I’ll keep apologising for my homeboy, while the world burns

Several years ago my son recommended that we buy shares in Tesla. Tesla, the company, was a bit of a joke back then, Elon Musk an interesting outlier and potential force for good, so, on the advice of a recent art graduate who couldn’t keep his room tidy, we bought Tesla shares.

Last year, they paid for our wedding. Mazel tov and thank you, Elon – but now please shut up. Because, like his most recent rocket on Saturday, Elon appears to be having a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

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Tesla isn’t a joke nowadays, but Elon has become one. Worse, he’s a dad joke, a bad joke, and, because he’s South African, I keep feeling the need to apologise for him.

But the joke isn’t funny anymore. Elon seems to believe that because he’s the cleverest person in the room he must be right about everything – even things he knows nothing about.

Take his latest clanger: “Jewish communities have been pushing dialectical hatred against whites,” declared a conspiracy theorist on X, to which our man from Pretoria responded: “You have said the actual truth.”

Really? Like Elon, I grew up when schools were segregated by colour, and the Jewish kids were definitely not being bused to Soweto but sitting next to me in biology.

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I presume he’s equating whiteness with white Anglo-Saxon protestants, but who could say?

After all, this is the bloke who accused a man rescuing children stuck in a cave of paedophilia; who took billions in subsidies from the US government but believes companies shouldn’t be subsidised; who reopened a Tesla factory at the height of Covid because he knew better (though the 450 subsequent cases said otherwise); who prevented his workers unionising; who called the Canadian prime minister Hitler; who quoted a neo-Nazi while thinking he was quoting Voltaire; who says he’s going to start a Texas Institute for Technology and Science, acronym Tits, heh-hehheh… (He isn’t.)

He’s a tech-bro with endless money and power who says he wants to save the world, but you know what’s standing in Elon’s way? Elon.

As Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said: “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he can be the one to save it.”

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Meanwhile I guess I’ll keep apologising for my homeboy, while the world burns.