… Is as a bad example to the rest of us, and a risible target for our better journalists. Albert Burneko, at Defector, “Looking Good, Elon! Feeling Good, Trashcan Man!”:
… X, née Twitter, the microblogging platform this genius bought on accident for twice its value a little over a year ago and which likely is now worth less than a quarter of what he paid for it, is struggling. It is losing its most valuable advertising partners, whose money has always provided nearly all the company’s anemic bloodflow, entirely 100-percent because of stuff Musk has done to the company and its product, either via numb-skulled executive fiat or through the sneering bigotry he himself posts and promotes on the site. Again, this is entirely 100-percent because Musk is, and I do not say this lightly, the rankest ignoramus presently living.
As briefly as I can summarize: He destroyed Twitter’s utility as a news service. He actively elevated and empowered its most poisonous and/or frightening and/or tiresome users. He made it janky and unreliable by gutting its workforce. He renamed it “X,” instantly rendering it somehow both anonymous and incandescently corny. Worst and most poisonous of all, he associated it with himself—with, that is, the rankest ignoramus presently living. It’s that guy’s website, now.
As to that. People still evidently want to hear from this absolute buttmunch, which is not really surprising I guess, even where it can’t be explained by ghoulish rubbernecking. Just about everything bad anyone might ever wish to say about society under capitalism is both crystallized and proven correct by the fact that Elon Musk remains Important despite all of the above. In fact he is probably at least as important as he has ever been, because “important” is just a synonym for “rich” in a society in which nothing substantial can be accomplished or even meaningfully attempted without first convincing at least one hyper-rich cretin that it will gratify them personally or financially. Conceivably Musk might not be quite as rich, or uh liquid or whatever, as he was some time ago, or maybe his rate of becoming richer has slowed somewhat, but he remains, inarguably, super duper friggin’ rich, and therefore important at a scale previously reserved for, like, pharaohs. Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and CNBC interviewed him earlier this week, and it served as a nice reminder of why pharaohs so seldom sat for interviews…
… The man is so profoundly sure that his dumb, todder-like, obviously pre-planned “Go fuck yourself” is going to dazzle and delight the crowd; that they will, depending on their sympathies, gasp (the owned libs) or applaud (astounded freethinkers) at his boldness, or moral courage, or edgy fearless cool or whatever. He’s so sure of it that he takes not one but two more passes at the line, each more deathly than the last: first with some theatrical handwaving that earns him a smattering of pity-chuckles from the crowd, and then again as a psychedelically cringey “G … F … Y” that makes clear he either doesn’t understand or is intentionally dodging Sorkin’s anodyne question.
Now, it’s true: Corny self-impressed mediocrities with zero self-awareness are not, as a rule, especially hilarious, even unintentionally. But this is one of the planet’s richest and most powerful people—a 52-year-old ultra-celebrity who can pick and choose his media engagements with a privilege rivaled only by certain heads of state and Taylor Swift—fully reduced to Walter Sobchak’s “Shomer fucking Shabbos” routine by momentary exposure to gentle half-adversarial questioning along utterly predictable lines from a broadly friendly interlocutor. That’s funny!
No less funny is Musk’s virtually instantaneous full-brain meltdown, as soon as Sorkin shows the slightest resistance to the megaton rhetorical force of awkwardly repeating “Go fuck yourself” in increasingly dumb ways, at people who are not present, for the benefit of people who are not impressed. “Yes, no, no, it, I-I-I, if, a-a-a-a-absolutely, so, um, no-no, totally, so, so, wha, eh, actually,” he offers, all but bleeding from the eyeballs: “What this advertiser boycott is gonna do is, it’s gonna kill the company.” What’s remarkable is not the prediction (he might be right!) but the dunce’s bearing as he makes it. He appears to think, to sincerely believe, that what he is proclaiming is something like an indictment … of the advertisers who are not paying money to promote their shit on Twitter…
Many different things can rot a person’s mind—can erode their critical and moral faculties, dissolve their awareness of themselves and of the reality of others, turn them into Norma Desmond demanding her close-up. Fame. Wealth. Power. Impunity. Gratification. Sycophants. Drugs. Here is a man who has overindulged in all of these in gargantuan proportions, indulged until he is a great big sodden bag of shit, slumped and sludgy and spongy on the inside, like everything in there has been steeping in a Coca-Cola bath for 30 years. Too spoiled and indolent for the meager work of sussing out a single thought’s contours and borders, to say nothing of connecting it to another, without some Waylon Smithers at hand to do the lifting for him.
