Standing in the back bed of his biggest bum, his face dark in shadow, the billionaire who built a frenzy of fans through seemingly inhuman feats of engineering and willpower was cut short: Elon Musk presided over the first deliveries of a Tesla truck. which, like most things Musk touched, was drastically over budget and way beyond the original shipping schedule. Furthermore, just a few days earlier, Musk had effectively sealed the sad fate of another of his companies by publicly telling advertising partners to “fuck [themselves].”
To say he looked diminished is putting it mildly.
The Cybertruck launch, like most of Tesla’s delivery events, was no big deal. My more patient colleagues have done a far better job than I ever could of recounting what happened there. Suffice it to say that Musk briefly protested the capabilities of his stainless steel monstrosity before explaining to a few of the Cybertruck’s slanderous early new owners (including one Alexis Ohanian) the highly non-obvious way to open their doors, then repeating a vague and convoluted statement about how wild it will be to see these roll around before they call it a day.
I mentioned the odd choice of him standing in the bed of the truck in semi-darkness, despite having a stage lighting setup very clearly designed not to do that, but I neglected to note the moment when a Franz von Holzhausen sheep was drugged to weakly fly . a baseball on the Cybertruck’s windows, in a moment that felt like unintentional satire when he smashed the original prototype’s windows at a 2019 unveiling event. The only takeaway from this watered-down rendition was that if von Holzhausen had replicated the 2019 crash faithfully , with steel balls and a proper toss, I’m almost convinced it would have broken the windows again.
Musk didn’t address his crumbling social media product or how his frequent, inflammatory comments and fueling of false and dangerous conspiracy theories have made it impossible to see a path forward for X that doesn’t end badly. He didn’t talk about how his range of distractions, including a spacecraft that periodically launches from South Texas, is causing serious misgivings among Tesla investors. Mainly, he talked about the Cybertruck’s potential benefits to owners in the event of the end of modern civilization. Again: about how cool they’ll look.
No longer the confident, if controversial, big-swing prognosticator and solution engineer, Musk has instead become a crazed, confused, and rabid champion of far-right nonsense and wavering beliefs. Even his seemingly existential objection to the rapid development of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence turns out to be little more than petty jealousy, as evidenced by the rushed introduction of Grok, his much more juvenile and mud-brained counterpart.
No doubt Musk continues to benefit from legions of devoted fans – many of whom I’m sure will let me know how amazing he still is and how rubbish I still am – but it’s hard to deny that his influence is waning now, and the prime time of his dumbest idea fleshed out in the form of Cybertruck seems like an essential book for his time in power.
