The Week in Elon #2
This series reveals how the world’s richest man is tapping into dangerous currents that threaten America. His denial of the data confirming Twitter’s far-right algorithmic bias is only the beginning.
How This Series Works
One of the few incontrovertibly positive things about former Twitter CEO and current Twitter owner Elon Musk is that he’s so rich that he’s lost interest in hiding his views—some of which are extremely ugly—from the American public and indeed the world.
The result is that even a cursory perusal of what Elon Musk says and does online is stunningly revealing of his character.
This new Proof series is particularly focused on what Musk does: that is, which voices and words he seeks to amplify and encourage on the social media platform he owns, where he has access to one of the largest megaphones any human has ever enjoyed.
Musk is aware that his Twitter feed, which has more followers than any other—to be precise, 144.3 million as of this writing—is an immensely powerful tool for advancing the agendas and ideologies he favors, even as secret ad hoc elements of his allegedly public algorithm combine to form the perfect weapon for sidelining dissenting voices.
Little wonder that the co-owner of Twitter with Musk is a member of the royal family of a country with no belief whatsoever in free speech—Saudi Arabia, a country rated as “not free” by Freedom House, with a royal family that has a history of assassinating critics at home and abroad and no free press whatsoever. Nor is it a wonder that Musk has been caught acceding to the censorship wishes of brutal autocratic regimes across the world at a far higher rate than his predecessors at Twitter; unsurprisingly, regimes allied with the Saudis, such as those in Russia and Turkey, are particular beneficiaries of Musk’s new anti-free-speech policies.
Nor was it a shock when Musk gave far-right would-be authoritarian Florida governor Ron DeSantis one of the largest platforms for a presidential campaign launch in U.S. history in the same week DeSantis signed a bill immunizing Musk’s company SpaceX in the event it kills people—an eventuality that increasingly looks like a probability.
Far-right authoritarians, whether in Saudi Arabia or the United States, are infamously willing to give idiosyncratic billionaires free reign with their projects so long as those billionaires work overtime to get low-information voters to vote against their interests.
In this light, what Musk is doing makes good business sense.
But we must also consider the man’s own, previously hidden ideological proclivities.
Not only do we know that Twitter already had a far-right algorithmic bias when Musk became the company’s CEO last fall and reversed its prior public acknowledgment of this fact to allege—falsely—that the platform had in fact always had a far-left political bias (which lie “justified” him tweaking the algorithm to more perfectly suit his own newly revealed ideologies, including transphobia, white supremacy, anti-science, anti-journalism, and a glowing hatred of the Democratic Party), but we also now know that he personally directs some Twitter accounts to be algorithmically throttled or banned.
And he does this despite having made the centerpiece of his stewardship of Twitter the notion that he would never become a censor himself.
All this underscores that we must watch what Elon Musk does, not just listen to what he says. Musk is infamous for spreading platitudes about himself and humanity that do not comport with how he conducts himself as an entrepreneur, boss, or citizen.
The best place to see Musk betraying his platitudes is in the “likes” tab of his Twitter feed, which not only has an Earth-spanning reach but appears to have been made immune to any of the algorithmic quirks (like inexplicable bot purges that only target progressives) the Musk Algorithm otherwise doles out on the regular, often in secret.
Past Musk pledges to publish in real time the account status of every Twitter feed—including whether it’s been artificially restricted in its reach—remain unsurprisingly unfulfilled, even as Musk daily publishes claims about the growth of Twitter that are immediately contradicted by public reporting (as a private company, Twitter no longer has to publish its internal data, a fact which has also protected Musk from having to acknowledge what his predecessors at Twitter acknowledged regarding the far-right bias of Twitter’s algorithms). In short, Twitter has become a “black box” of the most insidious sort, from which the controversial and often risible communications of its new chief executive are one of the few forms of transparency still permitted to escape.