He also looks like shit! He looks like the answer to the question “What if toadies emitted gamma radiation.” He looks like somebody made an applehead Martin Bormann doll, sprayed it with vegetable oil, and dressed it up like it was going trick-or-treating as Maverick from Top Gun. I wouldn’t let him pet my dog.
“Musk, who appeared both high and made of plywood, responded with a reality of his own” https://t.co/I0qfanssDd
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 2, 2023
Drew Magary, at SFGate — “The end of Elon Musk”:
… A little over a year ago, Musk — already the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and founder of the Boring Company — bought Twitter after making an obscene offer for it seemingly on a lark. Then he tried to back out of the deal by inventing whatever reasons he could find in his desk, and then bought it anyway when he realized that the die was cast. After that, he rebranded Twitter as X, laid off so many staffers that quality control on the platform became all but nonexistent, turned its verification system into a subscription service for thirsty MAGA losers, and watched his new company’s revenues drop by 50% and its American user base drop by nearly 20%.
A smarter billionaire might have cut his losses with X and turned his focus back to minting ugly Cybertrucks. But Musk has put all of his energy, to the great detriment of his other assets, into reshaping X in his own image instead, replete with antisemitic tropes out of the Illinois Nazi playbook and a tacit effort to revive the long-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy. This is because — and I’m not exaggerating — Musk truly believes that he who controls X also controls the world. His exchange with Sorkin yesterday, the entirety of which you can watch on the New York Times’ YouTube channel, all but proves it.
It also proves that he’s a real tit.
After many big-name companies withdrew their advertising from X in the wake of Musk’s continued hate speech, he used his exchange with Sorkin to respond to those companies thusly:
“Don’t advertise,” he said to the audience. “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f—k yourself. Go. F—k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey Bob [Iger, CEO of Disney]! If you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”
Here is where Sorkin had to give Musk a bit of pragmatic business advice. I, like Sorkin, am a journalist and lemme tell you: You’re in BIG trouble if one of US understands how to make a profit better than you do…
Musk, who appeared both high and made of plywood, responded with a reality of his own:
“Actually, what this advertising boycott is going to do is, it’s going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”
Here Musk looked out to the audience, expecting vehement agreement, perhaps even applause. He was greeted with dead silence instead. Sorkin, still residing in the correct reality, told Musk, “But those advertisers, I imagine they’re going to say, ‘WE didn’t kill the company.’”
And here is where Musk revealed his delusion to all. “Oh yeah?” he shot back. “Tell it to Earth.”
“Tell it to Earth.” If you imagine Will Smith delivering that line, it REALLY hits. But this was coming from a purported titan of industry, who was seemingly unaware that no one gives a holy s—t about his social media platform anymore. “Twitter isn’t real life” is a tired sound bite, but it’s never been more true than now. You really are screaming into the void when you post there. But Musk, who told Sorkin that he believed data to be more valuable than gold, remains committed to the idea that owning X means owning the chief information exchange for all of this planet’s 8 billion citizens. He thinks he can Thanos Snap wars and recessions into being merely by posting a recycled Pepe the Frog meme from 2016 on there. There is no reasoning with someone who is so megalomaniacal and so, SO stupid…
Ah well, allow me to respond on behalf of the Earth: The brands are right. No one gives a f—k about X anymore, and no one will be outraged when you — yes, you, Elon Musk — have finally killed it. The days of serial tweeters like me lamenting the days of Twitter Classic are over. We’ve gone elsewhere and use X only sparingly, and only as a necessary evil. Without us, and without any advertising support, X will soon make no money of any sort, and you’ll be left only with the occasional $8 a month from @FreedomBob69…
Elon should've pivoted the conversation to Tesla by telling ex-Twitter advertisers to die in a fire.
