The Unremitting 24Karat Shittiness of Elon Musk
Convincing us that you're not shitty takes more than TELLING us you're not shitty.
“Have you ever looked at a cow and wondered whether or not it was a cow?”
The question hung there and like Lord Dunsany’s “ominous cough” said it all without saying much of anything. The speaker had, in total, undercut an ex’s contention that he’d ever find anyone better than she was, and it applies here even more closely than you might imagine. But the story doesn’t start here. It starts well before here.
A friend had gotten a gig at an electric car company started by the absolutely visionary Martin Eberhard. Visionary in that he was seeing things that weren’t there, Eberhard imagined that running a car company like a tech company was run would dovetail nicely with our interests in maximizing globally friendly nonpolluting transportation. It seemed like a fun skunkworks project and running by the warehouse offices it seemed exactly the kind of thing people with engineering degrees might wile away the hours with. Beyond that they were realists.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” he once said. “The Big Three automakers are going to wait for us to do proof of concept, then they’re going to swoop in and kill us with scale.” Until then though, he was going to enjoy the ride.
That’s not what happened though (yet). What happened is that a board of directors did what boards of directors often do and they shunted Eberhard off to the side and in some still not understood palace coup, replaced him with the right-time-right-place South African Elon Musk. Right-time-right-place because Musk hadn’t started PayPal either, though in the burly burly of rewriting history this would be forgotten as well. So well forgotten that the Marvel Comics Universe found it advantageous to make a public comparison between millionaire playboy Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, and the multimillionaire manqué Musk.
[F]ans of Grimes were mystified about what Fortune magazine may finally have made clear: Musk was one of the richest men…on the planet.
Which, I think, is finally what broke him.
While we’re unsure of what talent, outside of one for self-promotion, made it necessary to give Musk the leg up — he’s not funny, handsome, talented, or especially charismatic — he correctly embraced the moment and the maxim, say whatever you want about me, just spell my name right. So I had questions. Mainly, Musk: ass or not?
“I didn’t like him. At first,” said my friend who was probably employee number eight at Tesla. “But he’s grown on me. He works hard. And realistically speaking he’s taken the company where Marty probably couldn’t have.” A calculation that the board of directors, possibly correctly, made.
But there were warning signs. Christmas party weirdness with a shifting set of partners, some actresses and quasi-celebs, but you know, who can account for taste? Specifically the tastes of actresses and quasi-celebs. Maybe Musk had a good line of patter. Or maybe he was just easy to please if your name was on a B-List somewhere.
However, if Nathanael West is to be believed, proximity to what Hollywood sells and trades in can be corrosive. So it wasn’t long before a couple of head scratcher assignations. I mean fans of Grimes were mystified about what Fortune magazine may finally have made clear: Musk was one of the richest men…on the planet.
Which, I think, is finally what broke him.
Because since then the hits have not stopped coming: smoking weed with Joe Rogan, hanging with Ye, a professional athlete’s profligate paternity thing, and most crushingly a serious addiction to seeing and hearing your name on the lips of others. Every day. All the time.
Now it wasn’t enough to be the richest man on the planet Earth. Not when your aspirations were to be the most essential. Like Jesus, or Madonna, Musk inveigled himself into every corner of our existence. If it was a thing, Musk had an opinion on that thing.
The thing is though, no matter how often you might think to tell someone that you’re sexy or cool or funny, no amount of saying so will make it so. Carrying a sink into the multibillion dollar company you just overpaid for? Well, laughter is involuntary and the only people laughing here really are the ones that believe high comedy is in “owning” the “libs” and so their laughter is a contrivance. Like with Chappelle now it is to make a “political” point. However, as a lib, I can enjoy a laugh like everyone else, even if it doesn’t align with my political beliefs, IF it is funny.
But Musk’s desperate attempts to buy his way into the cool kids’ club elicits, in equal parts, both pity and contempt. As anyone who was ever picked last in the great games of the American schoolyard can attest, no amount of wishing it wasn’t so, will make it not so.
Similarly, Musk should note that any company with an overwhelmingly close identification with an unloved leader never does well in the long run. Despite Justin Timberlake’s involvement, MySpace never recovered from the same thing that doomed Vice: Murdoch getting his hands on a piece of that pie. Throw Pitchfork in there too. And Meta, formerly Facebook, is…well, we always knew it would fail, but never quite so spectacularly and largely on account of its repellent CEO who, in a likewise fashion, fashions himself now one of the cool kids.
Realistically speaking though there are not many of us who have ever looked at a cow and wondered whether or not it was a cow. Its essential cow-ness is inescapable, most of all to the cow itself. No matter how rich it is.
So, the Musk-fueled Twitter, where I will post this, will fail. Just like Pet Rocks, Garbage Pail Kids, CB radios, Cabbage Patch Kids, Tickle Me Elmo and tribal tattoos. And I will be there when it does so. Like I still have a MySpace page. Somewhere. Along with my AOL account.
But beyond that there’s the blowhard, Sally Field-esque Musk whose need for the love and approval of any and many will be withheld by the same because he needs it so much, and if we can do even one thing and deny him that, well that seems like something that the richest man in the world can afford, and what I am willing to charge him for rent in my life.
Until then I will enjoy watching him try to make me clap because it’s pretty clear to me that if I wanted any more shit out of him I’d just squeeze his head.
#freespeech