We all of us wonder, don’t we, how we’ll be remembered once we are gone. What is to be our epitaph, our legacy, our bequest to history?
I’m fairly sure Elon Musk thinks about this sort of thing as well, although perhaps he could’ve done with thinking about it rather longer and harder, since he appears, in the last few months, to have decided that rather than be remembered as the man who solved the energy crisis by solarising the world and popularising the electric car, or indeed as the man who took the human race back into space and possibly to Mars, he’d rather go down in history as the man who seized control of perhaps the most democratic and egalitarian means of mass communication ever conceived, and ruined it because he was worried there weren’t enough racists on it (or something; like Musk’s original hairline, his motives for buying Twitter have long since receded).
Finding himself $44bn (£36.5bn) out of pocket after the purchase, Musk immediately set about trying to find ways of making his money back. His first bright idea was to take Twitter’s famous “blue tick” verification mark and put it up for sale to anyone for the price of $8 a month. Notwithstanding the economic ropiness of this idea, the fact that what had previously been a badge of authenticity was now available to everyone instantly caused a rash of mischievous impersonations. This came to a head when a fake but nonetheless apparently “verified” account set up in the name of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly cheerfully announced that henceforth all insulin would be free, resulting in $16bn being wiped off Eli Lilly’s market value.
Elon Musk has a lot of fun playing at being a billionaire, but now that he’s starting to annoy the real ones, he may need to watch his back.
The smart money now is on Musk selling Twitter on for a nominal fee to someone who might actually be able to hold it together, before it finally implodes and takes him and his other companies with it. Once he’s free of Twitter he’ll be looking for something else to do. With that in mind here are… some things Elon Musk could ruin next.
AMAZON
Musk’s arch-nemesis Jeff Bezos, very much the Lex Luthor to Musk’s, erm, other Lex Luthor, has recently announced his intention to retire as CEO of Amazon soon to spend more time with his spaceships. I’m sure Musk would love to make his mark on the online retail giant and its video streaming service, purging anything tiresomely “woke” from the schedules (essentially leaving nothing but WWE wrestling and dodgy old westerns) and making all deliveries free to anyone who says anything nice enough about him in the comments box.
Mark Zuckerberg, very much the Lex Luthor… of reality, seems to be mired in hubris to an almost Elon-esque degree right now, having devoted all his attention and, one imagines, a sizable chunk of his incalculable fortune, to expanding Facebook into the Meta online universe. This is supposed to add a whole new virtual level to reality, although to the untrained eye, it does look an awful lot like an early noughties Sims game, and indeed to serve about as much purpose.
Should Zuckerberg ever tire of his thus-far futile quest to make himself on any level likable or relatable, and choose instead to retire to his compound in Hawaii to set about making himself some android friends who will NEVER be mean to him, I’m sure Musk would be only too happy to step into the breach.
One imagines Musk would prefer Facebook to be an altogether more exclusive affair, restricting membership to his own “friends”. That done, he could re-designate his friends as “Bros” and before long Facebook would be restored to its original function: creeping after college girls and rating them for hotness (this is true, check it out).
AMERICA
Tragically, Musk’s South African origins render him ineligible to run for president of the United States, which is a shame as that job has turned out to be rather more attainable by narcissistic tycoons than previously thought.
HUMANITY
Since it is possible, in the age of genetically modified crops, to copyright the DNA of a given species, one wonders if, for the right price, the rights to the genetic blueprint for human beings could be purchased.
I’m sure Musk has considered this, and also what modifications he’d go about introducing. With a few minor tweaks, he could fix it so that every woman in the world found him irresistible, and that every man in the world except him immediately went bald.
POEM OF THE WEEK
There was a young PM called Rishi
Whose authority was at best squishy
Rebellious stenches
Came from the back benches
And soon it all smelled rather fishy
