Elon Musk - You’re A Clown

Why and how a few individuals - relative to the whole population - became rich, often obscenely so, was a question that, once upon a time, troubled those who told the world that capitalism was A Very Good Thing. And then along came pioneering social scientist William Sumner, a supposedly anti-elitist “classical liberal”, to put their minds at rest.

Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me ...

Sumner’s conclusion may not be so well known nowadays: “The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society”. So now we knew: conspicuous wealth was nothing to concern us. It was just another facet of Darwinism.

Had Sumner encountered some of the latest crop of the overmonied and underbrained, one hopes that he may have stopped, thought, and revisited that analysis, especially given the behaviour of one Elon Musk, who sounds like a cheap and nasty aftershave, but in reality is far more evil-smelling, rather more politically polarised, and not particularly clever.

This last attribute has been brought into sharp focus in the wake of Musk taking over the platform formerly known as Twitter. He was, we were told, rich and clever, so what was not to like? Sadly, he turned out to be out there on the extreme right, and not clever at all. Nor did he think things through.

Musk took the Twitter brand and binned it. Instead, the platform became simply “X”. ReTweets became Reposts. Blue ticks were confiscated, except for those prepared to pay for the privilege. Those who had been on Twitter for many years began to set up accounts on Mastodon and Threads. Just how much cleverer, one wondered, was Twitter, or X, going to become?

Yesterday came the answer to that one: it was going to get far less clever, after Musk once again leapt without looking, failing abysmally to think through his latest wheeze, and pronounced, in the style (or lack of it) of a very amateurish Roman Emperor, that “Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs”. Well, crush me a few more grapes O Tedious Maximus, but this is total crap. His Tweet, or X, soon attracted a Community Note.

Which read simply “Elon Musk cannot do this. The feature to block someone on the site is REQUIRED as a social media app to be allowed on the App Store or the Google Play Store”. William LeGate had a prediction: “I predict Elon isn’t aware of this [requirement] & will backtrack - saying he was ‘trolling’ or ‘joking’ - and his followers will buy it”. Others were not buying it.

Indeed, one not impressed at all, and with more than a million followers, was Monica Lewinsky (yes, HER), who tagged Musk and his CEO Linda Yaccarino to tell them “Please rethink removing the block feature. As an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it’s a critical tool to keep people safe online”. What say Ms Yaccarino to that?

“Our users’ safety on X is our number one priority. And we’re building something better than the current state of block and mute. Please keep the feedback coming”. She could be arguing in her spare time. It all sounded as if someone was making it up on the fly. It wasn’t broke, but the great Musk was going to fix it anyway. He had spoken. Crush some more of those grapes!

User feedback varied from Kathy O’Donnell simply stating “Removing the block from this site will make it unusable for me”, to the great Doc Hackenbush in Max Subtlety mode: “Nothing illustrates the necessity of the block button better than the 5000 drooling sex offenders about to show up in your mentions to repeatedly tell you how blocking is unnecessary”.

The Tweeter known as Flying Rodent could only conclude that “This guy really is incredible, like the Lord invented one man whose entire purpose was to lead humanity by the nose through the idea ‘capitalism = actually bad’ specifically by targeting and infuriating the people employed to tell the public it is awesome”. Awesomely bad. Yes, that’s Space Karen in one.

Cloughie could have been talking about Musk: “He’s a clown, young man”.

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