Elon Musk Can’t Buy Friends or Love
Elon Musk has spent the last two weeks learning the hard way a lesson most learned in adolescence- money can’t buy you happiness, or friends.
Elon Musk is one of the single most bizarre people on the planet, but not in the usual mysterious rich guy way, in fact quite the opposite. Elon is loud. Elon wants people to like him. Elon Musk wants money and power and fame, but he also wants love and respect. Elon Musk wants to be “one of the guys”- something you can see in his absurdly transparent attempts to relate to the common man, and something that runs in direct contrast with the amount of money he’s worth. But something about these attempts is always off and anybody with eyes can see it.
Elon spends hours a day on Twitter- a website he bought seemingly for the purpose of bothering people. Musk spends his time posting memes that would’ve been lame five years ago and bickering- something that most normal people do on Twitter anyway. The thing that bothers me about this activity is that Elon Musk is worth in the ballpark of 200 million dollars. One of the single richest people in human history can’t find anything better to do with his time than whine on the internet and I find that pathetic more than anything else.
Now I’m not saying Elon has to do anything specific with his money. We all know that even a small chunk of what he has in liquid cash could go a long way towards solving our world’s issues, but there aren’t a whole lot of people on his level of wealth that commit themselves to philanthropy in that way so I wouldn’t necessarily expect Musk to do it either even though it’s the right thing to do. It’s the fact that *this* (gestures wildly) is the best he could come up with.
Elon Musk bought Twitter and nearly tanked it in the funniest way possible. In an effort to appeal to the common man, Musk announced that anybody regardless of fame or status could purchase the iconic blue checkmark to put on their profile- you know, the check that was originally rolled out to indicate legitimacy of actual celebrities and news outlets so as to reduce impersonation and misinformation. This had maybe the most predictable result of any decision I’ve seen made by a public figure- people immediately started impersonating celebrities and companies. You may have seen Eli Lilly announce that they were no longer going to be profiting from the sale of Insulin, or maybe you saw Lockheed Martin announce they would be halting the sale of weapons to the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel pending an investigation on human rights abuses by those nations. These were of course fake tweets, but the blue check next to the name of the accounts put so much implied credibility behind these tweets that both Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin stock crashed. This was maybe the quickest, most predictable, and most damaging beta tests in the history of social media technology. But it also shows something far more telling about Elon Musk- this was an appeal to common people and the common people told him to shove it up his ass.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people that love Elon Musk. If you know any guys that recently lost a lot of money in Cryptocurrency or that spend too much time on Reddit, ask them their opinions on Elon Musk- you’ll probably get an answer so full of propaganda and false-lionization that Goebbels would be impressed. But that doesn’t make the reality different. Musk is outwardly insecure- perhaps because he’s the definition of “daddy’s money” or perhaps because Tesla- the company he’s most closely associated with- wasn’t even created by him. Maybe this insecurity stems from his multiple failed relationships with the mother(s) of his children, or maybe it stems from something else entirely.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is one of the saddest things I have ever watched play out live. The mess started in the Spring. This NYT article gives a good layout of the timeline. Musk spent several months trying to get out of a deal he originally tried to make, only to end up being sued by Twitter for failing to carry out the agreement. He agreed to purchase the platform for the original price if Twitter would stop suing him. Now I’m no businessman but I know “getting punked” when I see it.
Musk’s goals at Twitter were vague- he describes himself as a “free speech absolutist” and he made it clear he would allow banned accounts such as former president Donald Trump and weepy psychologist Jordan Peterson back on the platform. His other goals included the always vague “limiting spam” and the even more vague “build an everything app.” What this indicates to me is that there may have been some semblance of a plan for Elon, but his main goal was really just to be the king of Twitter and do whatever he pleases.
This is why I have such disdain for Elon Musk. How do you have so much money yet so little worth as a person? How can he lay in bed at night after a day of shitposting in the same way a 25 year old incel named Todd does and think “this is a cool/useful way to be the richest guy on the planet.”? How does he find meaning in a life where he could do so much doing so little. I’d love to find it in my heart to be jealous of Elon, and maybe I am jealous of his money- but I am not jealous of him because how could I be? It’s like watching a man walk down the street in a Dior coat decked in diamonds head to toe but with nobody by his side.
“What do you get for the man that has everything?”
“What does he want?”
“To be loved.”
“What can he have?”
“Anything else.”