So what you’ll find below is a compendium of Musk “likes” curated by theme, with an occasional “curator’s note” included to contextualize message amplifications by Musk whose rank offensiveness may not be immediately apparent. On occasion, direct posts from Musk are explored as well; while Twitter’s owner is more cautious with these—he appears to be confident no one is tracking his “likes,” but less so that his tweets to 150 million or so people around the world are being ignored—but even so, he at times uncloaks his far-right agendas and ideologies via contemptible declarations that are issued under his name. If we wish to truly understand the man, and more importantly to understand what the man means for (and says about) the current moment in the United States and the near-term future both here and around the world, we must pay attention to these digital missives as well.
But Why Run a Series on This Topic?
The most powerful gang on Twitter right now, perhaps even on all of social media—and it’s by no means melodramatic to call it a “gang,” as its mobbish behavior richly earns that appellation—is The Elongelicals. These individuals, whose allegiances run the gamut from neo-Nazism to Donald Trump worship, from cryptocurrency scams to NFT scams, from 4chan-style “edgelording” to far-right “sealioning”, have self-deputized themselves to police negative chatter about Musk that arises on his site.
And Musk has been at great pains to amplify the voices of his Elongelicals, ensuring that only those on Twitter willing to pay him for a blue emoji and certain posting privileges that were once free will have their comments boosted by his algorithm and automatically shepherded to the top of every comment-field. Indeed, Musk bought a company that he falsely said promoted a social hierarchy (his gloss of any verification protocol intended to combat impersonation and acknowledge hard-earned cultural capital in certain key professions) yet quickly set about making it rigidly hierarchical in fact. The difference is that now the determining factor in whether one has full use of Twitter or is a second-class citizen (which previously no one was) is whether one is paying the current richest man on Earth over $110 annually to become even richer.
What Elon Musk saw—to his credit, rightly—is that almost the only people willing to play along with his obvious grift would be those who worship him and his endeavors no matter how stupid, corrupt, or boneheaded they are. Thus were “The Elongelicals” formed as an impromptu digital crew whose only ambition is to honor and glorify one of most categorically (some might even say objectively) unpleasant men in the world; and to honor their service to him, Musk rejiggered Twitter’s algorithm to favor them.
When Elon is criticized on Twitter, Elongelicals quickly appear atop such comment-fields—as those who pay Elon to use his website are algorithmically placed atop every comment field—to say they’ve never observed even an iota of evidence that Mr. Musk suffers from any of the moral maladies now attributed to him, whether it’s an abiding penchant for white-supremacist rhetoric or his weirdly frenzied antipathy for trans people and professional journalists (the latter because journalists do not fete him but report on him). If you note correctly that Musk’s corporate projects have largely failed, or that he often misleads followers about their progress and near-term projections; if you note correctly that he’s a bad parent who has been accused of sexually harassing employees; if you note his creepy obsession with creating offspring or his attraction to years-old memes that make him look terribly out of touch; if you note all the current pending lawsuits against him or the countless times he has brazenly violated what he once claimed was a deeply held principle or his willingness to pal around publicly with Nazi sympathizers or his systematic mistreatment of employees at his several companies or anything else that can and has been gratuitously sourced to within an inch of its life about the man and his proclivities—incorporating in this statement basic Google searches that include “Elon Musk” and virtually any topic that indicates his unscrupulous nature—you’re quickly surrounded on Twitter by people gaslighting you by saying they’ve seen no evidence of anything you speak of. It’s typical cult stuff.
While Elongelicals are willing to pay Musk a lot of money for nothing—or for things they would have gotten for free if Musk hadn’t upcharged for them or, for that matter, bought Twitter in the first place—one thing they are not willing to do is pay for high-quality, well-sourced content criticizing Elon Musk on Substack. Which means one can write about him on Substack and remain relatively free from trolling by his digital serfs. Hopefully this explains both the need for a digital archive that uses the man’s own words and actions to show who he really is and serves to underscore why Substack, rather than Twitter, is the best locus for this new project.
More broadly, what has been wanting online, for some time now, is a centralized archive of offensive content related to Elon Musk that readers can quickly point to when they are accosted by Elongelicals—as they inevitably will be—and ordered to supply proof that the man is colossally disreputable. Proof readers now have a well-sourced series that they can direct skeptics (or even full-blown Muskovites) toward.
Why Focus on Weekly Rather Than Monthly Content?
