News organizations are grappling with how to cover the overwhelming pace of news expected from the return to power of President-elect Donald Trump later today. The lawyer and investigative journalist Judd Legum, founder of the liberal site Popular Information, thinks he has the answer: focus like a laser on Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
Legum says there will be two issues a week of his publication on Substack, to be called "Musk Watch"; one issue will be dedicated to a deep dive or scoops about Elon Musk, and a second aggregating the reporting of others to capture Musk's actions and activities.
He's hired Caleb Ecarma, formerly a political reporter for Vanity Fair, and hopes to hire more to cover Musk, the chief of SpaceX and Tesla, owner of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), and now the head of DOGE, a new task force charged with advising Trump on how to radically reorder the federal government.
"I think that he has an unprecedented combination of wealth, of influence across major industries, and of political influence," Legum tells NPR. "We really don't know what the implications of one person having so much influence over a breadth of different areas will be."
Legum says there should be plenty to write about.
"He is not just a charlatan who says wild things and doesn't follow through," Legum says. "He has accomplished a lot."
Legum says he'll run Musk Watch on the same principle as Popular Information, embracing "adversarial journalism." The site has made national news on some of its stories, including the revelation that a man whose life sentence commuted by Trump in his first term was subsequently convicted of domestic violence. Legum reported he shared an attorney with Donald Trump Jr.
"It's not neutral," Legum says. "It comes from a progressive perspective, but we're also taking our facts very seriously and making sure we get the story right."
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