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) November 30, 2023
‘Squid-clouds of butthurt’, illustrated!
craigie
Hilarious.
UncleEbeneezer
That cartoon needs “Transphobia” to be part of that squid ink cloud.
artem1s
creepily spot on
Bobby Thomson
You know it’s the end for him when noted transphobe Martina Navratilova is telling him
MattF
So, bullshit + horseshit + chickenshit = ??
ArchTeryx
@MattF: A whole lot of manure in vaguely human shape.
Tehanu
LOL.
Marc
FWIW, if you look carefully at some of the pictures from the Sorkin interview, there is a recent roughly two-inch long incision at the right base of his neck. I’d like to think they removed his clue gland, but since I have the same incision, he probably just lost part or all of his thyroid. Hopefully, he’s becoming aware that he’s mortal just like the rest of us.
ArchTeryx
@Marc: As the sages from the group Kansas once write, “All your money won’t another minute buy.”
Suzanne
@Marc: I feel like he’s also getting fillers in weird places.
Sure Lurkalot
The sad thing is the money that he and his ilk vaporize, money that could feed the hungry, house the unhoused, heal the sick, ventilate common spaces, clean the air and oceans…yes I could go on.
$100 million couldn’t make Ron DeSantis electable, likable or even a smidge less detestable.
Shawn Fain puts it mildly (eat the rich). Seriously, it would be doing them and all of us a big favor.
Planetjanet
@craigie: I had to pick myself off the floor with that last tweet. Glorious.
Tony Jay
Musk’s face looks like someone made papier-mâché out of piss-stained newspapers, slathered the mix around a deflating balloon, left it out in the unforgiving Kalahari sun to dry, and then asked a twitchy geriatric to draw the face of “that lady from The Shining” on it.
And he’s both aware and not happy about it.
karen marie
@Suzanne: I do not understand people and plastic surgery. Have none of them seen the photos of others before them who did the same thing and how awful it looks?
There’s an awful lot of “that won’t happen to ME” going around, I guess
@Tony Jay: One can only hope.
Frankensteinbeck
He doesn’t look like he’s made of plywood. He looks like he’s made of melting Crisco. Slowly melting Crisco, that has carved rivulets down the surface and sagged into planes. It’s one of the things that struck me in the video clip. He looks grotesque. No longer human.
ArchTeryx
@Tony Jay: You do have a way with words I could never hope to match.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
He’s more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.
SpaceUnit
Not a comedian but if you’re on a stage shouting go fuck yourself to the crowd then your act isn’t going over too well.
Frankensteinbeck
OH MY GOD I FIGURED IT OUT. Musk looks like that Nazi guy in Raiders Of The Lost Ark just as he begins to melt.
Tony Jay
@ArchTeryx:
Just let the hate surge through you. Don’t fight it, don’t try to control it, just let it swell every cavity in your brain fit to bursting and then, when you feel your skull is going to snap open down the middle, grab your electronic friend and crack open a can of bile one key tap at a time.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
👍
SpaceUnit
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think his vibe is more like that klansman at the end of O Brother, Where Art Thou? when he sees the rail being carried into the room.
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
He does!
Or alternatively he looks like one of David Icke’s reptilian overlords wearing that guy’s skin after snatching it from one frozen moment in time.
It’s something about the ill-fitting eye sacks.
MagdaInBlack
I enjoyed every word of this post. Thank you AL. I am SO entertained by his self-destruction.
piratedan
I have no pity for Musk, to have the head start that he had, the money that he had and these are the choices he chose to make.
in short, fuck that guy.
Geminid
I’m beginning to think Michael Tracey was a decoy, and Elon Musk is the real Butter Goblin.
