Alien vs Predator Requiem: Elon Musk Takes the Knee
In retrospect I should have expected that Elon would crumple under pressure like a Cybertruck
Earlier this year I wrote about the strange fact that Elon Musk had yet to endorse Donald Trump for president, even though their politics match up in just about every significant way.
Musk, though he claims to have voted for Obama, has been a die hard Republican for some time, and for reasons I guess known only to him, although I think one of his kids coming out as transgender probably did 90% of the legwork on that.
(Late edit: This is now confirmed by the man himself in an interview with whatever noodle-shaped network of prions remains of Jordan Peterson’s brain. According to Musk, his journey to full 4chan chud began with his trans child who is now “dead to him” because she can’t ptocreate).
Notoriously his first child died in infancy so he’s spent the rest of his life trying again until he gets another one he likes, like rolling perfect stats first time on a random character generator and then losing the save file. He won’t blame his own perfect genetics so he blames this nebulous wokeness concept instead.
Everybody knew from the very outset that Donald Trump was going to be the GOP nominee. The primary was a Vice Presidential talent contest and the joke is on all of them because J.D. Vance wasn’t even playing. Nevertheless, Elon Musk spent the first half of the race throwing his entire energy behind Ron DeSantis for some goddamn reason. When it became clear that DeSantis’ campaign ended the moment Trump came up with a funny nickname for him, Musk switched to Vivek Ramaswamy, even though Vivek was wedged so far up Trump’s urethra from day one that he would have done a protest vote against himself for Donald in the miraculous event that he was selected instead.
Two things were notable after Vivek dropped out: Number one, Musk didn’t switch to promoting Nikki Haley, proving the hypothesis that women are below dark-skinned people on the hierarchy of minorities that Musk is willing to tolerate in positions of power. Number two, Musk still did not endorse Donald Trump.
My theory, to recap, which I hesitate to call a theory because I know it to be absolutely true, was that Musk’s ego and need for control are so powerful that he wasn’t going to endorse a candidate who wouldn’t subordinate themselves to him. Both DeSantis and Ramaswamy are nauseating sycophants who would eagerly explore quid-pro-quo arrangements with Musk and his businesses in exchange for access to his immense personality cult.
Trump, though, shares the exact same belief as Musk that everybody in the entire world is beneath him on every metric against which a man’s worth can be measured, from intelligence to fitness to virility, and that presents a problem for both of them because even though their personalities are virtually identical it only means that they’re like two magnetic poles facing each other. They can’t both be North.
Trump needs Musk’s bottomless well of capital and stranglehold on the social media narrative, and Musk needs a federal government that he can wield as a weapon—just owning the state of Texas isn’t enough. But neither man was going to kneel to the other, so neither could get what they mutually needed. It was a truly comical situation, but as the year drew on toward November and things became increasingly desperate for both of them, something eventually had to give.
It is with great schadenfreude that I can announce that Elon Musk finally blinked. He broke like a bitch. And he isn’t happy about it. The week of July 14, starting immediately after Donald Trump got shot with a gun, is the angriest that Musk has been since 2023 when people smarter than him took advantage of his new checkmark buying system to tank the stock of Eli Lilly.
The temper tantrum actually started earlier in the month when Musk started purging LGBT accounts from Twitter—hundreds of them—for no stated reason. You can actually kind of tell what flavour of tantrum Musk is having based on which minority he’s taking it out on. Another Cybertruck recall because the steering wheels explode and decapitate people? Time to put a cowboy hat on backwards and mosey down to the border to threaten Mexicans. Tesla stock crashing because Grok AI keeps quoting Mein Kampf at people? Fly to Tel Aviv with Shapiro and watch drones strike Palestinians on a screen while wearing three layers of Kevlar.
Donald Trump doing poorly in the polls despite his opponent being Mr Magoo gives Elon Musk a raging hard-on for attacking queer communities. But when Trump nearly took a bullet and it finally became obvious that he wasn’t going to stand up in front of a crowd and praise Elon in public, even going as far as to make opposition to electric vehicles part of his platform, Musk knew the game of chicken was over and he was going to have to start clucking.
