In his spat with Trump, the man who literally owns X has been hoist by his own platform. Guys, no one is safe!
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id you see Elon Musk apologise for some tweets this week? (Please don’t be naff and call them “X posts”.) Like me, you will be so embarrassed for Earth’s primo edgelord that he feels pressed into doing something so excruciatingly conventional. This is worse than when Kate Moss was scapegoated into rehab.
Imagine owning the world’s premier shitposting platform – in fact, having spent $44bn (£32bn) on it, specifically so that your magic mirror would tell you each day that you were the fairest shitposter of all – and then shuffling sheepishly on to your own pixels to mumble something about having gone “too far” with your hurty words. Buck up, sadsack – honestly.
We’ll come in a minute to how this hilariously preposterous spectacle should surely mark the absurdist endpoint of humankind’s intensely brief, intensely passionate, and intensely destructive relationship with social media. But first, a recap. Elon’s apology, of course, related to last week’s spectacular online beef that he’d started with US president Donald Trump over the latter’s OBBB. (Sounds like a specialist Pornhub search term; actually stands for One Big Beautiful Bill.) Amusingly, the two men were not able to directly confront each other, each feeling that they could only engage on their own platforms – X in Musk’s case, Truth Social in Trump’s. Going forward, we surely need some proxy platforms these two superpowers can fight on, like the proxy war countries of the cold war. Maybe Threads and Bluesky could play the role of Vietnam and Nicaragua?