ArchTeryx
@Tony Jay: I write for a hobby, and have been published (albeit for technical, not fiction writing). I know all about hating the right wing, as they tried to directly murder me after that orange cockwhistle was elected in 2016 by taking away my life-sustaining health care. It doesn’t get much deeper a hatred then when people declare en masse they want you dead.
And I still couldn’t even approach your biting wit. Maybe it’s because I’m just a Yank, and you have to be either British or Japanese to REALLY know where to sink the knife in and twist it a few dozen times. (If you ever watch Manzai comedy, particularly Downtown, you’ll know just what I mean about the Japanese). You wield words like the Tall Man wielded that nasty little multitool sphere from the Phantasm movies.
Hoodie
He looks like if you took the mask off of Bane to discover he’s Edgar the Bug in his human suit.
Tony Jay
@ArchTeryx:
Well, in that case, thank you very much.
ArchTeryx
@Hoodie: I remain convinced TFG is a Bug in a human suit. They’re chaos agents that ruin worlds just for shits and giggles. What better way to describe the Orange Bug than that?
FlyingToaster (Tablet)
From what I’m seeing, a number of online communities have re-formed over on Mastodon, advertising is moving slowly-but-surely to Threads, and the stoners, weirdos, and non-linux nerds have moved to Bluesky. I posted my last rant at Twitter in January, and log in once a month or so and remove old tweets/media that might make it easier to identify me-n-mine. The only thing in my DMs is scams, sigh.
FWIW, I am attempting to keep a Bluesky Feed of “Balloon Juice Jackals” going; if you search in Feeds (#) you should find it.
Martin
So, part of Trumps story was that he always wanted to ingratiate himself to the NY upper class, and never could, because he was low class. But that’s a bit of a shallow take, because NY upper class had an agenda – to remain in the good graces of the people they unavoidably had to pass on the street by taking their excesses and handing at least some of it back to the city population in the form of museums and libraries and schools and various other public, mostly cultural works. And say what you will, that salve has worked. But Trump wasn’t interested in paying that entrance fee – he didn’t want to give up any of his money to keep the citizenry from wondering if shanking them on the street wasn’t a better public service, and so they wouldn’t let him into the club, and that’s at least a component to his coastal elite grievance – the Asters wouldn’t let me put my McNuggets next to their finger sandwiches. And like, who gives a shit, but this was a major through-line of the NYC tabloids in the 80s because “John Barron” made it one.
And I’m curious how Musk will slot into this dynamic. Like, the narrative about why we need billionaires is that they’ve ‘earned’ it and they’re ‘job creators’ and they’ll make our society better. And you know, those museums and libraries are part of that narrative. But that narrative assumes that at a minimum, these people are not directly detrimental to society. Like, that’s table stakes – you gotta at least do that much, and Musk can’t do that, let alone go alone with the narrative of being a job creator. His entire value proposition to society for his existence is hinted at in his ‘tell it to earth’ line for why the advertisers killing Twitter was a problem that seemed to befuddle everyone. Musks view is that he’s going to save humanity. He alone. His cars will save us from climate change and if that doesn’t work, he’ll sell us passage to Mars. Pulling ads from Twitter will kill the platform that allows Musk to save humanity. Disney has doomed us all!
I still think the current economic system is more fragile than it seems, not just because edgy zoomers are into marxism, but because those Trump supporters who were Bernie-curious sound pretty much like those edgy zoomers, feeling that big corporation have them over a barrel same as everyone else feels. And we know that people gauge their progress in the economy only relatively. There’s no absolute evaluation of how well you’re doing. It’s always in the context of better or worse than your parents, than a year ago, and so on. So we look at the bottom of the economy and the top and sort of interpolate in some way and decide, yeah, I’m going up at the right rate, with the traps that if Musk is accumulating wealth faster it feels like you’re going backward, even if you in some hypothetical objective sense aren’t, but also if homeless people are finding jobs and housing, it can also feel like you are going backward, because their lives improved a lot, and yours hasn’t. But within that is something a bit trickier for the narrative defending the wealthy, it relies on the myth that they’re smarter or harder working than you, and when they get on a stage and tell their advertisers to go fuck themselves, well, that sort of idiocy tends to puncture the willful suspension of disbelief that is necessary to go along with the system. Why is this dipshit worth $200B when I have two jobs where I don’t tell people to go fuck themselves?