Groaning under the strain of knees that had never been bent before, the tech world’s insufferable mush-mouthed Vader forced himself to know humility and pledged allegiance to the bloviating Emperor of golden toilets. He’s now dumping as much as $45 million a month on Trump’s re-election campaign. With no apparent quid pro quo deal in place, this means he’s openly engaging in behaviour that he’s only ever demanded from others—pathetic, mewling sycophancy.
He is NOT happy about it.
In the week since his coerced expression of fealty Musk has been running Hulkamania over Twitter, whining about how heroic he is for his position while removing prominent liberal accounts from the monetization scheme, made paranoid claims that the assassins are coming for him as well, and started hatching diabolical voter disenfranchisement schemes that make the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 look as existentially threatening as a campus Republican guidebook for student council elections in comparison.
He's also blaming women for the assassination plot on Donald Trump and has vowed to move both Twitter and SpaceX out of blue-voting California to Texas where he already enjoys a de facto tin-pot dictatorship. Initially he claimed he made this decision because he was sick of getting stuck inside Twitter HQ due to roving drug gangs (translated from Apartheid Afrikaans: this means he was scared of leaving the office when he saw black people outside) but then when he decided that made him sound like even more of a pussy, he switched to claiming he was taking a stand against California’s transgender-friendly laws.
California governor Gavin Newsom responded by simply pointing out Musk’s own self-humiliation to him with a less than flattering screenshot of the last time Donald Trump mentioned his name.
So, besides the sensible chuckle one gets out of seeing Musk prostrate himself before an elderly technophobic game show host who hates him, let’s look at the downsides.
Donald Trump, who already has the full support of many tech oligarchs who are less strangers to sycophancy, now has for all intents and purposes a bottomless well of funding for his campaign. Elon Musk is relatively unique among mind-blowingly rich people in the sense that he tends to, you know, spend his wealth rather than hoard it because he’s more interested in power than yachts.
No other billionaire would, for example, blow a double digit percentage of their entire net worth on an asset in order to deliberately depreciate its value and neuter its ability to operate. Nonetheless, this is what he did with Twitter merely because an open social platform was challenging his ability to control the public narrative around his activities. He did the equivalent of a crooked politician buying the newspaper on a comical scale.
Twitter is a concern now too. Because Donald Trump now owns Elon Musk, Donald Trump now also owns Twitter. MAGA related hashtags now auto-display an image of the triumphant fist photograph from the shooting, and if you click on it, little American flags rain down on your screen.
Notably, journalist Matt Taibbi, who thought he was blowing open the modern Watergate scandal when he wrote a magnum opus of articles at Musk’s direction about supposed collaboration between Twitter and the Joe Biden campaign leading up to 2020, has been strangely silent about the fact that Musk’s deformed Frankenstein’s Monster version of the same social network is reportedly in constant direct communication and collaboration with the Trump campaign.
Controlling such a large stake in the social media environment (remember, Trump still controls his own network, Truth Social) means that Republicans now have a much firmer grip on the media narrative. As I pointed out last week, the traditional (or “legacy” media as Musk loves to call it) is more or less in the bag for Trump now as well, if for nothing but vulgar ratings reasons.
The ramifications of the new Trump/Musk collaboration are kind of frightening but it doesn’t necessarily form an insurmountable obstacle. For one thing, the fact of their now public collaboration opens the Democratic campaign to the ability to attack Musk more directly. To use an analogy Musk might appreciate, his cloaking device is deactivated and his shields are down.
But we also have to remember that these two guys still just fucking hate each other. One must not understate the benefit of that. The house of Trump/Musk can only ever be divided against itself for so long as Trump thinks space travel and electric cars are kinda gay. We can live in hope that they’ll rip each other apart sooner or later.
That's just so cartoonish, the flags raining down thing. 🤣
Ouch, that photo of Musk in the oval office, and the tweet. Sooooo embarrassing. 🤦♀️