Elon Musk Is the Physical Embodiment of a Reddit Post

Honestly there'south non a lot to say about this. Hither'due south a delicious clip of Tesla CEO Elon Musk on lx Minutes trying non to cry as he's asked well-nigh existence also impulsive and insecure to run his own Twitter account.

Nothing like a practiced one-time-fashioned prune of a guy richer than anyone reading this will ever exist crying considering he made a weed joke so stupid it triggered a federal enforcement machinery. (Lesley Stahl and Musk are discussing Tesla'southward recent settlement with the SEC, which required him to step down as chairman, pay a fine, and put in place some sort of mechanism to monitor what he posts online.)

This is your king? This guy? The wealthiest "redditor from the late aughts" in the globe taking time away from binge-watching Rick & Morty and cracking epic bacon references to willingly become on one of the most-watched news programs in America and declare that he does not respect the SEC in the same way a 12-year-old might say they don't respect a crosswalk signal? Him?

Why exactly do we (or perchance merely I) have this fascination with watching Elon Musk's train wreck of a life? Part of it is that he's rich, duh, and it is very funny to watch insanely rich people who could very well just exit the spotlight forever and chill on a private isle rather than burn under the glare of public scrutiny. Personally I would beloved to exist rich and completely divorce myself from guild, no criminal offense.

Another pleasurable aspect of this is that Musk is legitimately terrible in some means, such as how he subjected Tesla workers to dangerous and discriminatory working conditions. And so seeing that blazon of person weep is wild and gives me a lilliputian thrill of cheap schadenfreude.

But maybe the reason I remain fascinated with Elon is because he is literally, as I alluded to before, a rich redditor. By this, I don't hateful that he actually uses Reddit (although: peradventure). I mean that the personality he presents publicly is largely shaped by the civilization that Reddit spawned, a sort of digital libertarianism founded on the idea that heavy cyberspace users are wiser than everyone else.

Musk is doing epic projects like building a cyborg dragon, or selling flamethrowers. He's got an involvement in logic and reason and reducing everything to mathematics, like when he suggested ranking journalists by trustworthiness. He too lashes out and calls people "pedos" when they criticize his ideas — the blazon of overreach that pseudonymous online flame wars oft descend into. He thinks 420 references are funny enough to be worth the legal headache, but says he doesn't really fume. He carps virtually the First Amendment. He's also capable of occasionally demonstrating a notable grasp of STEM topics.

I believe Elon Musk is literally what would happen if you gave the prototypical redditor a blank cheque. He probably has a closet total of Threadless T-shirts. He would have been an angel investor in Reddit Isle, the sick-fated effort by a few Reddit users to buy an island and start their own sovereign nation.

And so clips like Musk on 60 Minutes are compelling to me because they are the most vibrant demonstration yet of what happens when you take the digital libertarian out of the Reddit bubble and into the existent world where people like Lesley Stahl call you lot on your stuff. The logic that those like Musk hold then dear crumbles under scrutiny: He respects the concept of justice, but not the body doling information technology out, the SEC? His supposedly market-moving tweets don't demand to be reviewed past anyone else, unless they're definitely going to motility the market?

And through information technology all he is and then close to crying. Despite the fact that he doesn't need to field of study himself to any of this really. The smartest guy in the conversation room just can't convince himself to log out, fifty-fifty when he's literally logged out.

Elon Musk Is the Physical Embodiment of a Reddit Post