Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
Elon Musk must be feeling the heat. Last week, the man who spent $44 billion purchasing Twitter because his favorite bigots kept getting thrown off the platform decided to use his overpriced digital dumpster to threaten Democrats who intend to investigate him if they win control of Congress on Nov. 3.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he wrote, responding to a Politico report detailing the investigations Democrats are preparing. Then, because subtlety has never been one of his intellectual strengths, he warned that he would “find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.” Well, goddamn. Lex Luthor has discovered congressional oversight, and somebody needs to explain to him that the United States Constitution does not have a customer-service department where billionaires can demand to speak to the manager.
Elon Musk has proven himself, time and time again, to be a piece-of-shit human being. He is an extraordinarily wealthy man with the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old boy who just got suspended from Xbox Live for calling somebody a racial slur. He does not understand how American government works, and he has demonstrated absolutely no curiosity about learning. Congress is not a corporate board he can stack with ass-kissers, intimidate with stock options, or fire because somebody hurt his feelings. Congressional subpoenas do not give a flying fuck how many satellites he owns, how many rockets he launches, or how many zeros appear on his bank statements. The legislative branch was conducting investigations long before Elon Musk was born, and it will continue doing so long after his latest midlife crisis has been converted into another embarrassing social media post.
What Musk understands is money. It is the only language he speaks fluently, the foundation of his entire personality, and the yardstick by which he measures his own importance: how much wealth he can accumulate, how many companies he can purchase, how many politicians he can bankroll, and how many women he can bed and impregnate along the way. The man approaches reproduction like he is personally responsible for solving an imaginary population shortage. Somewhere in America, a family court clerk probably sees his name on the docket and starts calculating overtime. For all his talk about advancing civilization, Musk seems convinced that humanity’s greatest technological achievement would be producing enough little Elons to populate a medium-sized congressional district.
And for a man who worships money, he has demonstrated a truly spectacular inability to spend it intelligently. Consider his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which deserves its own chapter in the history of billionaires doing dumb shit because nobody in their immediate orbit has the courage to tell them to sit their stupid asses down. Musk became increasingly irritated that Twitter was suspending accounts belonging to his favorite collection of racists, conspiracy theorists, and professional grievance merchants. Evidently, the possibility that people might face consequences for behaving like assholes on a privately owned platform was an intolerable assault on Western civilization. So, rather than find another website where his bigoted buddies could gather and exchange their latest theories about why minorities are responsible for everything, this fool decided to buy the entire goddamn company.
And here is the part that makes me laugh. There was a reason Jack Dorsey wanted out of the Twitter business.
