Elon Musk (Parroty)

There’s a longstanding, mass delusion, especially here in the United States, that we live in a meritocracy. This form of cognitive bias was summed up nicely by the late ‘90s sketch comedy program Mr. Show with Bob and David as “Worthington’s Law,” a satirical proof which states “More Money = Better Than,” and has also been formally described by the “just-world hypothesis,” which basically boils down to the notion that “people get what they deserve.”

Even the mere existence of billionaires strongly repudiates such beliefs, since no individual in the history of the world has ever done a billion dollars’ worth of work, but it’s totally obliterated almost any time Elon Musk, the wealthiest—sorry, second wealthiest person on Earth speaks aloud, publishes a tweet, or really does anything in public. For years, people thought he was a genius scientist and brilliant businessman whose great ideas would literally save the world, but like the Great and Powerful Oz, this was all an illusion; an exaggerated or outright falsified identity and history, drawn like a curtain around a deceptive humbug.

Musk and his army of mouth-breathing, crypto-hawking suck-ups variously claim that he is a self-made billionaire, an engineer, a rocket scientist, a founder or cofounder of online payment service PayPal and electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, a “free speech absolutist,” and also very clever and funny. Not one of these claims is true. No one is truly “self-made,” after all, especially no one who was born white in apartheid South Africa to a rich family with so much emerald mining money, they could barely fit all of it in their safe!

He didn’t cofound PayPal. Rather, he cofounded a competing online banking service called X.com, where he was widely considered an annoying, incompetent gadfly, only useful as a funding source, whose code was so poorly-written, it was termed “hairball” code, and usually had to be rewritten from scratch by other programmers who actually knew what they were doing. X.com merged with Confinity, which was already developing its “digital wallet” service, PayPal. Six months later, as if to send a mob-like message about how hated and disrespected he was, the conjoined entity fired Musk’s dumb ass while he was away on his honeymoon.

He had nothing to do with the founding of Tesla, which already existed when he first invested in it. Instead, he used his individual majority to pack the board with cronies so they could oust the actual founders and lead engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. He then altered the official company history to state that he, too, was a founder, declared himself “chief product architect” even though there’s no evidence he’s ever built anything more complicated than a peanut butter sandwich, and presumably changed the corporate slogan to “FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER.”

While he did found SpaceX, in between being excised from PayPal like a tumor and invading Tesla like a virus, it can be reasonably surmised that he does not actually participate in any of its rocket science or engineering in any functional capacity, because he lacks the education and general knowledge necessary to do so. He does not possess a doctorate or even a master’s degree in any field, and may not even have a bachelor’s in anything other than economics, which makes him even less of a genuine scientist than Bill Nye, The Science Guy.

Anyone who’s ever seen him awkwardly stammer through a Tesla presentation like Reginald Barclay knows he’s an atrocious public speaker. Anyone who’s looked at his Twitter feed at any time during the last half decade and doesn’t regularly huff solvents can recognize how cringingly unfunny he is, and anyone who’s followed his acquisition and subsequent mismanagement of Twitter itself knows his stated commitment to “free speech” is perhaps the biggest whopper of them all.

The “pedo guy” tweet was when the facade first began to crumble. Musk was so pissy that a hero who actually helped out with the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue dared to call him out for wasting time and getting in the way there like he does everywhere else, that he went to court defending his “right” to baselessly call that person a child rapist. Most observers of this understandably reacted with some variation of “what the fuck,” especially after they learned there already existed a photograph of Musk palling around with convicted sex-trafficker and pedophile Ghislaine Maxwell. So habitually does Musk allege those who cross him are pedophiles that one begins to wonder if he’s projecting, and if Ghislaine herself perhaps helped him develop the “child-sized submarine” concept shortly before or after the photograph was taken.

After that, people started to look more closely into his history en masse, discovering the many lies and patterns of similarly childish, sociopathic, or straight-up evil behavior. The Twitter mockery steadily intensified, as if some cosmic scale sought to counterbalance his gilded reputation or the hyperinflated price of Tesla’s stock. This caused a feedback loop of Musk becoming increasingly desperate for online validation, which only emboldened his attackers, but instead of reflecting on why so many people might dislike him, he just rationalized it away by telling himself, “no, it’s the bots who are wrong.”

