Elon Musk Is Grimly Determined To Let You Know He Is Funny
The two iron laws of posting online are as follows: understand the terrain, and never, ever let anyone know you're mad. Elon Musk, former regulatory-credit-arbitrage moron turned pretend car manufacturer/anti-bank balance-sheet activist, is someone incredibly dedicated to posting, both as a matter of owning the picks and shovels and actually doing it himself. All the more remarkable then that he is in serious running for our worst living poster. His cool person aesthetic as filtered through the mind of an 11-year-old boy, his actually financially damaging fixation with 420, his general rage comic-adjacent mien, all of it is steeped in a corrosive broth composed of 2009-era Reddit sludge and latter-day make-work right wing anti-comedy. He's always getting mad, trying and failing to contain his rage, which makes the defensive tone of his posts (and mercifully protracted public appearances, for that matter) that much funnier.
All of which is to say, I think what we have on our hands this week is the acme of modern day Muskposting.
This is scarcely distinguishable on quality from the mass of Musk slop, and indeed, it avoids at least using Impact font, though this one is really scratching the itch for me: owning the imagined haters with epic logic with a vague nod at imagined plotting elites; the grim visage of that eternal sprite, Le Trollface; the addled 12:10 a.m. local timestamp; half-baked sigma grindset tuxedo excellence quarter-fried photo of himself. There's just so much to like here. This is like when Darren Rovell followed the Darren Rovell Facebook page, only it's being performed, which makes it that much sadder. Also, given what we know about the means of production vis-a-vis Musk's Twitter account, the likelihood that this was workshopped and touched up during a feedback process involving an untold number of sweaty Boring Company staffers is almost too grim to comprehend.
Not to take the comedic semiotics of Elon Musk too-too seriously, but the most interesting facet of his dogged, ever-flopping quest to be thought of as a comedy genius as well as a success entrepreneur guy is the ways in which he is consistently five or more years behind the online comedy meta-game. For someone with a stupefying amount of resources and a bizarrely overcooked opinion of the importance of his dying app, he understands precious little about the modern forms of comedy. To be more precise, he knows precious little about anything that people have laughed at since the Nationals won the 2019 World Series, something that's incredibly easy to find out, say, by using the "For You" tab on his wheezing, bleeding-out website. He is a consistent anachronism and it is truly fascinating. It's a manifestation of a profound, self-consumed, and hilarious disconnect with the world as it exists, the sound of a hand clapping for itself. He is on track to discover Dat Boi sometime around Q3 2026.
Let's see what's happening within the rest of the company.
Stay in touch
Sign up for our free newsletter
