Elon Musk is the Worst Kind of Villain

It’s the kind of villain that only the real world can produce.

Yesterday, I wrote about how some people will never have enough. Although I was talking about money, it also works for power, status, or just about anything else. In that article, I called out Elon Musk at least a few times as a prime example.

On my lunch break, I read an article about Elon Musk by Jessica Wildfire from a few months ago that painted Musk as a sort of real-world supervillain, doing whatever he wants and flaunting authority on the public stage. She compared him with Dr. Evil, the villain from the Austin Powers franchise, which I think is an interesting and apt comparison. However, one thing that struck me as interesting is that she opened up with the notion that movie villains aren’t supposed to make sense.

I watched a video a while back about the trope of Deus ex Machina. One of the things that the video pointed out was that, while we don’t care for a lot of Deus ex Machina in our fiction, it happens in real life all the time. There are loads of things that occur for basically no real reason in our everyday lives — some people just get absurdly lucky, others get absurdly unlucky, and many have their lives completely changed by random happenstance. However, compared to the amount of random stuff that happens in the real world, we don’t tolerate a lot of it in our fiction.

The same goes for our fictional villains. In many, many works of fiction, the villains have a motivation. They have a driving goal that they are pushing toward and nothing will stand in their way. The goal might even make sense in some ways, but how they go about it is bad or wrong. A lot of villains are relatable in this way — they have the right idea, but their means are too brutal or awful for most to swallow.

I have heard a lot of commentary within media circles that fictional villains who don’t have any reason for doing the things that they do are generally unbelievable. There are examples — The Joker from Batman is one of the biggest ones, particularly Heath Ledger’s Joker — but by and large, unless your villain has some sort of tragic backstory or driving motivation, they are often seen as unbelievable.

That’s not true for Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is the worst kind of villain in that he’s the kind that only the real world could create — one with no goal and no motivation. As Jessica pointed out, he might have had some underlying reason for doing what he does — saving the planet for Tesla, for example — but that is long gone. He is now, by and large, just an internet troll who happens to have billions of dollars in wealth and a global platform.

Nothing he does seems to have any rhyme or reason behind it — he just does it for the lulz and dares anyone to tell him not to. Then, when someone tries, he crushes them. His army of wannabe alpha bro fanboys is right there with him, too, bombarding any detractors with negative comments and, sometimes, threats. I know I look forward to not reading the comments on this article if it manages to gain any traction. Nothing says “I have something valuable to contribute” like a random white-dude name and a blank profile photo, or worse, a profile photo of a random meme.

Elon Musk has become for the world what The Joker was for Batman: an agent of chaos, doing whatever he wants no matter the cost or consequence. It doesn’t matter who he hurts, whose lives he ruins, or who he has to walk over to get what he wants, and there is often very little apparent reason for anything he does. He may be playing some sort of 4D chess long game here, and just because his machinations are not apparent to me doesn’t mean they’re not there, but I’m willing to bet that much of what he does has one of two reasons: “to be a troll” or “I was high.”

Jessica is right in that no matter what we do, no matter what I or anyone write about him, he will relish the attention like it was some sort of life-sustaining nectar for him. If we didn’t pay attention to Elon Musk, he would probably shrivel up and die, so he has built a world where we must pay attention to him. And, when he’s not in the news, he puts himself in the news by tweeting something absurd or just straight-up buying Twitter.

Honestly, I feel like the whole “Elon Musk is The Joker” thing is really apt. They’re both madmen, they both thirst for attention, they’re both driven by the chaos they create, they both have a bunch of terrible fanboys who idolize them despite (or because of) their toxic tendencies, and they’re both clowns. I think the only major differences are that Musk hasn’t murdered anyone that I know of and, on occasion, The Joker gets caught in his schemes and goes to the asylum. That said, if Musk actually goes through with the Twitter deal, he’ll have his own asylum to deal with.

Elon Musk isn’t humanity’s savior. He’s not some ubermensch with everyone’s best interest at heart. I’m fairly certain he doesn’t have a plan for what he wants in this world aside from “controlling everything” and “being a shit disturber.” He is a pure agent of chaos at this point, tweeting out whatever he wants and daring anyone to challenge him in the event it will make for an entertaining news cycle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to ruin me somehow, since destroying the life of some random nobody blogger isn’t something that appears to be beneath him.

For most fictional villains, their actions are driven by something. Whether that thing makes sense or not, there is a lot of ink spilled over how to make a villain’s motivations believable. The best kind of villains are the most interesting characters in the work — the one that makes you think, makes you question whether they’re really the ones who are right.

If somebody submitted Elon Musk as the villain of their movie, I would think that a bunch of critics would call him an unbelievable villain. The notion that a fictional supervillain would cause chaos and destruction just for funsies? What kind of nonsense is that? You’re just ripping off The Joker at this point.

No, Elon Musk is the worst kind of villain: one created by the real world and enabled by edgelords, meme culture, and wannabe alpha bros. He was born into a wealthy and connected family, and he used his rich kid status to make himself richer at the expense of just about everyone else with nary a care for those he hurt along the way.

I hope that, in the end, he is relegated to being a stain on the underpants of history, seen for the troll he really is as opposed to some sort of savior. That said, the victor writes the history books, and at this point, Musk could afford to buy every major textbook printer if he wanted to and mandate that they sing his praises in perpetuity. It seems like the kind of thing he would do, if only for the lulz.

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