Suspicions confirmed: Musk is a right-wing jerk

Har Har

In the hard copy of today's New York Times: Twitter dissolves Trust and Safety Council. 

This flabby hed should have been Elon Musk dissolves Trust and Safety Council, since it was clearly the world's richest jerk who personally did the deed.

A NY Times story last month by Jason Zinoman tells us all we need to know about Musk. When someone tries that hard to show he has a sense of humor, he doesn't really have one.

It reminds me of what Dwight Macdonald said, more or maybe less, about Max Eastman's ponderous book Enjoyment of Laughter: "Max Eastman got humor down and broke its back." (I can't find the exact quote online, so that's probably a little off.)

Zinoman on Musk and humor:

All the money in the world won’t make you funny.

If there’s one thing Elon Musk is desperately serious about, it’s comedy. Consider the amount of work required to pull off the pun he made in a tweet announcing he bought Twitter, pairing a video of him carrying a sink into the social media company’s lobby with the line “Let that sink in.” 

Someone had to find the heavy prop and schlep it over. Another person needed to film it. Then there was the heavy lifting done by the employees who pretended this was a hilarious idea worth the trouble.

Musk’s interest in electric cars or Ukraine comes and goes, but the richest man in the world is constantly joking. A shameless punchline thief, he doesn’t discriminate between dad jokes or insult humor. On Twitter, he’s Beavis and Butt-Head, chuckling at everything. And according to reporting by my colleague Joseph Bernstein, he makes a point of trying to befriend comics like Nathan Fielder. 

His stated reason for buying Twitter is to expand free speech, a cause he took up in part because it suspended the account of a conservative parody site, the Babylon Bee, after a post. Days after taking over Twitter, he tweeted: “Comedy is legal again.”

Then people started making fun of him and you’ll never believe what happened next. 

Elon Musk, comedy savior, transformed into the joke police. He banned Kathy Griffin for impersonating him on the site, taking a heavier hand in enforcing longstanding policy and tweeting that if users pretend to be someone they are not, they will be suspended without warning. If you wanted to parody someone, he posted, the tweet must be clearly defined as such in your name.

The first notable thing here is that Griffin is now the only comedian in history to be targeted by the most powerful man on Earth (when Trump was president, he furiously attacked her for a tweeted photo of her holding a fake version of his head) and the richest. 

The second is how the thin skin of Musk revealed that being in charge can quickly change your tone on free speech....

Even worse, in today's SF Chronicle: Elon Musk is leaning into transphobia.

See also Elon Musk is a crackpot and Twitter: "Hellhole of hate" and Twitterizing the Democratic Party.