Elon Musk is “Extremely Online”, as the kids say. There is diminishing evidence that he pays sufficient attention to his existing companies, and a great deal of reason to fear that his main vocation, these days, is trying to become an “S-Class” edgelord so the bigoted, angry White teenage boys who populate 4chan will like him and give him the sort of male-to-male encouragement he seems to feel he never got from his father despite his father funding his education and his “whole career” using dodgy emeralds from an Apartheid-era emerald mine somewhere in South Africa.
In other words, Musk is producing a vast quantity of data on how risible he is every day—let alone every week. It would be impossible for a writer to coherently condense the man’s odiousness if the unit of measure were a month; there’d simply be too much content, and the themes and sub-themes inherent to the work would start to get lost.
For this reason, the images you will see below are limited to the seven-day period that precedes the publication of the edition of the series you’re reading. While this series won’t appear every week, you can be confident that when it does appear it will log the words and actions of Elon Musk over roughly a week’s duration. This can also serve as a valuable marker as to the frequency of Musk’s objectionable content; it’s remarkable that so much filth can be compiled as to one man over such an abbreviated time-frame.
One other note I would make here—a point of personal privilege, I suppose—is that as a Trump biographer I have a great deal of experience in tracking the conduct and the statements of a White billionaire who is, in sum, based upon my own research and analysis, intellectually incurious, a bigot, morally corrupt (sometimes in other ways as well), a bully, a pathological liar, a malignant narcissist, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a power-mad cretin who endangers all those around him in novel ways that most conventional media outlets simply aren’t prepared to report on let alone reply to. I’ve so much experience speaking truth of power in a way that power soon becomes aware of and alarmed by that I think I’m well-positioned to author an occasional series like this one (especially as my writing is read by Musk himself). I think that those who’ve worked under Musk, or invested in good faith in any one of his many projects, or been negatively impacted by his conduct, deserve a well-sourced, journalistic compendium of this sort.
The Week in Elon: Prelude
As I began my research for The Week in Elon #2, a reader sent me the following three images and asked me to look into them further. Not assuming that the images were or were not real—most Proof readers would never send manufactured content to Proof, but I always begin from the realization that it’s a possibility—I reviewed the images:
I confirmed that “TopLobsta” is an account known for posting antisemitic content, and that therefore the phrase “one of us”, if these images were in fact authentic, was likely shorthand for “[is Elon Musk] one of us [an antisemite]?”
For context, the “joke” being made in the meme Musk allegedly commented on above is that one can either choose to be part of a Jewish-run globalist cabal of cannibalistic Satan-worshippers who drink adrenochrome directly from the bodies of the children they have murdered—in other words, the vile, antisemitic “blood libel” against Jews that’s been central to the far-right cult known as “QAnon” from its inception and was a key rhetorical setpiece in Nazi Germany in the years preceding The Holocaust—or one can be like antisemitic actor Mel Gibson and simply hate Jews.
The right answer, TopLobsta makes very clear with his framing here, is that the only reasonable path forward is rank antisemitism.
The only reasonable path, to be specific, for “western men.”
If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because we find it in The Week in Elon #1, here. An excerpt from that earlier entry in this series:
So “western man” is a neo-Nazi trope; it’s a shorthand for “WASP” favored by the sort of “Western chauvinist” white supremacists who formed the Proud Boys (the group whose leaders’ Seditious Conspiracy was at the heart of the January 6 coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol). And Elon Musk has a history of responding favorably to this term and all that it implies.
But even knowing that, I still needed to see whether the sequence of images above was actually real, which I knew was going to be a bit of a task given that the allegation from the person who sent it to me was that Musk had since deleted all online evidence of him interacting merrily with antisemites on Twitter.
