Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Elon Musk makes a fool of himself again, this time over Ukraine

I keep writing about Elon Musk, saying that the guy's a jerk and I'm not going to write about him any more. I used to do same with Donald Trump. But I keep coming back for more, even though I know that's exactly what these narcissists want, and I shouldn't be encouraging and enabling them. But the guy says and does such ridiculous things; it's hard not to make some comment.

His latest ridiculous thing is to challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat, with Ukraine as the prize. He tweeted - yes, of course it was a tweet; Twitter is the perfect medium for thoughtless and puerile comments - "I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine." Putin didn't dignify it with a reply (although the Director General of the Russian space agency did - sigh!)

I'm not sure what the Ukrainian leadership thought to this American hypermasculinity and macho posturing (one Ukrainian mayor, an equally macho ex-boxer, seemed to be impressed with Musk, as did Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation, but I'm sure that was not the general consensus). And I'm pretty sure they weren't consulted. 

Maybe it was a joke (it's hard to tell with Musk), in which case it's in pretty bad taste to use a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude for his own self-promotion. And if he was serious, then this is just further evidence that the guy is off his rocker.

Either way, no-one comes out of this looking good, least of all Elon Musk.

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