It ultimately culminated in Musk exercising the most expensive humiliation fetish of all-time by spending $44 billion in mostly other people’s money to buy Twitter. This happened because the “business genius” thought he’d put the fear of God in all those “bots” by sowing a pretend offer for the service, only he ended up reaping after the company called his bluff and hauled him before a judge, where he was forced to either complete the purchase or have all his text and email conversations with people like Ghislaine leaked via discovery.

Musk’s first act as CEO, if you don’t count staging a photo op around an incredibly forced, divorced dad-style pun, was to fire thousands of people, some illegally, without bothering to figure out what their jobs were or what functions they served. He then began issuing ultimatums which caused a further thousand-plus resignations, leaving him with a skeleton crew of H-1B visa-dependent slaves, who were soon tasked with fulfilling a variety of nonsensical, rapidly-shifting demands for changes he wanted made to the site while Musk himself wandered around the building doing nothing useful, as usual.

For starters, he wanted them to make it possible for anyone to purchase a blue “verified” badge, regardless of identity or notoriety, because apparently he was oblivious to the badge’s purpose. The initial proposal, seemingly made on a whim, said they would cost $20 per month, but then the author of Cujo told Musk to fuck off, so he arbitrarily settled on a price of $8 per month, instead.

Many existing verified accounts decided to clown on Elon with a taste of what would happen if he were to proceed with this inane plan by changing their screennames to “Elon Musk” or some variation thereof, replacing their profile pictures with photos of what he looked like prior to hair plugs, and posting tweets which followed in the grand tradition of the satirical Campari ad at the center of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. Musk banned most of these accounts and retroactively added a “NO IMPERSONATIONS” asterisk to his previous declaration of “free speech absolutism,” then went ahead with his bad idea anyway, resulting in an avalanche of ersatz verified accounts for corporations and public figures posting tweets that would probably have resulted in Twitter being immediately pulverized by libel lawsuits if social media platforms were legally responsible for user content.

The “$8 for a verified badge” offer was abruptly put on hold while Musk tried to come up with a way to salvage it, but in the meantime, ad buys for the platform plummeted—for some strange reason, brands didn’t want their ads appearing alongside Bizarro versions of themselves or racist tweets by genuine white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis Elon had also let back onto the platform! Soon, in an hilarious graphic design fail, Twitter added a second, grey checkmark, then quickly realized how stupid that looked and got rid of it, then went “fuck it” and brought it back, then got rid of it again while replacing some blue checkmarks with piss-yellow checkmarks for verified accounts whose identities had actually been verified.

Throughout all this chaos, many people used their “absolute free speech” to relentlessly shit on Musk like a pandemonium of aggressive parrots released from a cage and allowed to fly freely about his office, calling out his stupidity and mocking any feeble attempts to swat them down or hypocritically silence them. In search of a more receptive audience, Musk appeared on stage with fellow transphobe Dave Chappelle, but instead of adulation, he was greeted with five minutes of vicious, uninterrupted booing.

That event seems to have finally broken whatever portion of Musk’s brain had thus far remained intact, since it’s impossible to pretend a giant crowd of people surrounding one in person are merely “bots.” His public meltdown accelerated to the point that he began making ludicrous displays of ill-advised megalomania multiple times per day, ranging from putting up embarrassing “do you like me” polls where “no” kept winning, to suspending a private jet-tracking account he had previously explicitly promised he would never suspend, to falsely claiming a hit and run attempt by one of his own security guards was the result of the victim “stalking” him, to banning something like a dozen journalists and even going so far as to temporarily shut down an entire site feature simply because they either asked questions about his erratic behavior or had reported unfavorable information about him or his businesses in the past.

But he’s not owned, HE’S NOT OWNED, even though everyone (including nervous Tesla investors) has now seen him spectacularly shrink into a corncob, just as predicted by dril, the Nostradamus of the internet.

Hey, given how things have unraveled for Elon over the last couple of months, maybe we actually can say he’s finally getting what he deserves, huh?