Jack

@tracewoodgrains · Twitter · 2025-03-12 13:47 UTC

if this is the sort of slop that goes viral on this site, the likes aren't a reward, they're a punishment. "have you even said thank you?" virtually nobody hated Elon for SpaceX. virtually nobody hated him for Tesla. most who hate him now do not hate him out of envy for greatness, but out of despair at what he has done with it. start with the purely pragmatic: if someone hates watching the stock market crash, if they hate watching Trump shred our international relations, if they hate watching the death toll of the end of PEPFAR tick up or the endless stream of crypto grifts or the destruction of long-running longitudinal studies and the unlawful detainment of American permanent residents, of course they'll be disgusted with the man who arguably did more than any other single individual to ensure those outcomes. of course they will! that's what it means to enter politics and leave the realm of the purely technological: it means you will be fighting to ensure some people win and others lose, fighting to claim you know what's best for everyone and they're going to get it good and hard whether they want it or not but DOGE! everyone loves government efficiency! and yes, I thought and hoped that could be a bright spot of his rise, until he started swinging a blunt hammer blindly. many who had been excited at the prospect of thoughtful, effective cuts now wince at as they see just how many new inefficiencies he's adding and how carelessly he's handling his power—still hoping for bright spots, hoping for some efficiencies to come out of it all, but seeing just how far we are from any sort of best case. and what of virtue in personal life? the mothers of Elon's children have to beg him on Twitter for a scrap of attention for urgent medical issues as he parades their kids as status symbols against their wishes. he treats his oldest child as dead to him because she transitioned. he's so desperate to be seen as great that he pays people to pay video games for him, then acts as if he's an expert. no matter how many times people insist this sort of virtue can be disregarded for public figures, I reject that. virtue matters. it mattered in the past, it matters now, it will always matter, and abandoning it drives us towards tragedy. and the lies, the stream of lies! no matter how much people erode it, no matter how much people act like they can sully themselves with repeated falsehoods and remain virtuous through it. he lies about how much DOGE has cut, he lies about his political enemies, he spreads so many falsehoods that his own AI identifies him as the primary spreader of falsehood on his own app and the Community Notes tool he promotes has to work overtime to keep up with his own stream of nonsense as for free speech? Elon claimed, upon buying Twitter, that "for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally"—and then he burned bridges not just with the far left, but with the moderate left and the center, withdrawing into a slop ecosystem of Ian Miles Cheongs and Catturds, grifters and sycophants who would help him uncritically boost the far right. he turned away from people not for their vices, but for their virtues. he feuded with The Site That Shall Not Be Named, the site that's taken a thousand times more principled of a stand on speech than he has, sending links to it into the abyss before choking almost all external links. he suppressed Matt Taibbi, banned journalists he got in personal feuds with. he cheers bold truth-tellers for precisely as long as they boldly tell the truths convenient to him, then discards them to surround himself with slop merchants and grifters. say what you will about i/o, Hanania, Bari Weiss—he didn't unfollow them because they're worse than Catturd or neonazi softcore pornographers, he unfollowed them because they challenged him rather than feeding him the slop and adulation he increasingly demands and people like Vittorio so eagerly provide. I love greatness. I respect nothing more than the pursuit of excellence. and for so long, I wanted to cheer Elon because he was so clearly great, jumping from success to success, defying the odds and building new wonders when he could have rested on his laurels. but the man has changed and is changing further. and in the end, I don't just want great men. I want good men. Elon is the richest and arguably the most powerful man in the world. he has actively, consciously placed himself as the main character not just of this site but of my country, demanding not just extraordinary power but extraordinary attention. he has gone on an attention-seeking bender since calling a rescue diver a pedophile for the sake of a dumb online feud, and has escalated that to mind-warping levels since his purchase of Twitter. he demands ever more attention, ever more adulation, as he becomes less and less worthy of it. power is neutral. it is not good. it is not bad. it is power. and when you acquire it by building good things, then spend it on placing yourself as the main character of your country and demanding attention and adulation for your multi-year bender, at some point it becomes not just blindness but abject cowardice to continue cheering and calling every critique a manifestation of simple resentment from the powerless. the man wants to dictate the course of my future. I want him to be worthy of that. and yes, through all of that, he remains A Complicated Man. because Tesla is that impressive, because SpaceX is that far ahead, because the state of Twitter was that bad, because once you reach the scale Musk reaches you stop being a man and start being a complicated web of cause and effect that transcends normal evaluation. here we are in 2025. alas, what can one say?