Elon Musk is currently trying to weasel out of his attempt to buy Twitter, and for the first
time ever I find myself in the uncomfortable position of hoping he succeeds at something.
Nothing Elon Musk says should ever be believed on his word alone. No expertise or credential
he presents for himself should ever be taken at face value. His lies and misrepresentations
are easily debunked, sometimes outrageous, and always at the service of himself, his wealth,
his celebrity, and the fucking preposterous conceit
that he is a revolutionary genius who will change the course of human history.
Elon Musk is a bullshitter, and it is continually flabbergasting to me that
everyone who ever sees him or hears him speak doesn’t recognize this immediately.
When I stop and think about it, though, I know it shouldn’t surprise me. Because,
I’ve known people like Elon Musk my entire life. No one who was that rich, of course.
No one who was rich at all, come to think of it. But, people who did the same sort of thing
Elon Musk does, which is to walk through life spewing bullshit in all directions.
There are various types of bullshitters, and some are more tolerable than others.
There are those who bullshit in an attempt to cover their misdeeds, to stay out of trouble.
There are those who bullshit to entertain their friends — they know that we know that
they’re full of shit, but they carry on and we suspend our disbelief and a good time is had by
all — it’s like pro wrestling. But then, there are the most insufferable of all bullshitters — the
ones who bullshit in order to impress you, to get you to like them. Elon Musk is one of these.
To be a successful bullshitter of any kind, you need to commit,
to infuse every word with the conviction of absolute truth, and to never,
ever break, no matter what. If Elon Musk possesses any shred of actual genius — and I don’t think he
does, but if so! — it lies in his unshakable commitment to his own bullshit. This is a man
who bragged onstage about how unbreakable the windows on his company’s new truck were,
had a guy come out and try to break the windows by throwing a metal ball at them — which the guy
immediately did, twice, with relatively gentle tosses of the ball — and Musk’s
reaction was to look at the shattered supposedly unbreakable windows, shrug, and say “Eh, not bad.”
That unbothered, utterly unwarranted confidence is crucial to successful bullshittery, because
it suggests to some people that, despite all evidence to the contrary, maybe
you’re not full of shit after all. I mean, maybe the windows of that truck were supposed to shatter
like that! He didn’t act like it bothered him. You’d think having something like that happen
would be embarrassing — hell, deeply, painfully humiliating — but it didn’t seem to bother
Elon Musk! Maybe we really should just get off his back and let him lead humanity to Mars!
It’s not usually such a short ride, but that’s a journey a lot of people have taken,
judging by how many of his admirers rush in to defend him and the notion of his
transformational brilliance from the slightest perceived criticism.
If not for the money and the “architect of the future” pretense, he would remind me a lot of
this guy I used to work with back when I was still holding down my one and only actual job.
For the purposes of this story I’ll call him Rick, though that wasn’t his real
name. Rick worked with me for about a year on the maintenance crew at a truck stop,
then he moved on to something else. But, during that year I heard quite a few stories,
because ol’ Rick — according to himself — had led . . . a life.
As he told it, Rick — who was roughly ten years older than me — had been a marine and
a green beret — some of you might know that the green berets are actually in the army,
not the marines, so Rick was in both — isn’t that neat?! He also had an uncle who was a four-star
general. Rick claimed that once, after he’d been unjustly arrested by a local police department,
his uncle had broken him out of jail using a blackhawk helicopter.
He also told me, after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003,
that the government was planning to replace the shuttle fleet in the next
few years with — and I swear to god, these were his exact words — “Star Wars ships.”
I guess the R&D is taking a while. Hey, maybe we could get Elon to help with that, huh?
The rest of us would exchange glances and knowing smiles whenever Rick would start in
with his bullshit. No one believed him. But he just kept piling it on as though we did.
And at the center of every story he told was
the same pitiful plea: Look at all the things I’ve done. Look at how important I am.
Elon Musk says the same thing. And in his case, it’s even more pathetic, because he’s got all
that money. Why is it that those with the most money often seem to have the thinnest skin,
the most fragile egos? If you’re a billionaire, why do you care if the general public
thinks you’re smart? Or funny? Or that you actually founded the electric car company?
Is it the money? Is it that deep down you know you don’t actually deserve to be that rich — because
no one could ever truly earn that much money? Is it that, though you’d never actually admit it to
anyone else, you know that hoarding that much wealth in a world where so many have so little,
is an obscenity? So, you seek approval? You put this manufactured version of yourself out there
in front of everyone, hoping some of them will see it and tell you that you’re good?
Is that it? I wonder.
That surely wasn’t the case with Rick, because Rick emptied trash
cans and cleaned showers at a truck stop. And I don’t say that to disparage Rick,
or that line of work — I did it for five years, there are thousands of people doing it right now
all across the country and every last one of them is criminally underpaid. But, you’d think
a former green beret with a four-star general uncle and classified knowledge
about the future of the U.S. space program could do a little better, wouldn’t you?
The truth is, when a working class person tells obvious, nakedly self-serving lies,
the rest of us do what we did at the truck stop in response to Rick: shake our heads,
roll our eyes, “get a load’a this guy!” And then we move on with our day. When a wealthy
person does the exact same thing — a lot of us still shake our heads and roll our eyes, but
a lot of us also buy into the bullshit, and start making excuses for the billionaire bullshitter.
Fast forward a few years, and we’ve got a whole segment of the population
spending a certain portion of their time defending obvious liars from challenges to their lies.
And my question is: why? What is it about Elon Musk that inspires
so many to suck up to him so shamelessly instead of writing him off like the joke he, by all
rights, should be? Because, even his idealized self-described vision of the future isn’t that
great: a world where social media companies are controlled by a handful of thin-skinned tycoons,
for-profit businesses are entrusted with solving climate change, investment in
public transportation is abandoned in favor of useless rich guy vanity projects like single-lane
underground car tunnels, and space exploration is shelved in favor of commercial space tourism.
And all of that is the best case scenario where
everything works the way Elon Musk wants it to — oh, yeah, sign me up!
So, yeah, Elon Musk is trying to not buy Twitter, and just this once I wish him the best of luck,
because I don’t want that motherfucker buying Twitter any more than that motherfucker wants
to buy Twitter. I wouldn’t want to see my old coworker Rick put in charge of Twitter,
either. It turned out Rick was more than just a bit of a fabulist. He was
a real scumbag, and he ended up going to prison for some things I’m not going to discuss here.
But, that does bring up another difference between working class bullshitters and
billionaire bullshitters: working class people are expected to pay for their crimes.
Rich people have to pay sometimes, too, but it’s rarely more than they can afford.
That’s part of the reason why all of you reactionary Elon fanboys come off looking like
such assholes whenever you climb over top of each other to defend him. He might covet your praise,
but he doesn’t need your help. He’s got the money. And no matter how hard you simp for him,
he’s not sharing any of it with you.