Mar 27, 2021
Daddy Elon
Like all good things, Elon Musk is everywhere.
Every time I’m on Twitter, I scroll straight to his feed and gaze in awe at his hilarious, relatable tweets, and wonder to myself how a man who is supposedly the intellectual mastermind behind at least three cutting-edge tech businesses has enough time to tweet crowdpleasing memes five times a day.
Every time I’m on Hustle-Instagram, scrolling through DailyGrind and Millionaire Feeds and Billionaire Fucks, I read his pearls of wisdom. “If you get up in the morning and think the future will be better, that’s a good day”, he says, and I audibly gasp: I never thought about it that way before. “Read a book every day,” he tells me, and I shit myself in shock. Of course, he never actually said some of this stuff, but on the Internet, value can be generated purely by putting someone famous’ picture next to a vapid quote. Pictures of Daddy Elon are their own form of currency. A cryptocurrency, you might say. “Billionaire fucks” however, is real. Look it up.
I dream of one day having the drive, the passion, the hustle to inherit unimaginable wealth gathered by my family during apartheid-era South Africa. Of course, it’s one thing to inherit family wealth through historical systems of apartheid, but it’s another thing entirely to continue to exploit vulnerable workers even in today’s era of lefty snowflakes and workers’ rights.
But anyone who cares about whether workers are allowed to unionise needs to stop being such a simp for equality. Stop being cucked by your own sense of self-worth. I honestly wouldn’t mind working in wage slavery for my entire life, being denied the right to unionise or feed by family, if it means I can help fund the mindless exploits of one ubercapitalist who has figured out how to bolster his image through trendy, self-referential meta humour.
He can land a fucking rocket ship!! He built a fucking tunnel beneath LA which makes cars go zoom zoom!! He’s in Rick and Morty! He builds Cybertrucks! Yes, cyberpunk was originally conceived as a radical artistic movement highlighting the inevitable endpoint of capital forces, but only with relentless avaricious capitalism can that fantasy become a reality. Well, perhaps not yet, because his bulletproof Cybertruck lost in a fistfight with a hammer, but that didn’t stop 200,000 people ordering one in the first 3 days. (Really, look it up.) Gives me hope for humanity.
But I view the entire world as essentially a scaled-up version of my childhood LEGO sets, and I am absolutely fine with the fact that enough money to end world hunger is being splurged on projects which are explicitly pointless. Once climate collapse is finally upon us, and the rich retreat to their enclaves of civility, I will take heart from imagining how fucking cool Elon Musk looks getting to work and back, while I throttle neighbourhood rats in a futile attempt to feed my dying family.
Talking of family: Elon is truly aspirational in his choice of a woman young enough to be his daughter as a wife. And their son, who Elon presumably named by smashing his forehead into a keyboard! Almost as if it was just to impress me and my friends. In fact, that is the only conceivable reason why you would name your child X Æ A-12: to try to impress random hordes of strangers. To reiterate: this is a good thing.
So yes, I am unapologetic in my adoration of this super-8 8-bit Bitcoin cointhrift. As a twenty-five year old man brought up on superhero movies, I have absolutely no qualms participating in the generation-wide stockholm syndrome of worshipping a fifty year-old billionaire manchild cosplaying as Tony Stark.
And not even his most ardent fanboy can deny this, since the man himself paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a brief cameo in Iron Man 2. Imagine, writing a cheque worth more than the salary of 10 of your workers in a year, to pay Gwyneth Paltrow to pretend to know who you are. For the chance to absolutely massacre two lines in a Hollywood film. Look it up.
Or better still, look up.