So I went to WayBackMachine and found there something truly bizarre: the only day this year in which WayBackMachine was inexplicably prevented from archiving Elon Musk’s replies was the day he allegedly deleted a reply to an antisemitic slur (June 7th):
But as this might be just a low-odds coincidence—I won’t say it wasn’t, as I don’t have enough evidence yet to draw another conclusion—I continued on by checking the feed of TopLobsta for evidence of Elon’s presence there. And I found it immediately:
Fortunately, because this was such a big day for an apparently well-known antisemite, TopLobsta had moved fast to get a screenshot of his brush with celebrity:
And there it was—the proof I’d been looking for. I’d written in the first edition of the series you’re now reading that “Musk specializes in walking right up to the line of open Nazism and then retreating”, and wouldn’t you know it, just a few days later he crossed that line.
Nor was I the only one to notice.
The New York Times of Israel, Haaretz, reported on it, as did The Daily Dot, as did The Forward (a major international Jewish media outlet). The last of these went so far as to call Musk “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Proof agrees, given the size of the megaphone he carries and his outsized influence in U.S. and global digital culture.
I’m glad people are finally tuning in to who and what Elon Musk is. It underscores how important this Proof series can be to illuminating the danger he poses to us all.
The Week in Elon
(1) Elon’s message to children, and indeed to everyone: not only should you ignore the experts, but you should express open contempt for them.
According to Musk, random people know more about subjects they’ve never been exposed to in their lives than those who’ve dedicated their adulthood to acquiring knowledge, expertise, and experience in a given field. It is hard to imagine any more destructive message to send out to nearly 150 million readers on a digital platform.
(2) But it is also important to Elon Musk that you hate government.
So if one hates government, hates experts, and (as Musk has already made quite clear he does, indeed a thousand times over) hates professional journalists, who’s left? Why, your friendly neighborhood billionaire robber baron, of course! The very one whose companies rely on government subsidies to survive; who depends on journalists for free PR; and who’d never employ anyone who wasn’t an expert in their field. Strange how what’s good for Musk somehow doesn’t seem to be, in his view, a fit for anyone else?
Ah, yes, the use of Revolutionary War memes to falsely suggest that we live under a fascist regime. Such memes certainly never inspired a violent coup in America in this decade. And after all, who among us can really distinguish between “taxation without representation” under a monarchy and a democratically elected government politely asking its citizens to consider employing social distancing during a 100-year pandemic?
{Note: As the United States Army helpfully explains here, there was not a single “lockdown” during the COVID-19 pandemic. A few states did issue what are known as “stay at home” or “safer at home” regulations that (a) lasted on average for just 7 weeks of a 3-year pandemic, (b) were in many instances not enforced via penalty, (c) were limited to the first days of the pandemic (when it was unclear if the mortality rate for COVID-19 would be 1% or 25% or 50%), and (d) even when and where enforceable by law, don’t seem to have been meaningfully enforced in anything but extraordinary cases of repeated, flagrant, and dangerous violation.}
One can’t help but suspect here that Musk, allegedly the world’s least scrupulous and greediest boss—see below—is actually decrying basic and longstanding international pandemic-response measures because he thinks they cost him money. That’d almost make him a mustache-twirling silent film villain, or an unrepentant Ayn Rand fanboy.
(3) There’s one group of people (excluding himself, his family, and his fanboys) Musk habitually shows stunning deference to: far-right extremists who’ve long been held—for substantiated reasons—to be dangerous by government officials, journalists and experts.
Indeed, when former Dutch politician Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who’s been termed a “far-right political extremist” by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, found that one of her videos on Twitter had been removed, she had direct access to Twitter’s owner in under seven hours—even as progressives whose accounts have been throttled by Musk’s algorithm have been waiting nine months for any sign Musk even acknowledges their existence, let alone is willing to do anything to de-throttle their feeds or (as he’s repeatedly promised) at least make their new account statuses public.
(4) So in the absence of expertise, journalism, or regulation, what does Elon Musk want? He’s quite clear on this: election disinformation.
Musk publicly endorsed Ron DeSantis for President of the United States shortly after he promised his company would be politically neutral, and also told his followers to vote “Republican” for Congress in November 2022 in yet another violation of his own policy of political neutrality, so we can no longer doubt that he has a dog in America’s political battles.
Note the name of the article Musk celebrates: “Big Tech Rolls Back Misinformation Measures Ahead of 2024.” And no surprise, the party that’s been accused of pumping out systemic election misinformation to win elections in America is the very party that Elon Musk has now repeatedly declared his allegiance to, the Republican Party.
