Elon to the Rescue. Plus. . .

It’s Tuesday, October 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: a new database exposes the Wild West of gender medicine; let jackasses be jackasses; and more. But first, why the government needs Elon Musk.

Musk is a major thorn in the Democrats’ side, using X to promote Donald Trump—even appearing at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. In particular, he has promoted the theory that the Democrats created the border crisis to bring in migrants who will vote for the party, ensuring it will never lose again. Yesterday, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on X, saying if Trump loses, “I’m fucked. . . . How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”

But despite all this, we’re living in Elon’s world. The electric car industry didn’t exist until Musk became CEO of Tesla in 2008. The U.S. not long ago depended on the Russians to go into space. Now, NASA relies on homegrown SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, which have successfully launched over 300 times across 14 years. And after two astronauts were stranded on the International Space Station in June when their Boeing spaceship sprung several helium leaks, NASA had to turn to SpaceX as its only option to get them back to Earth. Their return flight is scheduled for February.

And then there’s Starlink. First made commercially available in 2021, the satellite-based Wi-Fi technology has made it possible for people all over the world to access high-speed internet, including rural Americans. Shortly after his inauguration in 2021, Biden announced that $65 billion in the infrastructure bill would go toward equipping rural areas with broadband internet by 2030. Musk beat him to it by nine years—by launching satellites instead of digging fiber-optic cable lines underground.

“However much Joe Biden—and millions of other Democrats—might dislike Musk, can you name anyone since Steve Jobs who has done more for the country’s economy than him?” ask Free Press reporters Joe Nocera and Madeleine Rowley in today’s story. True, Musk can be erratic and moody, “but sometimes, it takes an erratic, moody, inhumanely demanding person to make things happen. And, time and again, Musk has made things happen—to the benefit of us all.” 

Read Joe Nocera and Madeleine Rowley on how “Elon Succeeded Where FEMA Failed.” 

The Gender Medicine Gold Mine 

We’ve reported many times on the dangers of “gender-affirming” care for distressed youths. Detransitioners and whistleblowers keep warning that young patients are losing their bodily functions, reproductive organs, and future fertility through drugs and surgeries before they’re old enough to consent.

Europe is now changing course. France, Britain, Norway, and Sweden are all moving away from the “affirmation” model as a way to treat gender-distressed kids. And one advantage they have over the U.S. is their nationalized health systems’ ability to record exactly how many kids are undergoing medical transitions. 

In the U.S.—the “Wild West” of gender medicine—healthcare is decentralized and geographically sprawling, so it’s difficult to keep track. But today, Do No Harm, a medical watchdog, is hoping to help fix that with the launch of their “Stop The Harm” database. 

The database compiles medical insurance claims related to gender-affirming care for minors aged 17.5 and younger across all 50 states. They weren’t able to include patients who aren’t insured or anyone insured by Kaiser, a major provider on the West Coast, which does not make its data public.

The estimates are conservative, but these numbers show that in the U.S., between 2019 and 2023, at least:

• 13,944 minors were given “gender-affirming” puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. 

• 5,747 minors underwent “gender-affirming” facial, breast, and genital surgeries. 

• 8,579 minors were prescribed cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. And those nearly 9,000 youths received a total of 62,682 prescriptions. To be clear, that’s more than seven separate prescriptions per patient.

This amounts to a total of $119,791,202 in charges that private insurance companies and public Medicare/Medicaid funds—a.k.a. your taxes—were billed by gender-affirming clinicians over a four-year period. 

“This first-of-its-kind project provides patients, families, and policymakers with a resource that reveals the pervasiveness of irreversible sex-change treatments for minors in America,” says Do No Harm chairman Stanley Goldfarb. “While this data represents the tip of the iceberg, this is the first step in holding the medical establishment accountable for participating in, and oftentimes promoting, predatory and unscientific medical interventions for vulnerable children.”

The Professional Idiots Are in Trouble 

You may have heard of MrBeast. Otherwise known as Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube sensation became a star by doing stupid stunts and filming them. (In 2017, he counted to 100,000, which took him 40 hours and earned him 30 million views.) And it paid off. The 26-year-old is now worth half a billion dollars. His video “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive” has reaped 325 million views—almost the entire population of the United States.

But has MrBeast become a victim of his own success? This year, Amazon gave him a show, and now he’s being held to higher standards of propriety. On September 16, five contestants involved in the show filed a class-action lawsuit alleging a “toxic and hostile” work environment. Former employees accused him of being a fraud, and even of violating the Geneva Conventions for refusing to turn off the lights during a challenge where the employee was put in a room alone for 30 days.

But Donaldson admits that an inappropriate work environment is what has fueled his success. In an internal memo for staff, which leaked online recently, he wrote that fans enjoy it “when we are in our natural element of stupidity.” 

Free Press writer Suzy Weiss argues that MrBeast’s “blunders are a little extreme. . . . But as he gets even bigger, formalizes his company, and partners with even bigger companies, he risks sacrificing his appeal on the altar of HR. Bureaucracy doesn’t mix well with his magic formula, which is, remember, ‘Let them be idiots.’ ” 

Read Suzy Weiss’s defense of MrBeast, “The Professional Idiots Are in Trouble.”

Ben Kawaller: The Swing States Debate in Arizona 

For Episode Two of his new series, the Swing State Debates, Ben Kawaller travels to Arizona to discuss that most divisive of election issues: the border. Poll after poll shows immigration is a top concern for voters—and it’s not hard to see why. Under the Biden administration, an average of two million undocumented migrants crossed the border annually until this year.

