One must receive as good as one gives…
Well, let’s be honest: Elon Musk has always been a troll. He’s trolled board members of various companies he has invested in; owners of startups he has taken over; the FAA, the FCC, the SEC, and probably NEA at this point; Tesla investors that he stuck with acquiring his SolarCity debacle and who are taking the hit for his recent shenanigans; Tesla owners and would-be owners awaiting their “Full Self Driving”, CyberTruck, or the US$35k ‘Mythical Unicorn’ Model 3; former residents of Boca Chica, TX driven out by noise, traffic, and falling debris from his unregulated fireworks factory; SolarCity investors and would-be purchasers hyped up on his solar shingle sleight-of-hand; the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority which was sold on a sleek, futuristic automated vacuum tube transporter and instead got ordinary electric cars driving through a concrete tunnel with mood lighting; the diving team trying to rescue a student football team stuck inthe Tham Luang caves; space enthusiasts who want to believe his nonsensical fabulisms of colonizing Mars in a couple of decades; people who desperately want a brain-machine interface for controlling prosthetics and instead got dead monkeys and fanciful claims of making direct-to-brain video game consoles; NASA in too many ways to count; the astronomy community as a whole; and everybody who watched more than five seconds of that video of Elon talking about household android robots and then presented a guy in a body sock dancing even more awkwardly than Musk himself.
Elon Musk isn’t just a troll; at this point, he is the Troll; the Troll-King of Troll Nation, trying to acquire the Troll Anti-News Network by leveraging grossly exaggerated valuations of his company and Other People’s Money (which is the best kind of money with which to gamble) so that he and his national militia of online trolls can troll their way to fascism, promoting and giving voices to übertrolls like Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon. If Elon Musk held a press conference one day and ripped off his mask tl reveal a gnarled countenance with big teeth and pointy ears, most people would just shrug and say, “Well, that makes sense now.”
A troll’s gotta be what a troll’s gotta be, and he should fit right in with the modern GOP which is so Troll-Trumpy that candidates are trolling each other trying to be more of “Them Trumps” than the others. Pretty soon they’re going to start getting plastic surgery to look more like their favorite Trump (Donald, Ivanka, Don Jr., maybe Bannon for the little ones, but no love for Eric) and Elon will be Friedrich Flick to Trump’s Gröfaz.
Stranger