(5) But that’s just Musk’s political aim (albeit a significant one). What does he want personally? This, too, is clear: he wants everyone to hate trans people—as he thinks the push for equal rights for LGTBQIA2S+ persons is directed at killing straight men like him.
(6) If that sounds absolutely crazy to you, it’s only because it is. But Musk is even more of a militant than this.
Musk believes that anyone in the LGTBQIA2S+ who uses the phrase “I identify as”—presumably to include those who identify as genderqueer, sex-posi, bisexual, asexual, intersex, trans, and many other forms of gender identity—is no more than a deceitful cosplayer who lies to everyone they meet.
Does this identify to those who say “I identify as Christian”? Or “I identify as a supporter of ‘parental rights’”? Or “I identify as a ‘free-speech absolutist’”? Of course not—the only intention here is to erase the notion of gender identity from existence by way of erasing it from public discourse.
(7) But Elon doesn’t stop there. His juxtaposition of his hatred for the Democratic Party, his hatred for the LGTBQIA2S+ community, and his creepy insistence that a clandestine mass “grooming” campaign is happening worldwide is the definition of the bonkers conspiracy theory at the core of the domestic terror “movement” known as QAnonism.
The problem that Musk has is that it’s been universally reported on that his scheme to make Twitter profitable led to the decimation of the very team at Twitter that focused on keeping children safe. This is a huge public-relations vulnerability for Musk: he needs to attract neo-Nazis, QAnonists, and other white supremacists to Twitter, as well as “phobes” of every stripe—transphobes, homophobes, misogynists, and so on—to keep Twitter’s traffic numbers up (though not really, as the company is private so now he can just lie about traffic data if he wishes), but he also knows that his greed for the positive press that would come with profitability and the international influence that would come with making Twitter the world’s top instrument of far-right mis- and disinformation has decimated his website’s ability to pursue the very “values” certain hateful subcommunities claim to have, especially relating to their creepily unwavering obsession with children and sex and the sexual experiences children are having that in fact are vanishingly uncommon.
So what does Musk do? He uses his platform to attack his social media competitors, even if it means doing so in the most disingenuous way possible: focusing on a report that simply says Instagram needs to change its longstanding “hashtag” algorithm because (unbeknownst to the company, and not as part of any plan or scheme) it can make finding children to abuse online easier. Musk knows that his willful firing of the human beings who help keep children safe on Twitter is far, far—far—worse than this, as it was intentional, but that’s what psyops targeted at your own customer base are for.
(8) But Elon is fighting two-front war here, as he must forever strive to distinguish his hateful views—or morally cowardly pandering, or some combination of the two—from the white supremacist hatred of his biggest fans, lest he start to lose even more advertisers from Twitter.
Below is yet another ham-fisted attempt by Musk to amplify any instance in which a nonwhite person is acting in a violently transphobic way, on the seeming theory that this “cleanses” such violence of being morally reprehensible.
The last comment here, the one by Musk himself, is even nastier than you might think at first blush, for two reasons:
Musk is mocking the fact that LGTBQIA2S+ persons are less likely to be able to readily have or adopt children; and
he himself is literally the poster child for trying to interfere with the parenting of other parents—as his own insistence on “protecting children” is all about telling other people how to parent their kids.
When parents assist their children in beginning the process of transitioning—and let us be clear that in all but a vanishingly small number of cases, we’re speaking of high school students with every legal and intellectual capacity to think for themselves—they’re literally protecting their children because the hard data overwhelmingly confirms (for as much as Musk and his ilk are allergic to hard data) that trans minors who want to transition and are prevented from doing so are much more likely to kill themselves.
At what point, exactly, must saving the lives of tens of thousands of young people give way to the irrational upset that Elon Musk feels over having a trans daughter who disowned him? Certainly that’s a question that every Musk fan should ask themselves.
Do 5,000 trans kids need to die so Elon Musk feels better? 10,000? 100,000? A million?
It’s reasonable for us to want a number put on this.
