These two guys have no idea what they’re doing
Pioneering comedic legend Andy Kaufman once famously held a poll among Saturday Night Live viewers to decide whether he should be kicked off the show. It was a poll that he should have known – and perhaps did know – that he was going to lose. It was always tough to figure out what was going on in his mind, so it never was clear if he had screwed up with the impulsive move, or if it was all just part of the game.
Much as I hesitate to even put the great Andy Kaufman and the thuggish Elon Musk in the same sentence, there’s no ignoring the parallel between Kaufman getting himself voted off SNL and Musk apparently having just gotten himself voted out at CEO of Twitter. No, not by any board of directors or shareholders, but by his own Twitter poll.
Musk spent all day Sunday throwing a policy tantrum, so to speak, by having Twitter officially announce in a tweet thread that tweets and even entire accounts would be banned for posting links to competing social networks, only to delete that thread hours later – making it unclear what Twitter’s terms of service even are at this point. Then Musk posted a poll asking if he should step down as CEO of Twitter, and promising to abide by the results. He ended up losing his own poll by a couple million votes.
For all we know he was planning to step down as CEO anyway. But if that were the case, would he have risked winning the poll? At this point it’s entirely possible that he’s so far gone, he really is just leaving the biggest decisions of his career to the whim of whoever (or whatever) is voting in these online polls. After all, this guy is (or was) the CEO of three major companies, yet he appears to spend most of his time indulging in right wing conspiracy theories on Twitter. That’s proof enough that he’s not right in the head, and not even close. It’s not that big of a leap for him to be dismantling his own life one Twitter poll at a time.
Frankly it’s difficult to decide what’s more embarrassing: that Musk used a Twitter poll as the basis for allowing Donald Trump back onto Twitter, or that Trump never did take Musk up on the offer. Musk humiliated himself to try to get Trump back on the platform, and failed. And of course Trump is making himself irrelevant by not returning to Twitter. Instead Trump is out there trying to convince everyone that his phony 2024 campaign is legitimate by hawking digital trading cards.
These two guys have no idea what they’re doing. None. Zero. Trump has had nearly two years since leaving office to try to figure out how to fend off criminal indictment by the Department of Justice, and he came up with… trading cards. Musk had it made in the shade, until he did the one and only thing that could ever cause the world’s richest man to potentially go broke, which was to single handedly buy up an entire publicly traded company at a price even he couldn’t afford. And now he’s… gotten himself voted out of the leadership position in that company, despite holding a 100% stake in it?
We keep hearing about how these two guys each must have some secret evil genius strategy, that they’re three steps ahead of us, and that everything is going to magically work out in their favor – or that everything is magically going to work out in the favor of whatever mysterious forces my be pulling their strings. But let’s get real. These are simply two narcissistic egomaniacs who got lucky for a long time but have now finally bitten off more than they could chew, and are now making one stupid unforced error after another. There’s no strategy. No plan. No four dimensional chess. Just bumbling. Trump is flailing because he can’t figure out how to keep himself from going to prison. Musk is flailing because he can’t figure out how to keep himself from going bankrupt. Once narcissists stop getting their way, they always flame out in self destructive fashion. These two narcissists are no different.