I make no predictions, but it feels like we’re going to have to go back to the well for excuses for why we need tax cuts, or why the deficit is anyones problem but the rich.
Ruckus
@MattF:
bullshit + horseshit + chickenshit = Elon!
brendancalling
In the video with Sorkin, Elon really DOES look like Shaved Cookie Monster.
Betty Cracker
Between Musk’s self-immolation and Ron DeSantis swirling around the bowl, it’s a smorgasbord of schadenfreude! Two of the most terrible people in America undergoing serial humiliations due to their own dickishness. What’s not to love?
Citizen Alan
It is breathtaking to me to realize that Miles Bron from Glass Onion wasn’t a satire and in fact undersold how cretinous a billionaire could be.
Miss Bianca
@Marc: Hmm. My thyroidectomy scar is at the base of my throat, just above my collarbones, and it was a partial, so what his scar could be…who knows? But maybe he’s been hyperthyroid all this time, and that’s fueled his madness.
The Madness of Would-Be King Musk. It might be even more entertaining, if he weren’t such a dreary, drab, *little* personality.
@Tony Jay: OMG, you have killed me. I am deaded.
Suzanne
@karen marie:
I don’t get it, either. A good skincare routine and general healthy living stuff makes most people look 500 times better.
You know who is looking really bad these days? Kate Middleton, or Princess of Wales, or however she goes these days. She’s younger than me, and her skin looks terrible. She’s got some deep, droopy frown stuff happening. She looks like she is always disapproving and miserable and her face got stuck like that.
like a metaphor
Ha! I love you BC!
dm
@Martin: I also think that the phrase “differ man in the world” is well last is sell-by date, especially since much of that assessment is based on non-publicly traded stock ownership (Twitter is now probably worthless, SpaceX has always been tulip-bulb waiting for people to notice, and Tesla’s stock evaluation is now facing competition from people who really know how to build cars).
geg6
@Suzanne:
This!
Plus, I think some hair plugs.
Suzanne
@geg6: Hair plugs for Elmo or Kate?
Actually, she is wearing very obvious hair extensions. I can easily believe that Elon got hair plugs.
geg6
@Suzanne:
I have noticed the exact same thing. She looks like a bitter, unhappy woman. Old before her time.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Elmo. I saw a closeup still from the Sorkin interview and he has what looks an awful lot like an obvious plug job.
I find Kate to be a very uninteresting and almost comically drab royal. I pretty much despise royalty but drab British royals particularly bug me. I mean, if your whole job, for which you are paid millions upon millions, is to be decorative, then BE decorative for fuck’s sake.
Suzanne
@geg6: But Britain essentially exists as a country to be the world’s racist, grumpy grandparents!
I agree with you. At this point, their only job is to be interesting and entertaining. Blah blah “service”. They don’t do service work. They’re just a slightly older form of influencers.
It makes me laugh how much they hate Meghan Markle, for being black, American, and much better at their jobs than they were.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Kate is so obviously jealous of her and it makes me laugh so hard. She may some day be queen but she knows she is not as interesting, stylish or accomplished as Meghan and never will be.
prostratedragon
@Martin: Quite agree with thi diagnosis of TFG: desperately wants social approval that he can’t get because of his militant resistance to paying any of the club dues. They are supposed to knuckle under to him and his standards:
AnonPhenom
Musk is ‘That kid’, the one who desperately wanted to hang at the ‘cool table’ in the cafeteria sitting beside that girl he had the massive crush on …but because he’d been tagged a ‘dweeb’ it wasn’t ever gonna happen.
But Musk never grew out of it, arrested development.
Paul in KY
@Frankensteinbeck: He does! Same pasty complexion, etc.
Paul in KY
@prostratedragon: They should have stopped the ceremony when he did that & checked him out. That showed him what bluster & unmitigated gall can accomplish.