(9) What’s so bizarre about Elon intermittently trying to distance himself from white supremacists (by way making his transphobia seem multicultural) is how quickly he undercuts himself by criticizing one of the leading non-profit organizations in the world that systematically combats white-supremacist hatred, violence, and crime.
Does Musk realize that cattily insisting that the Southern Poverty Law Center stick to socioeconomic issues is something that would only ever be said by a member of a hate group on the widely admired SPLC Watchlist?
I’m putting aside here that the “parental rights” movement only has a single precept: that the constitutionally protected right of Americans to parent their own kids should be abolished. (It’s as Orwellian as being sued for exercising your First Amendment rights by a group that calls itself the First Amendment Praetorians—a paradox that I sadly know something about.)
(9) Elon’s excuse for his incoherence is that civilization is at the point of collapse.
Why does he think so? Because the percentage of Americans identifying as trans just doubled over the last half-decade…
…to 0.4%.
That’s not a typo: 0.4%.
And of course almost the entirety of that doubling was just people publicly declaring themselves to be what they had always regarded themselves as being privately. But no, as Elon Musk and transphobe Camille Paglia declare, human civilization is collapsing!
What do you want to bet that 0.4% of ancient Romans would have identified as trans if they’d understand the term? After all, Roman society was significantly more dextrous in discussing sexual congress and idiosyncratic expressions of the self than America is, given that our cultural touchstone is Puritanism (a reality I learned the hard way, growing up in Colonial Massachusetts, that ring of rural towns in the greater Boston area that was central to the Revolutionary War—a war that Musk and his ideological compatriots like to meme about but appear to have no historical understanding of at all.)
How hysterical does a supposedly serious man have to be to spread Paglia’s toxic pap?
I’m not going to psychoanalyze Musk here, as that’s well beyond my expertise. But few will fail to note that Musk’s trans daughter publicly disowning him might well have enraged and embarrassed and hurt him—as certainly his grotesquely brusque and almost monstrous response (“You can’t win them all”) would suggest—and that the woman he implies is the love of his life (Grimes) having now allegedly left him for a trans woman (Chelsea Manning) might well have had the same impact on his psyche.
These are not excuses for transphobia, of course; rather, they simply underscore just how abiding and militant Musk’s transphobia may now be and may soon become.
{Spoiler alert: There will be much, much more on this sad topic in The Week in Elon #3.}
(10) Rarely do you see someone as invested in commenting on subjects they know nothing about than Elon Musk.
What is so striking about the former Twitter CEO and current Twitter owner being this way is that he spends all day on a website where access to actual experts is instant.
Still odder than this, Musk famously spends much of his time on Twitter trying to convince readers that the platform they’re on is filled with people who have hard-won knowledge on key topics. So why is Musk so insistent on ignoring the experts and engaging with and amplifying non-experts who just happen to share his biases and counterfactual presuppositions?
Elon Musk has no sense of how many Democratic politicians have been investigated and prosecuted, and far be it from him to do the bare minimum and look up the entire page on this on Wikipedia, which reveals that during the Obama administration at least fifteen political figures and federal judges were criminally indicted, 40% of whom were members of the Democratic Party.
Under Republican president George W. Bush, those figures (again, minimum figures) were fifteen and 20%. And under Democratic POTUS Bill Clinton, thirteen and 77%.
What this review would also reveal is how historically few indictments of political figures and federal judges there have been under President Joe Biden, not how many.
And even a cursory glance at what actual attorneys are saying on Twitter—and it isn’t hard, in the law, to know who to listen to, because it’s a professional field in which real practitioners get licensed—would reveal that the overwhelming consensus is that Trump hasn’t been treated the same as anyone else would be under the circumstances.
He’s been treated better.
Just so, legal professionals have literally zero doubt about what the numbers show with respect to the disparate treatment of Black Americans in America’s criminal justice system. So why is Musk listening to anonymous nonlawyer “The Rabbit Hole” on this critical question about justice in America? And what exactly do Musk and this hole have invested in falsely implying that anyone says “minorities can[not] succeed in the West” or anyone says there are no biological “differences between men and women”?
