On the morning of Valentine’s Day, I logged onto Twitter and found, as did a lot of different customers, that the majority of my feed was now composed of tweets by Musk. The information web site Platformer later supplied an account of why this could be so. Musk, in line with Platformer’s reporting, was irritated that his tweet in regards to the Tremendous Bowl had acquired much less engagement than President Biden’s tweet in regards to the Tremendous Bowl. Twitter’s engineers allegedly had been ordered to govern the location’s algorithm, boosting their boss’s posts by an element of 1,000 %.
Let’s pause for a second. Should you had the facility to grab the eye of tens of millions right away, what would you employ that energy to do?
Okay, now, what would a 12-year-old boy do?
I’ll let you know which Musk tweet confirmed up uninvited on my feed on Tuesday morning: a drawing of a circle labeled “Earth,” overlaid with a cartoon sketch of a person. At one finish, the person’s head was an Easter Island statue; on the different finish his toes had been Stonehenge. Within the center, lewdly protruding from the person’s pelvis, the Washington Monument.
The second richest man on the planet had used his platform to make a penis joke.
“There are not any coincidences,” Musk added by means of commentary.
The period of time I’ve spent speculating over the psychology of Elon Musk is time I’ll by no means get again, nugatory time, particularly because it’s changing into clear simply how a lot I used to be overcomplicating issues. Does Musk truly imagine humanity is imperiled by “woke mind virus,” or has he simply discovered a button you possibly can press to get the little ants to do their little ant dance? Does he actually imagine he’s altering the world for good, or does he simply need a playground for his billionaire pals?
The idea I’ve come round to is the only one: Musk is a boy’s concept of a wealthy man. That concept is an Aqua Teen Starvation Power-themed Trapper Keeper’s value of giddy, hormonal, four-soda fantasies: Quick vehicles, spaceships, fairly ladies, phallic jokes, canine memes, superhero costumes, adoring followers, wealthy and/or well-known pals, “hardcore” underlings.
Many people, if given the possibility, may redo our adolescence from the billionaire POV. Alas, the method of maturity is studying how one can compromise, to be discerning, to lose gracefully. It requires admitting when you’re incorrect, if not since you imagine your self to be incorrect then since you want medical health insurance and also you don’t wish to be fired. The world supplies guardrails towards our juvenile impulses, significantly those we proceed to pull behind us as we fishtail into our center years.
Freed of such guardrails, and surrounded by individuals who don’t wish to be fired, it might seem that Elon Musk has gone full “Clean Test,” so to talk. Seize the limo driver, we’re going to Sharper Picture and shopping for a robotic bartender and an automatic giggle observe.
This isn’t an altogether revolutionary framing. Since buying Twitter final 12 months, Musk has made headlines for his propensity towards the audacious, the breakneck, the glib. In December he posted a ballot asking whether or not he ought to even stay CEO, promising to abide by the outcomes (57 % of respondents stated he ought to step down, which he has said he will do as soon as he finds a substitute). Being a billionaire has lengthy meant being able to buy carelessness.
However Musk isn’t buying carelessness a lot as he’s buying the power to care about infantile issues — like whether or not sufficient individuals see the joke about how the Washington Monument is sort of a penis — gone the age once you’re imagined to let that stuff go.
