad turns out to be good?

“The upper-stage Starship spacecraft continued heading toward orbit for several more minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but then SpaceX lost contact, likely after the flight termination system detonated.

Engineers will now have to decipher what went wrong on both the booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, make fixes and then try again….”

I’m reserving judgment on the rocket and on the anti-Semitic/”anti-Semitic” tweet.