The world is divided enough—why pick new fights by making up straw men, and why amplify those who spend their precious time on Earth doing so?
Surely it’s possible to argue—and offer reliable facts to substantiate the claim—that nonwhites are doing better in America than some fear without making up straw men?
Surely it’s possible to argue—I mean, I’d vociferously disagree, but nothing stops one from arguing—that America would benefit in certain explicit ways (which presumably an advocate for the idea would try to substantiate with reliable facts) if it forced every citizen, under penalty of immediate Orwellian incarceration for wrongthink, to identify themselves exclusively on the basis of their biological sex? If Elon Musk and his fellow transphobes are so sure that the LGTBQIA2S+ community wants to destroy America, and are so committed (in ways that surely must be redefining the word) to freedom, surely they can provide hard data rather than mere anecdotes to support their assertion—data sufficient in volume and scientific rigor that it would justify turning America into a biological-sex police state?
Or if he insists on sticking with anecdotes—the last refuge of scoundrels with no data to support their views—maybe Musk could just post things that comport with human experience.
For instance, I went to my doctor’s office recently and saw a sign there asking patients to remain six feet from one another—an admonition that doesn’t comport with science because science confirms that the particulates that carry COVID-19 can travel much farther than six feet when ejected from a human mouth. So why, in a country where not one study has ever even implied that athletes are less likely to contract COVID-19 and everyone knows that unvaccinated people are more likely to have engaged in social behaviors that would cause them to carry a larger load of COVID-19 when and if they carry a load at all, am I reading this counterfactual nonsense on Musk’s Twitter feed?
Who benefits from made-up facts about hospitals, basic masking practices during an airborne-particulate pandemic, and student-athletes? Should we do away with masks worn during open-heart surgery, or declare NFL players permanently immune from ebola, or counterfactually decide, as Americans, that sneezes only eject particles one centimeter from your nose, because “The Robber Baron” says so and the CEO of the Boring Company agrees?
(12) Finally, like any unscrupulous CEO, Elon Musk knows the value of overworking employees rather than—in the CEO view, at least—“overhiring” in order to get the number of workers necessary for all your employees to receive humane treatment.
As has been written about by literally hundreds of major-media outlets (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), Musk is a notoriously cruel boss.
This is critical to understand not just because it contradicts the “lovable loser” self-branding Musk seems to be going for these days, but because it underscores two key things about the man: (1) he’s driven by greed, not (as he claims) a desire to advocate for the future of his species, and (2) there is, at the very core of this man, a monstrous coarseness that explains in part why he’s so consistently hateful and so consistently deceitful about how hateful he is.
Conclusion
The most important thing to remember in all this is that, like many tech bros who got rich at a relatively young age, Elon Musk appears to have experienced stunted emotional growth. He stopped maturing at a point when responsible adults are just beginning to find their moral center. The result is a man with enormous power and influence but the instincts of a teenager and the moral development of a pre-teen. No sort of human adult is less deserving of a following or more potentially dangerous to the culture at large when they get one. The same Musk fanboys (and some fangirls) who believe Musk will be the savior of all mankind conveniently close their eyes when Musk posts, as he so often does, cringeworthy, dated, incel-friendly content like this:
To be sure, everyone is entitled to a few slip-ups in judgment and being a kid at heart is in many respects a good thing—albeit maybe not the creepy sort of kid Elon is, sexualizing a children’s cartoon even as his fellow far-right ideologues falsely accuse the New York Times of doing precisely this in calling for the narrative of Disney’s Little Mermaid reboot to have more of a “kink” in it (which in film-review terms just means “mystery” and “surprise”).
But Elon’s immaturity is quite evidently at epidemic levels. It’s pathological, shows no sign of abatement, and, worse still, evinces no self-knowledge of how inappropriate and desperately disappointing it is when it resides in a businessman who’s in his fifties.
I mention all this because so many of Musk’s views are ill-formed and embarrassing that I want to leave open the possibility that—on certain issues—he doesn’t know any better than to post factually preposterous or easily debunked-and-dismissed memes, as perhaps he lacks the intelligence and wisdom to be any more than what he is. But then I think, “Why should he be held to such a low standard, as the richest man on Earth and one of the planet’s most influential? Why should we pretend, as a form of generosity, that brain-dead, irrelevant, factually vacuous posts like this are at all OK?”
