The end of Elon Musk

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Secretly, I’d prefer it if the richest men on Earth were special. I know that there are genuinely exceptional people out there, because I’ve watched Steph Curry play basketball. So it’s only fair of me to want our most successful businesspeople to be people of comparable, if not greater, talent. That’s how I thought of the Waltons and Gateses of the world when I was a middle schooler. And in a just world (ha!), I would have been not only right to think it, but happy to KNOW it. If these men really were great, then the socioeconomic system that elevated them would also be great. And fair.Which brings me to Elon Musk. At one point in his career, Musk was the heir apparent to the late Steve Jobs. He ran multiple tech corporations at once and seemingly did so with élan, and with genuine interest in improving the lives of his customers. He launched the first reusable space rockets. He had nascent plans to reinvent modern public transit with a “Hyperloop” that could shoot you from LA in San Francisco in 36 tidy minutes. He made Tesla’s patents available to all, and described his reason for doing so with simple brilliance:“If we’re all in a ship together, and there’s some holes in the ship and we’re sort of bailing water out … and we have a great design for a bucket … even if we’re bailing out way better than everybody else, we should probably still share the bucket design. Because we’re all going to sink.”FILE: Elon Musk speaks with members of the media during day one of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on Nov. 1, 2023, in Bletchley, England. Leon Neal/Getty ImagesThat Elon Musk was the naive person’s idea of what a billionaire should be. But we’re all a little bit wiser now, whereas Musk is no longer as articulate, nor as magnanimous, as he once was. He delivered final proof of that yesterday at the New York Times’ DealBook summit, in which he had the following bizarre exchange with journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adA smarter billionaire might have cut his losses with X and turned his focus back to minting ugly Cybertrucks. But Musk has put all of his energy, to the great detriment of his other assets, into reshaping X in his own image instead, replete with antisemitic tropes out of the Illinois Nazi playbook and a tacit effort to revive the long-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy. This is because — and I’m not exaggerating — Musk truly believes that he who controls X also controls the world. His exchange with Sorkin yesterday, the entirety of which you can watch on the New York Times’ YouTube channel, all but proves it.It also proves that he’s a real tit.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adNYT columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk speak during the New York Times annual DealBook summit on Nov. 29, 2023, in New York City.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesAfter many big-name companies withdrew their advertising from X in the wake of Musk’s continued hate speech, he used his exchange with Sorkin to respond to those companies thusly:“Don’t advertise,” he said to the audience. “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f—k yourself. Go. F—k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey Bob [Iger, CEO of Disney]! If you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”Here is where Sorkin had to give Musk a bit of pragmatic business advice. I, like Sorkin, am a journalist and lemme tell you: You’re in BIG trouble if one of US understands how to make a profit better than you do.AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“I understand that,” Sorkin told Musk with the utmost professionalism. “But there’s a reality too, right? I mean [X CEO] Linda Yaccarino is right here and she’s got to sell advertising!”Musk, who appeared both high and made of plywood, responded with a reality of his own:“Actually, what this advertising boycott is going to do is, it’s going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”Here Musk looked out to the audience, expecting vehement agreement, perhaps even applause. He was greeted with dead silence instead. Sorkin, still residing in the correct reality, told Musk, “But those advertisers, I imagine they’re going to say, ‘WE didn’t kill the company.’”AdvertisementArticle continues below this adAnd here is where Musk revealed his delusion to all. “Oh yeah?” he shot back. “Tell it to Earth.”“Tell it to Earth.” If you imagine Will Smith delivering that line, it REALLY hits. But this was coming from a purported titan of industry, who was seemingly unaware that no one gives a holy s—t about his social media platform anymore. “Twitter isn’t real life” is a tired sound bite, but it’s never been more true than now. You really are screaming into the void when you post there. But Musk, who told Sorkin that he believed data to be more valuable than gold, remains committed to the idea that owning X means owning the chief information exchange for all of this planet’s 8 billion citizens. He thinks he can Thanos Snap wars and recessions into being merely by posting a recycled Pepe the Frog meme from 2016 on there. There is no reasoning with someone who is so megalomaniacal and so, SO stupid.But god bless Sorkin, he tried. For a f—king hour, Sorkin, who is Jewish, sat there and endured a fusillade of Musk’s choicest bulls—t, including the following statements:AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad- “My mind often feels like a very wild storm.”- “There is a natural affinity, therefore, for persecuted groups. This has led to the funding of organizations that essentially promote any persecuted group, or any group with the perception of persecution. This includes radical Islamic groups.”- “Over time it’ll be obvious that, in fact, far from being antisemitic, I’m in fact philosemitic. And all the evidence in my track record would support that.”- “Actually it’s pretty rare for something frankly that is hateful [on X] to be promoted.” (Fact check alert for Elon)- “My aspiration is to do as much good as possible, and to be as productive as possible, within the bounds of what is legal.”- “There are probably 100 million regulations that my companies comply with and there’re probably five that we don’t, and if we disagree with some of those regulations, it’s because we think the regulation that is meant to do good doesn’t actually do good.” – “There are on the order of 2 billion Muslims in the world and I think a much smaller number of Jewish people. … So if you just look at content production just on a sheer numbers basis, it’s going to be overwhelmingly antisemitic.”The above mix of lies and braggadocio — including Musk using Tesla’s open-source policy as a form of self-defense rather than a wise bit of industrial altruism — is what people who still use X now confront every time they attempt to do a basic search on that platform. That’s why so few of us use it anymore, and that’s why advertisers are now backing out in droves. Those companies are hardly to blame for X’s downfall, and Sorkin tried to make that clear to his guest.“But they’re going to say, Elon, that you killed the company,” he told Musk, “Because you said these things, and that they were inappropriate things, and that they didn’t feel comfortable on the platform. That’s what they’re going to say.”To which Musk replied, with unearned smugness, “Let’s see how Earth responds to that.”AdvertisementArticle continues below this adElon Musk has built a net worth in the hundreds of billions.Luis Sinco/TNSAh well, allow me to respond on behalf of the Earth: The brands are right. No one gives a f—k about X anymore, and no one will be outraged when you — yes, you, Elon Musk — have finally killed it. The days of serial tweeters like me lamenting the days of Twitter Classic are over. We’ve gone elsewhere and use X only sparingly, and only as a necessary evil. Without us, and without any advertising support, X will soon make no money of any sort, and you’ll be left only with the occasional $8 a month from @FreedomBob69.Oh wait, but here’s more reality for you, Elon! The Cybertruck is already not only a laughingstock, it’s…

FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS

Read original article here