It doesn’t matter that the thing that set off Musk was so banal. In an earnings call earlier this month, Musk repeatedly interrupted analysts and insulted them for their questions. “Excuse me,” he said at one point, cutting off a query about capital expenditures. “Boring, bonehead questions are not cool. Next?”

From there, things got very weird, very quickly. In a response to a question about Tesla Model 3 reservations, Musk said, “We’re going to go to YouTube. Sorry. These questions are so dry. They’re killing me!”

Musk then turned over questioning to the YouTuber Galileo Russell, a fanboy investor who has published several fawning videos about Musk and Tesla. For context, one of Russell’s recent videos is titled: “🤑 How Tesla Will Become Profitable in 2018 🤑” and his YouTube bio contains this disclaimer: “Do not assume any facts and numbers in this video are accurate. Always do your own due diligence.”

Once Musk turned to Russell in the earnings call, he let him ask a dozen questions over the course of a long 23 minutes. Russell then recapped the call in a frenetic YouTube video titled, “WE GOT ON THE TESLA EARNINGS CALL.”

“I’m still basically in complete shock right now,” he told his viewers. “Just still shook, processing this entire epic situation.”

Sports reporters have a saying that every good journalist ought to absorb. There’s no cheering in the press box. The idea is this: You can bear witness to the most dramatic, poetic, unbelievable sequence of events ever to transpire in the history of the thing you’re covering, and you better damned well keep your cool anyway. Journalists are not in it to be impressed by the people they interview. They’re in it, on behalf of the public, to get information, to ask tough questions, to give voice to the voiceless. There’s no reason that Russell, the YouTuber, should be held to such a standard if he’s not a professional journalist. But the democratization of publishing technologies means that the lines between professionals and amateurs is ever-blurring, which can be a good thing. But in this case, Musk, a man who made his fortune off of the newspaper industry’s naïveté, is turning to the Russells of the world for public validation in order to sidestep public accountability.

Musk seems to suggest this is warranted because of media bias. “It’s super messed up,” he tweeted on May 14, “that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front-page news.” He went on to claim that “the ~40,000 people who died in U.S. auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage.” (This is false. Several major outlets published stories about the latest data reflecting overall U.S. traffic deaths. Among them: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, U.S.A. Today, CNBC, CityLab, The Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and more.) Musk is correct that there’s heightened interest in the Tesla’s safety record, but it’s largely because of the way he has hyped the car, repeatedly promising it would win the high-stakes race to put the first truly self-driving car on the market.