Near the end of the era when The Simpsons was still good, there was an episode where Mr.Burns had a feud with a Richard Branson-type character called Arthur Fortune who is a billionaire like Burns but everyone loves him. Eventually, Burns dredges up the Loch Ness monster and presents it to the public in an attempt to make everyone love him because the one thing his money can’t buy him is public adulation.
Elon Musk is also a billionaire and the thing his money can’t buy him is also adulation. Well, adulation and acting lessons.
I didn’t notice before I dug up that clip, but all his acting cameos are like Donald Trump’s cameos in movies he insists on if you want to film on one of his properties, where everyone around him is going “wow, you’re Elon Musk.”
The answer to the question “why won’t Elon Musk stop tweeting” then is because what Elon Musk wants, the thing his money can’t buy him, is to have everyone tell him what a genius he is. It would help if he said less dumb s**t, but whatever.
Elon Musk really outdid himself this weekend, implying that the impetus behind the US-led coup that deposed President Evo Morales of Bolivia was to give Tesla access to Bolivia’s most valuable natural resource, lithium. Glen Greenwald wrote an excellent piece about it for The Intercept last week, and a few days later Musk responded to a comment on it by saying “We Will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
He started this by arguing against another stimulus package because while one-third of Americans were unable to make a housing payment in July, that means two-thirds did make their payment and a few hundred million new homeless people is no big deal for Elon.
Those were not the tweets that got his baby mama Grimes to publicly chide him, though she later deleted her tweeting doing so. No, the thing that set Grimes off was a tweet saying “pronouns suck.”
Pronouns suck
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2020
So if you’re not terminally online like Elon (and let’s face it, me), you may not know why Musk has an issue with pronouns. In Japan, second-person pronouns are either intimate nicknames a married couple might call each other (anata and omae) or they’re really rude and generally get translated as “you bastard” (temē and kisama). In Japan, you generally just call people by their name with an honorific like -san at the end. But Elon Musk isn’t Japanese.
When someone talks about “pronouns” on Twitter, they’re almost invariably referring to people who put their preferred pronouns in their profile which is something that people do to make trans people feel more comfortable about asking to be referred to by certain pronouns. The theory is that the more people who do it, the more normalized it is. Elon’s tweet, regardless of what he means by it, if he even knows what he means, comes off as transphobic because of this.
Trans issues, unlike imperialism or inequality, is something Grimes cares about because publicly caring about these kinds of social issues is how a lot of rich people try to convince the public they’re good people without endangering their place at the top of the heap. Remember, money can’t buy adulation. So Grimes tweeted and then deleted “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a call. I cannot support hate. Please stop this,” in response to Elon’s tweet. I think she meant to call, and I relate, I’ve deleted more tweets than I can count because I made a typo.
Elon might actually have made that tweet to f**k with Grimes specifically. Grimes named her baby X AE A-XII, didn’t reveal its gender and wants to raise him gender-neutral. I say him because Elon immediately told everyone it’s a boy. And to be honest, I’ve known a lot of people who tried this and by the time they’re five or so most of the boys want boy toys and most of the girls want girl toys.
Now Elon was kind of an asshole to his first wife and Grimes has made it clear that this issue is important to her, or at least she publicly wants credit for being on the right side of it. It’s possible Elon just wanted to pass her off the same way he likes to piss other people off with his other tweets because he knows that the weird Elon Musk fanboys will come out of the woodwork to defend him in his mentions and that makes him feel important.
Elon is right. Pronouns are for stupid people who want to feel good about their mental disability.
It’s really telling about a society’s values, when people attempt to defend a literal coup, or defend someone who defends, dare I say it, A LITERAL COUP.
Transsexuals are mentally ill. It’s no skin off my back how they live, but we don’t have to play along.