This coulda gone a number of different places. But I'm putting it here, as it's (1) about a fundamentally unserious (but oh-so-
serious) far right figure, and also (2) delightful in a number of ways, especially (vis a vis this board) in the part I've
bolded (the italics are the author's).
Looking Good, Elon! Feeling Good, Trashcan Man!
https://defector.com/looking-good-elon- ... ashcan-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.
[video]
This bit, in which Sorkin attempts to extract lucid thoughts from Musk on the harm his own actions have done to X/Twitter, is a hilarious document for a few reasons. The first is just Musk's whole personal deal, which is instantly familiar to anyone who has ever shared a dreary retail shift (or, hell, elevator ride) with a tiresome dickweed who does all of his day-to-day socializing in hyper-curated online spaces. There's the man's howling bottomless anti-charisma; the painful, excruciatingly misplaced cocksureness; the not merely bad but actively uncanny timing of someone unaccustomed to unmediated meatspace interaction. Has there ever been a less magnetic individual? I wouldn't follow him if he was ahead of me in line for free ice cream.
Musk, for his part, seems to think he's crushing it. 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.
[...]
Here is where I started thinking about the ridiculous anecdote from Walter Isaacson's Musk biography that tore its way around the internet a while back, the one where a younger Elon continually goes all-in on poker bets, losing and losing and losing, until, solely because he has enough money to absorb the losses and keep at this stupid-ass gambit, he lucks into a winner, at which point he gets up and walks triumphantly from the table. Here are the wages of lifelong insulation from accountability and material consequence: The poor doofus simply has no idea how to judge stakes, success and failure, causes and effects. On a basic level he does not even really possess the capacity to tell who is risking what in a conflict; he is the equivalent of a tennis player, down two sets and a double-break in the third, exulting because their opponent faulted on a first-serve attempt. They wanted an ace there and didn't get one, and that makes me the victor.
That part sure seems familiar around these parts, vis a vis someone being "right".
