Let’s call a buffoon a buffoon


It must be nice to be filthy rich, so that you can say any idiotic thing and automatically get lots of attention, a good part of it your defenders rushing to make excuses for your idiocy. Witness Elon Musk.

He’s been proving himself a fool over and over again, yet still there are people who still insist that he’s a genius, rather than a walking, talking demonstration that incompetence can easily float to the top in a capitalist society.

I notice that Egyptians have responded to that stupid remark with deference and respectful disagreement. Politeness doesn’t work any more, and maybe it never worked. How about if we start changing that, beginning with a wealthy capitalist exploiter?

Comments

  1. says

    He hijacked Tesla and rewrote history to make himself THE founder. He has done a lot with the company but had to be reined by the Board with checks put on him because a lot of what he did was stupid. I fear he is suffering from the cognitive and empathetic decline that often strikes the rich and powerful. He has been surrounded by yes-men so long that he really thinks he is infallible and whatever notion comes into his head is the truth.

    Let’s hope whoever is handling day-to-day operations at Tesla is smart enough to keep him from doing damage to the company.

  2. Snarki, child of Loki says

    Heard of the “Modern self-driving Trolley Problem”?

    The solution: “shoot Elon Musk twice”.

  3. batflipenthusiast says

    This real dumb either way.

    But just in case, this is simply just a very stupid and funny joke.

  4. says

    The Behind the Bastards podcast did an episode on Musk. It sounds like he was an odd kid to begin with then was seriously warped with a bad upbringing. Great wealth, being great power, bends him even more.

  5. Matt G says

    Remember, WE are the stupid ones for not getting his obvious joke. Just like we didn’t get his joke about how COVID-19 wasn’t that serious. See how stupid we are? Ha ha!!

  6. cartomancer says

    I mean, it could be sarcastic. A lot of naive people don’t realise how easy it is for sarcasm not to come across in written text. But… even if it is sarcastic… why? What’s the point of that? What does that achieve? Was this in response to someone making that or a similar claim straightforwardly?

  7. robro says

    What was the context of the alien/pyramid tweet? Everything is about the reaction to it and his subsequent tweets reversing the assertion, but I don’t find any lead up to the aliens/pyramid tweet.

  8. erichoug says

    Here’s the real headline: “Cynical Billionaire gets millions in free advertising by saying something ‘controversial'”.

    He’s playing us. Stop giving him free air time every time he does anything.

  9. nomuse says

    Must be nice, though. I can write about pyramids all day and I’ll never get a personal invitation from Dr. Zahi Hawass to show me around.

    (Not unless you count the one in the back of National Geographic, and I think you have to pay for that.)

  10. unclefrogy says

    when the post was first displayed his name was below the line and I knew half way through the first sentence it was Musk.
    uncle frogy

  11. springa73 says

    Not sure whether he really believes it or is just trolling, but either way it makes him look like a jerk.

  12. birgerjohansson says

    So that film with the gate thing was a documentary? Is Elon Musk a Go’uld? Or is he part of a rival group, like the reptilians the president’s favv doctor is talking about?

  13. Bruce says

    I was going to buy a Tesla, but I stopped, because I heard they were designed by outer-space aliens, obv.

  14. says

    I think he might be expressing sarcasm using some obscure Twitter dialect only he speaks. The proper punishment for this sin of communication is to take him literally.

  15. birgerjohansson says

    Just in: UBC says the valleys on Mars were carved by sub-glacial water flow, not by ordinary rivers.
    So Mars never had a ‘warm and wet’ phase.
    The Earth is likely the only world in the system that has life.
    I suppose a supercivilzation might cross interstellar distances, but entities with strong AI and full nanotech capacities have no reason to move stones around, or even play around on a planetary surface drowned in corrosive oxygen in the first place.

  16. cartomancer says

    And just so that everyone is aware, the proper procedure for Dr. Zahi Hawass is to take a drink every time he says “Pyramid” in his unique fashion.

  17. blf says

    As a reminder, Musk is responsible for hair furor’s fixation on hydroxychloroquine. He picked up on quack Didier Raoult’s initial “study”, twittering about it, fox reported on that twittering, and hair furor went deep into the quackery shortly after fox’s “report” (Hydroxychloroquine: how an unproven drug became Trump’s coronavirus miracle cure (7th April): “With help from Fox News and Elon Musk, a misleading French study prompted a wave of misinformation that made its way to the president [sic]”).

  18. numerobis says

    In context: he threw up that tweet, then responded to it with wikipedia, a BBC article about the workers who build the pyramids, and an expression of admiration for Ramses II.

    This was not a particularly great example of buffoonery. I mean, Musk makes a fool of himself constantly, but you picked the time that he did a bait-and-switch to spread good information about pyramids.

  19. says

    @blf Musk is responsible for #bunkerbaby loving hydroxychloroquine
    Musk good
    But Musk makes Teslas. #coalrolling #stigginit
    Musk bad

    Conservatives’ brains leak out of their ears from heat of unshielded cognitive dissonance

  20. robert79 says

    If I were to say something like this, it would be in a pub (ow, how I miss pubs!) among friends (I miss you too even more!!!) and everyone would know me and clearly realize I was saying something sarcastic.

    It’s almost as if Elon Musk doesn’t know he’s famous, and doesn’t know how the internet works… in which case he’s an idiot.

    The other option is that he really believes what he says, in which case he’s even more of an idiot.