Assholes

… 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…

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