Elon Musk is not a smart man. If he’d have stopped trying so hard and just lived off the money he’d earned from a few lucky investments with daddy’s emerald money, he might have gone down as the electric car guy, or the PayPal guy, or even the rocket guy. But, like a fly to a zapper, he just can’t help but prove over and over again that he’s only successful because of starting a stumble away from the finish line in the race of life. And boy does he stumble.
This is why it’s no surprise he seems to have an affinity for famous conman, occasional politician, and soon to be courtroom artist muse Donald Trump, who also notoriously began life with more inherited money than the turnover of most multinational corporations. Although, say what you want about Trump, at least he’s won a popularity contest, something Elon can’t even do on his own website.
Musk’s latest embarrassing take is the notion that the Democrats would have assassinated Trump if they had a time machine. Never mind that Stalin guy, or that Hitler dude. Or, you know, Osama Bin Laden, or any number of school shooters. Heck, even Rupert Murdoch would be a better person to take out if you were a Democrat who just cared about winning elections. Then again, this is a guy who almost got fired for throwing a tantrum when people preferred to use the name PayPal instead of his porn-adjacent selection: x.com (he was later ousted from PayPal for being a general pain to work with), so you can’t be too surprised that the logic isn’t strong with him.
The thin-skinned Musk is, like Trump, famously known for his emotional outbursts, so this latest bit of drivel shouldn’t come as a shock. At least it’s not as bad as that time he called a heroic cave diver in the middle of a rescue a “pedo” just because the man had the temerity to point out Musk’s proposed solution — a tiny submarine — was a stupid idea and likely impossible to build in time to be of any use, if at all. Then there’s his utterly embarrassing divorced-dad energy when it comes to his former relationship with Grimes. And the fact he cancelled the Tesla order of a journalist who pointed out his event was badly organised. The list of his childish behaviour goes on, almost as long as the list of all his kids.
Another similarity between Trump and Musk is the fact they both love a big claim they have no intention of fulfilling, as well as blatant hypocrisy. Who could forget the South African’s pledge to send $6 billion dollars to the UN if they could outline how they would use it to solve world hunger, which they then did, only for Elon to treat the claim like one of his children and pretend it didn’t exist. And there was the time he claimed he wanted his critics to stay on Twitter, only to suspend several journalists who’d been critical of him. Plus, his childish hissy fit about businesses receiving government subsidies being bad, only for it to be revealed his companies had received several. Again, we could go on, but the internet only has so much bandwidth.
There are darker elements to his personality that mirror Trump, too. His SpaceX colleagues are embarrassed by him and disgusted by his allegedly pervy behaviour, which is something Trump watchers would have heard before. While SpaceX have stuck with the line that he’s not an assaulter, it’s been heavily documented that the company culture at Tesla is rampant with sexism, and given the biggest link between the two companies is Musk, well, you can draw your own conclusions. His power-tripping is also well documented, and consistent with the personality he displays while he is terminally-online — although Trump was smart enough to build an entire brand on firing people.
Now that he has his own little fifedom of Twitter, who know what stupid, dangerous, or just plain incorrect thing Musk will tweet next? As the Trump story continues to develop, it’s likely we’ll see the man who definitely didn’t found Tesla continue to pump out unhinged content that will please the bots who follow him. Or, maybe he’ll just try to carry on committing various crimes, running multiple companies into the ground, and killing us with cringe. The only thing we know for sure is that we’ll have to put up with it, whether we like it or not, because the real thing Elon Musk uses his wealth for is to make himself feel better about the fact he’s distinctly average, at best.