“I arrived in Phoenix expecting a fiery conversation,” says Ben. “And yes, in this debate, among eight participants gathered in a Methodist church, all with different views on immigration, there was plenty of intense disagreement. But there was also a surprising amount of common ground.”

Hit play below to watch Ben and an ideologically diverse group of Arizonans—including two DACA recipients, a former border patrol agent, an immigration attorney, and a Trump-supporting advocate for immigrant families—debate all things immigration. 

ICYMI: Yesterday, we wrote about how October 7, 2023, changed Israel, our lives, and the world. We shared a year’s worth of related Free Press stories, many of them harrowing. But there is hope, too. To mark the anniversary, we also published a beautiful essay by Candace Mittel Kahn, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, on bringing new Jewish children into a world where Jews face persecution. We encourage you to read her piece and share it widely.

Arms dealer Viktor Bout at an art gallery in Moscow. (Alexander Nemenov via Getty Images)

• Kamala Harris is in the midst of a media blitz, starting with an appearance on, and there’s no easy way to say this, Call Her Daddy. The podcast is hosted by Alex Cooper and is popular among young women (choice episode titles include “Condom Poker” and “Am I Dating a Narcissist?”). Unsurprisingly, it was not a hard-hitting interview. Other planned media appearances include The View, The Howard Stern Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—three very friendly hits. To give the vice president a little credit, she did sit down for a 60 Minutes interview with Bill Whitaker, which aired last night. Meanwhile, Donald Trump declined an invitation to appear on the CBS show, four years after he walked out of his interview with journalist Lesley Stahl.

• As for the state of the race, Nate Silver’s election model hasn’t moved much in the last week. He puts Trump’s chance of victory at 45 percent and Harris’s at 55 percent. We ran the data through our extremely sophisticated, top secret, proprietary, and definitely very real Free Press election model and it spat out the following result: “VERY CLOSE! SHUT THE LAPTOP! GO FOR A WALK!”

• Yesterday, we brought you the story that CBS News admonished journalist Tony Dokoupil for asking Ta-Nahesi Coates a few tough questions (also known as “doing his job”). We also brought you the audio from the Orwellian phone call in which the network’s top brass said Dokoupil’s interview did not meet the company’s “editorial standards.” But don’t worry: Help is on the way at CBS. Puck’s Dylan Byers reports that the network has invited Dr. Donald Grant, a self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist, and trauma trainer,” to moderate a conversation at an all-staff meeting today. That should do it. 

• Hurricane Helene has killed more than 230 people and inflicted at least $30.5 billion in damages across six states. Now, Florida is gearing up for more destruction as Hurricane Milton, due to terrorize the state’s west coast on Wednesday, intensified from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane in the space of seven hours. As of 8 p.m. last night, it was the fourth most intense Gulf or Atlantic hurricane on record, and the most intense since 2005. 

• Back in 2022, Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout walked out of a U.S. prison as part of a trade for U.S. women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, imprisoned in Russia at the time. The Wall Street Journal reports that the man known as the “Merchant of Death” is now back doing exactly what you’d expect a man with that name to do: selling arms to bad guys. More specifically: selling AK-47s to the Houthis. Great job, everyone.

• The anniversary of October 7 was marked by commemorations, vigils, and protests around the world. Joe Biden lit a memorial yahrzeit candle at the White House. Kamala Harris planted a tree at the Vice President’s residence. Donald Trump visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s grave in Queens. And in Israel, commemorations continued as Hezbollah fired more than 130 rockets into the country.

• Have we passed peak obesity? Newly released data shows that the U.S. adult obesity rate fell by two percentage points from 2020 to 2023, after rising for decades. Financial Times reports that this is almost certainly the “population level” effect of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. Non-expert opinion: It is definitely the drugs and not the Pelotons collecting dust in basements across America.

• For all the policy headaches and difficult decisions presented by the war in the Middle East, you would at least hope the U.S. government could get the basics right and avoid doing stupid things like sending taxpayer dollars to a college once described as a “greenhouse for martyrs.” Right? And no, we’re not talking about Columbia, but the West Bank–based An-Najah National University, which, according to a Washington Examiner investigation, has received $2.2 million from the United States over the last decade.

• Speaking of Columbia, donations were down significantly at the school’s first Giving Day since the October 7 massacre and the eruption of antisemitism on U.S. campuses that followed. The total amount donated on Giving Day was down almost 29 percent this year from 2022, the last time the event was held. 

• Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, was recently forced to pause her “knitting collective” because of security concerns ahead of the election. But all is not lost for the First Lady of Bushwick, who has debuted a new line of socks (otherwise known as sustainably made “foot accessories”) in homage to her love of knitting. Nylon magazine calls them “delightfully whimsical.” The launch follows Emhoff’s runway appearances at New York Fashion Week, where one designer requested her Secret Service detail walk as models on the runway. “We got a hard no,” the designer said.

Join us this morning at 9:30 a.m. ET for The Free Press Live, our weekly show bringing you sharp commentary from friends of The FP. This week, co-hosts Batya Ungar-Sargon and Michael Moynihan discuss Harris’s “Call Her Daddy” appearance. Also: Bari Weiss on CBS’s admonishment of journalism, and Joe Nocera on Elon Musk’s response to Hurricane Helene. 

 

Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor for The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns. 

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