Space cowboys
Elon Musk is rattled, brittle and aggrieved. It is an unbecoming disposition for the world’s richest man.
Jeff Bezos may have the smaller rocket, but is clearly living his best life. He’s a happy cowboy, a smoocher and a canoodler, but why not? John Wayne has been dead long enough, right?
Elon Musk is a different type of cowboy:
He won’t be blackmailed. Let’s watch:
He speaks for “Earth,” while dreaming of pogroms, Mars, government subsidies, and artificial intelligence all before most people get up in the morning — and that’s not even counting the antisemitic apologias, provocations and self-pity.
True cowboys can be many things, but self-pitying crybabies aren’t two of them. When the tabloids came after Jeff Bezos, he left them looking like the biker gang on the Dutton Ranch. When decency came for Elon Musk he reminded the crowd why Goebbels was so unlikeable. It wasn’t just the rottenness of his antisemitism, but his doggedness towards victimization. He combined incandescent arrogance, absolute certitude and a mindless immorality built on an unshakable faith in power as the arbiter of all things.
Elon Musk doesn’t believe in free speech. He believes in controlling speech. Specifically, your speech. His allowances and personal tolerances are the boundaries of free speech. He has no concept of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution at an intellectual, philosophical, legal, moral, revolutionary or American level.
What he has created with X is a digital Bavaria circa 1938. It is a square filled with menace, evil and loads of Nazis. It serves no purpose beyond the wealth of its owners, which include the Saudis and other foreign interests that love seeing the constant chaos wrought by X, if not the enduring love story between Musk’s disorders and Linda Yaccarino’s abject craveness.
Between Ron DeSantis and his failed Disney war, and the Musk outburst against Bob Iger, it seems like Mickey Mouse is having his most robust scrapping with incipient fascists in a very long while. My bet is on the mouse. Whatever his faults may be, he’s always loved Minnie and the United States of America. Fighting with Mickey Mouse for no reason is always a tell. It says something about a person in the same way a hostility to pets does.
Consumerism has turned millions of addled Americans into Musk’s disciples for an apostle of blather, hyperbole, hypocrisy and self-regard. Elon Musk is their totem and they are his digital brownshirts, always at the ready for more meaninglessness in the pursuit of nothingness. Speaking of the pride of South Africa let’s see how he measures up in the hat:
Not so good. At all. How about this?
By the way, what does NASA have to say about the worker safety disaster at Space X? What about any Congressional committees?
What Elon Musk mostly stands for is the utter corruption of America’s media and political class, who are a reflection of Musk’s ubiquity. He is as unstable and virulent as Kanye, but more functional and less discardable. The United States is a place where it is easy for Adidas to pull the Yeezys from the floor until later. It’s much harder to do with a launch vehicle. The morality of the decision is identical. What is easy shouldn’t be hard, and when it becomes so, it is almost always a sign that something has gone off the rails. The management of the human ego has always been humanity’s greatest challenge, and so it remains the case.
Here is what Elon Musk proves beyond a shadow of the doubt. There is no flower in the world more delicate than the male ego. Amongst a bloom of delicate flowers, there is none more delicate than a Musk — besides a Trump. Brittle though the bloom may be, its venom should never be mistaken for nectar. Poison is whatever its name may be.
“Here is what Elon Musk proves beyond a shadow of the doubt. There is no flower in the world more delicate than the male ego.”
Shocker? Isn’t this exactly how most oligarchs and plutocrats operate? Especially when they run their companies like autocracies? Musk isn’t just a billionaire CEO; he’s also a brand.
Musk isn’t just a CEO, he is the face of X, Tesla and SpaceX. Never mind, he isn’t a genius at all. He’s mostly failed upward and was more the beneficiary of improving market dynamics, than any genius or business acumen. The real genius are all the dedicated scientists and engineers, and financial experts that keep his companies operating in the black, in spite of Musk, yet they all remain anonymous.
Furthermore, Musk almost ran PayPal into the ground before he was fired and Thiel took the helm. He also benefitted from good investments in companies like EBay (right place, right time).
Back in the 1933 there was the “Business Plot,” in which our country’s richest billionaires or plutocrats tried to exact a coup against FDR and install a puppet (Major General Smedley). Smedley would later testify before Congress in 1934 since he was essentially a whistleblower who refused to go along with the conspiracy. He was later be ridiculed and laughed at as a fraud; never mind he won two Congressional medals honor.
That said, Plutocrats operate with hubris and arrogance. They are extremely paranoid, and in most cases, have delusions of grandeur. Musk himself could use a Prozac the size of Texas.
Bottom line: plutocrats and oligarchs don’t be believe the rules or laws apply to them; hence the Orange Mussolini or tangerine terrorist that is about to win the Republican nomination for president. They only believe in free markets when they have monopolies in their respective markets and industries. They would choose authoritarianism over democracy any day, as long as it works to their benefit, yet cry fowl whenever someone else operates like they do.
So again, is anyone truly shocked? And Space Cowboy to describe Musk is apt! After all, he definitely is out of this world, and not in a good way....:)
“The management of the human ego has always been humanity’s greatest challenge, and so it remains today.”
Here I add another golden nugget of wisdom into my book of knowledge. That is why I stay with this tribe. I learn to respect my own dignities and that of others like me. This is place that helps me to navigate through the landscape of human failures celebrated by media sensationalism.