Last fall, shortly after completing his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk sent a message to a skittish corporate community: Trust me.“Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world,” Mr. Musk wrote in an open letter, contrasting himself with a so-called traditional news media that, in his telling, had fueled societal divides in the pursuit of profit.On Sunday, Mr. Musk leaped to the defense of the “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, whose career has been upended in recent days after he called Black people “a hate group” and urged white people to “just get the hell away” from them during a YouTube livestream.Mr. Musk, no fan of major news organizations, then appeared to criticize the hundreds of newspapers that have since dropped “Dilbert” from their pages, asserting: “The media is racist.”It was another example of Mr. Musk blithely inserting himself into the sort of incendiary situation that most chief executives would run away from. And it built on his history of attacking what he views as a misguided commitment …
