Thank You, Elon Musk

You have done the world a service.

I have spared very few words in dunking on Elon Musk. In the past two months or so, I have written four separate articles in which I am critical of Elon Musk, his ideas, his tweets, his job performance as CEO of Twitter, and just him in general. You can read all of those articles below:

However, as his disastrous tenure as the self-described Chief Twit at Twitter has reached peak idiocy with a poll in which public opinion declared that he should step down, I actually want to thank him. That’s right, I want to thank Elon Musk for something.

Thank you, Elon Musk, for demonstrating that billionaires are not some sort of genius visionaries. They are not genetically superior to us in any particular way, they are not some sort of ubermensch, and they are not simply better than the average person in any notable way.

Rather, billionaires are just as dumb as the general public and make just as many stupid mistakes, but have family money, power, and/or a streak of good luck backing them up. Most billionaires are just mediocre white dudes who got lucky and were born into families that already had power or resources and simply leveraged that birth lottery into more money than any single human needs.

Generally speaking, billionaires are no better than many of us in any notable way. They can be smart, charismatic, or clever, but there are plenty of people who are smarter, more charismatic, and more clever and simply didn’t get as lucky in their birth circumstances.

And, lest we forget those who came from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve billionaire status, luck generally plays a huge role in that as well. Sometimes, the best way to get ahead in life is to simply take advantage of dumb luck when it hands you a win. These people are generally smart and clever enough to take advantage of that luck and will leverage the crap out of it to get ahead, but they often don’t acknowledge it. Rather, they cite their own skills and “hustle” as the source of their success.

Billionaires will do anything to avoid acknowledging that luck and birth circumstances are the primary drivers of their wealth because that would reveal that they are not, in fact, superior to the general public. Rather, they’re a bunch of mediocre idiots who took advantage of their luck or circumstances to get ahead. And, in many cases, they ruthlessly stole something — a piece of technology here, a job opportunity there — to get where they are.

America is a country that idolized billionaires as the creme de la creme, people who are somehow better than the average citizen. Obviously they must be, otherwise, how would they have become so successful? They must be better, smarter, more clever, and more charismatic than the average person, right?

Elon Musk has laid bare that this is not the case even a little bit. His constant missteps and idiotic moves while helming Twitter for the past eight weeks have laid bare his pure mediocrity, exposing him as the averagest of average white guy. His “brilliant ideas” have almost universally flopped, his “genius business decisions” have driven down both the stock prices of his companies and his personal wealth, and his ineptitude as a manager and business owner has become crystal clear.

Elon Musk is not special in any conceivable way. You could put any random white dude in charge of Twitter and get roughly the same outcome as his tenure there. He is, to put it simply, an idiot who is out of his depth because now he is actually in charge of something.

At his other companies, he had layers of executives, assistants, and managers who were able to insulate those companies from his stupid decisions and appease his childish ego. Most of what he did was take credit for the successes of those beneath him despite his poor leadership and tweet random right-wing garbage and conspiracies.

At Twitter, he is in charge, and his mediocrity is showing. His purchase of Twitter started as a troll, but when he was forced to actually do it, it became a vanity project that would show the world how great he was. Oh man did that backfire because everyone can now see that the emperor has no clothes.

This has continually happened in the past handful of years. Now that billionaires are increasingly in the public eye through investigative reporting and their own idiotic social media posts, we have begun to see that they’re actually a bunch of morons. Elon Musk’s Twitter escapade has blown the whole thing wide open, showing us that the inside of the fancy million-dollar armored limousine is packed impossibly full of billionaire clowns.

To paraphrase some random person on the internet somewhere: it’s like when you get your billionth dollar, your brain falls out and you start doing absolutely pants-on-head bonkers stuff. It’s gotten to the point where even some of the most die-hard Elon Musk stans are starting to fall off because he’s made so many stupid decisions that it is becoming harder and harder to justify his “genius.”

So, once again, thank you, Elon Musk, for demonstrating to the world that billionaires are really just a bunch of idiots who got lucky. Your poor business decisions and idiotic public commentary have illustrated your pure mediocrity better than any article I could possibly write. In the writing world, there is an adage: show, don’t tell. You have clearly shown the world what an absolute clown you are. For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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