Musk is surely smart enough to understand that everyone believes in biological sex—all children are born biologically male or biologically female, and this is determined by a doctor the moment a baby is born.
Emotionally, psychologically, and culturally, however, a given human being might decide at some later date that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex.
This is such a hard realization to come to, and such a horrifically difficult status to live with given the violent prejudices with which American society is rife—in large part because of transphobes like Musk—that the notion that anyone comes to it easily or without years of forethought is preposterous. Indeed, one of the most grotesque aspects of transphobia is its wildly counterfactual allegation that cis heterosexual men around the world are willy-nilly putting on dresses and acting like trans women just to get their juvenile jollies, as though doing this wouldn’t immediately put one in the very position every actual trans person is in in a world of transphobes: mortal danger.
Just so, the notion that teachers have an interest in making this grave life decision for kids fundamentally misses why people become teachers in the first instance—and the notion that parents would want to push their kids into such a terrifically difficult life fundamentally misunderstands what it means to love your child. A good parent stands by their child when and as their child comes to a decision that could change their life forever, but if you worry about parents using their children as political canvases you should be picketing at MAGA rallies rather than hunting about America for even a single anecdote in which a parent pushes their kid to a sex-change operation against their will because (presumably) that parent is actually a homicidal sociopath.
All of which is to say that no educated adult person with a normal degree of moral development on the Kohlberg Scale could think the above meme funny, smart, or true.
But the richest man on Earth does—a man who claims he can solve the world’s energy crisis, make us a biplanetary species, and shepherd human consciousness into the age of artificial intelligence—and this makes him an extremely dangerous person. Idiocy in an insurance adjuster is one thing; idiocy in a President of the United States or a man who positions himself as a savior of mankind is quite another altogether, full stop.
This is a man with such a high opinion of himself that, as to the issue of whether there are signs of intelligent life in the universe, he says straightfacedly, “I think I’d know.”
It’d be funny were it not the most deeply dispiriting content on the internet right now.
And worse still, for all the topics Musk could arguably position himself as a sort of expert on, there seems to be no end to the topics he (a) has no expertise on at all, and (b) is willing to credit other non-experts in discussions of because doing so for some unexplained reason appeals to his perverse egomania. Here Musk is (below) casually amplifying the conspiracy that Wikipedia—the world’s encyclopedia, and one of the most important open-source crowdsourcing projects in human history—has been taken over by a secret cabal of political activists with dark values and nefarious aims.
What the hell is this even about? As ever, there’s no reliable professional journalism attached to this conspiracy-theorizing to position it as credible discourse among adults.
And that, of course, is the rub: Twitter is no longer a place for discourse among adults.
And it’s Musk who has—in the run-up to yet another American presidential election that could determine whether America survives another decade—ensured that what the platform has become, instead, is a tool for those whose interest is in propaganda rather than debate. To be sure, Twitter has always had a problem with trolls and rank propagandists, but now the platform has been redesigned with their comfort in mind—and with amplification of their nefarious operations as its sole apparent ambition.
It’s with this in mind that I say that the next edition of The Week in Elon will not only reveal Musk’s plan for banning free speech on Twitter—and if you’ve been following Proof’s coverage of the man and his trajectory, you knew this autocratic heel turn was coming—but also the ways in which Musk, like Donald Trump, appears to be sidling up to foreign autocrats who would benefit if American political and cultural discourse were to collapse, as it would clear a space for their most venal schemes. And, for that matter, the apparently expansive venal schemes of Musk himself, which are becoming clearer with time.
Indeed, the story of Elon Musk gets darker and more dire with each chapter he writes.
This is purely anecdotal but Regarding #6, other than bigots posting memes or "attack helicopter" joke attempts, I've genuinely never heard anyone say "I identify as _______."
I've only ever heard, "I am ______."
Anyone experience different?
Good afternoon Seth. I just tried to go to your twitter page and all your post are hidden because of Elon’s new limits