Elon Musk is a boy’s idea of a rich man

On the early morning of Valentine’s Day, I logged onto Twitter and discovered, as did loads of other people, that the bulk of my feed was now composed of tweets by Musk. The information site Platformer afterwards presented an account of why this may well be so. Musk, according to Platformer’s reporting, was irritated that his tweet about the Super Bowl had been given considerably less engagement than President Biden’s tweet about the Tremendous Bowl. Twitter’s engineers allegedly were being ordered to manipulate the site’s algorithm, boosting their boss’s posts by a component of 1,000 p.c.

Let’s pause for a second. If you had the electric power to seize the attention of millions in an prompt, what would you use that electric power to do?

Alright, now, what would a 12-12 months-previous boy do?

I’ll tell you 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 particular close, the man’s head was an Easter Island statue at the other finish his toes had been Stonehenge. In the middle, lewdly protruding from the man’s pelvis, the Washington Monument.

The second richest person in the entire world experienced applied his system to make a penis joke.

“There are no coincidences,” Musk additional by way of commentary.

The total of time I have invested speculating in excess of the psychology of Elon Musk is time I will hardly ever get back, worthless time, primarily due to the fact it’s starting to be distinct just how a great deal I was overcomplicating issues. Does Musk actually feel humanity is imperiled by “woke brain virus,” or has he just figured out a button you can press to get the small ants to do their small ant dance? Does he really believe that he is altering the earth for good, or does he just want a playground for his billionaire buddies?

The concept I’ve appear close to to is the most basic a single: Musk is a boy’s thought of a wealthy man. That concept is an Aqua Teen Hunger Force-themed Trapper Keeper’s worthy of of giddy, hormonal, 4-soda fantasies: Fast autos, spaceships, fairly girls, phallic jokes, canine memes, superhero costumes, adoring enthusiasts, rich and/or famous friends, “hardcore” underlings.

Hesse: I never assume ‘hardcore’ usually means what Elon Musk thinks it does

Lots of of us, if given the possibility, may redo our adolescence from the billionaire POV. Alas, the system of adulthood is learning how to compromise, to be discerning, to shed gracefully. It requires admitting when you are incorrect, if not for the reason that you believe that your self to be incorrect then simply because you need overall health insurance and you really don’t want to be fired. The planet gives guardrails from our juvenile impulses, specifically the types we continue to drag driving us as we fishtail into our middle many years.

Freed of these guardrails, and surrounded by persons who never want to be fired, it would surface that Elon Musk has absent comprehensive “Blank Check,” so to discuss. Get the limo driver, we’re heading to Sharper Image and buying a robot bartender and an automatic laugh monitor.

Elon Musk reinvents Twitter for the advantage of a electric power user: Himself

This isn’t an entirely groundbreaking framing. Given that getting Twitter final yr, Musk has made headlines for his propensity toward the audacious, the breakneck, the glib. In December he posted a poll asking irrespective of whether he really should even keep on being CEO, promising to abide by the results (57 % of respondents claimed he must stage down, which he has claimed he will do as soon as he finds a replacement). Staying a billionaire has prolonged meant having the ability to buy carelessness.

But Musk is not buying carelessness so substantially as he’s getting the ability to care about childish points — like whether or not adequate persons see the joke about how the Washington Monument is like a penis — very long earlier the age when you’re supposed to let that stuff go.