If I never write about Elon Musk’s mad shenanigans at Twitter again, it will be too soon.
It seems like the tech world lurches from one insane episode to another.
It’s as embarrassing as watching World Rugby rescinding red cards for dangerous tackles, putting England’s marketing for next month’s world cup ahead of player safety.
Musk’s increasingly weird and over-the-top behaviour since he bought Twitter for $44bn last year has not only reduced its value by half, but has also lowered the tone of public debate to nonsense like poop emojis and cage fights.
Sadly, Musk is the new Donald Trump – everything he does becomes newsworthy because of who he is and how wealthy he is. What he does is no longer news.
The first time he challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, as puerile and improbable as it was, it was news. Now it isn’t.
We all laughed at Trump’s late-night, somnambulist Covfefe tweet. Now it seems as if Musk is embracing his right-wing hero’s antics and will do anything to remain in the spotlight.
I suspect he is a narcissist. A brilliant, world-changing genius who has reinvented space travel and electric cars, while creating a satellite internet business that was crucial for the Ukrainians after last year’s Russian invasion.
This, however, has become Covfefe 2.0.
Is the latest round of cage fight drivel a real story or a desperate attempt to get attention?
It has evolved into some form of bizarre online Munchausen syndrome. As soon as Musk feels unloved, which is usually late at night, he says something outrageous to his 153m Twitter followers.
Zuckerberg is the all-American alpha male. He has been training with mixed martial arts nutters and I assume this is where Musk found his inspiration for the initial insult.
Zuckerberg is – and I say this with some reservation and awareness of the potential insult to others – the ultimate example of short-man syndrome. When the then-Facebook CEO addressed Congress over misinformation and election interference, he required a booster seat. Bing the images. It’s hilarious and sad at the same time.
We all know this cage fight will never happen, and yet the headlines over this lunatic behaviour appear whenever Musk wants attention.
I’m quite sure Musk thinks this is amusing – and is revelling in the interest he is getting – but it isn’t funny anymore. If it ever was.
Musk is an attention-seeking missile who will do anything to remain in the spotlight.
Remember what happened when the President of the United States, Joe Biden, got more engagement with his tweet about this year’s Super Bowl?
Musk went berserk.
This major US sports event is the equivalent of a World Cup final – albeit with only one country competing – and is the high point of US television. It was Musk’s unacceptably nasty and bullying behaviour during this instance that truly turned me off a man I had admired for years.
Screaming, “You’re fired, you’re fired” into the face of anyone, let alone one of the last two principal engineers at Twitter, is beyond the pale. Like Musk, I was bullied at high school. I know the shame and hot tears of this kind of inexcusable behaviour.
When bullied kids become bullying adults, that is when they have truly failed as human beings. If you have experienced something so awful, why would you do it to anyone else?
We haven’t even got to Musk’s equally inexcusable and destructive comments about farm killings and so-called “white genocide”. Owning the digital town square doesn’t give anyone the right to spew disinformation.
If anything, like elected officials or the CEOs of listed companies, it behoves you to hold yourself to a higher standard. If only Musk could get this. DM