NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins has repeatedly and openly criticized Elon Musk and his handling of Twitter, raising questions into whether he can report impartially on the topic.
The left-leaning Collins covers "disinformation, extremism and the internet," according to NBC News’ website. He describes his job as covering the "dystopia beat" on his Twitter bio, and Collins has emerged as a chief antagonist of Musk’s Twitter leadership and has repeatedly scolded him during TV appearances and on his own social media.
Recent NBC News reports headlined, "There’s an exodus of Twitter executives, including the head of trust and safety, as Musk’s chaotic reign continues," "Musk fires Twitter engineers after critical posts on Twitter and Slack" and "Should I delete my DMs? What Twitter has on you, and what you can and can't do about it" were either written by Collins, or he contributed to them.
But while NBC News bills itself as a nonpartisan source of trusted information, Collins hasn't bothered to hide his disdain for Musk, whose poking of the media, digs at political correctness and dalliances with right-wing figures online have made him into a villain on the left. On Tuesday night, Collins mocked the Tesla mogul for declaring he recently found out Twitter hired a former FBI attorney to serve as in-house counsel before he purchased the tech giant.
"The scandal here is that Elon Musk discovered who his company's deputy general counsel was six weeks after he purchased it," Collins tweeted.
When journalist Matt Taibbi wrote Friday about the so-called "Twitter Files," Collins mocked him for the "humiliating s—t" of doing "PR work for the richest person in the world." Notably, a host of other left-wing figures used almost identical language to attack Taibbi, which didn't escape the journalist's attention.
"Looking forward to going through all the tweets complaining about ‘PR for the richest man on earth,’ and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, White House, etc," Taibbi responded.
But that wasn’t the only tweet in which he offered his opinion on the "Twitter Files." Collins, a frequent guest on hard-left MSNBC shows like Joy Reid's, spent much of his evening attacking Musk and Taibbi.
"Elon Musk paid $44 billion to discover what we already knew: content moderation is messy and involves whole teams of people with a range of viewpoints trying to appease different political factions," Collins wrote in one tweet. Another declared, "What Elon Musk’s Twitter files have revealed so far is that content moderation at Twitter WAS being decided by a team of people with differing viewpoints. Now it’s being decided by the richest man on Earth with an axe to grind against one political party — a true scandal."
Collins also tweeted that Musk "is now learning the hard way what information researchers have been known for decades: Everybody's pro-free speech. No s--t. Also, when you run a for-profit company, you will meet your line eventually."
By Sunday, Collins was sharing opinion pieces that dismissed the "Twitter Files," such as one by Nicholas Grossman that called it a "marketing gimmick" that "did the opposite" of uncovering a political scandal.
District Media Group president Beverly Hallberg, who has spoken out about why liberals are so concerned with Musk’s Twitter takeover, is surprised Collins would show so much animosity toward someone he’s tasked with covering.
Hallberg believes the "Twitter Files" are revealing for two different reasons, as it put a spotlight on corruption inside the company, as well as reporters willing to look the other way.
"They show the efforts by Twitter officials to remove any mention of the Hunter Biden laptop, but also because they expose how the public relations arm of the liberal establishment has reached supposed journalists who’ve followed the talking point orders," Hallberg said.
"Ben Collins is supposed to be reporting the news, yet he’s giving clear opinion and attacking actual journalism in the process. It’s quite something that he’s been so bold in showing his true colors, and it points to how siloed the media elite are since they don’t even realize their own bias," Hallberg told Fox News Digital.
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Since April 2022 when Musk first expressed interest in buying Twitter, Collins has criticized the billionaire at every turn.
Collins has mocked Musk for suspending accounts impersonating him, sarcastically suggested Musk "invented" verification and content moderation, criticized Twitter layoffs, implied the financing of Musk’s Twitter takeover was dishonest and taunted Musk for losing advertisers.
Collins appeared to take a victory lap as left-wing figures around Twitter panicked on the evening of Nov. 17 about what they viewed as the site's imminent collapse that day due to an exodus of staffers. "I told you so! Bye everybody bye," he wrote.
A day later, Collins backtracked and wrote, "For what it's worth, I don't think there will be a big, apocalyptic Day After Tomorrow-style moment where Twitter ends."
Before that, he had said Musk was "deeply out of his depth, objectively" at Twitter, and that the 2022 Election Day would be a "nightmare" because Musk had decimated its moderation staff.
"This could be really bad," he said on MSNBC on Nov. 4.
FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver mocked his doomsday talk as "completely wrong" while the two had a spat online later that month.
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In October, Collins snarked, "Elon, have you ever considered that maybe people just disagree with you and you've been living in a particularly well-sealed bubble of money-chasing Yes Men until very recently?"
That same month he wrote, "In the longterm, Musk's plans for this website are a suicide bomb. Very few people want to use a moderation-free app saturated with lies by design. We know this from the dozens of Twitter clones who've tried and failed. But he seems deadset on taking bad advice from bad people."
Collins has even tweeted directly at Musk on multiple occasions, recently using a cartoon mocking people who think they know better than experts.
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In August, Musk wrote that population collapse due to low birth rates is a bigger risk to civilization than global warming, and Collins simply responded, "No it isn’t." In September, Collins used a "Titanic" meme to lampoon Musk’s suggestion that cybertrucks will one day serve as boats.
NBC News did not immediately respond when asked if executives believe Collins can fairly cover Musk and Twitter, or if he is now considered an opinion pundit. NBC News also did not respond when asked if it has a problem with Collins offering his opinion so directly about a topic he covers.
It's hardly just on Musk-related matters where Collins voices his opinion. Last month, he gave a dramatic speech on MSNBC after the Colorado Springs shooting about his own coverage of online right-wing rhetoric about the LGBTQ community, baldly claiming that all five victims only ever felt safe in the gay club where they were killed.
"Because there are five dead people in a strip mall, because that was the only place they felt safe as gay or trans people, in this town, in Colorado Springs," he claimed.
Collins' speech drew derision from media critics, including Substack writer Jesse Singal.
"Ben Collins is putting words into their mouths and thoughts into their heads. He is, in effect, speaking over recent murder victims solely to make a political point and to inflate the importance of his own particular beat. That’s the only way to describe this," Singal wrote.
Collins also suggested in the speech that he received criticism from right-wing media because he wanted transgender people "to be alive."
Collins did not respond to a request for comment.
Fox News’ Gabriel Hays and Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
