While he is accused of having conversed with Vladimir Putin in the middle of the war against Ukraine, Elon Musk is having fun with his bottle of perfume with the smell of burnt hair. It’s time to get seriously worried.
When the monkey points to the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. In the case of Elon Musk, it is rather the opposite: the imbecile points the finger to divert attention from the star.
While the billionaire is suspected of having shared Kremlin propaganda after talking in person with Vladimir Putin, Musk uses his Twitter account with 108 million followers to share, on October 12, 2022, the latest absurd creation of a his undertakings: the sale of a perfume with the smell of “burnt hair”. The product is posted on the official website of The Boring Company, its tunnel construction company designed to accommodate hyperloops, very high-speed trains.
It didn’t take 48 hours to 20,000 blinded fans flock to the product at 104 euros each. Musk won two million dollars there, but above all strong press coverage, which allowed him to saturate the media space again with his person. And, to talk about things other than his geopolitical wanderings.
Elon Musk is no longer funny, but he should be worried
Let’s say it immediately: Musk did not wait to be suspected of collusion with Russia to promote absurd objects. It was through the Boring Company that he had already marketed a flamethrower in 2018 which had also sold 20,000 copies. At the time, we were already wondering about this obsession of the richest man in the world for quirky derivative products (from beers to the whistle, through the surfboard and Tequila or even the mini-shorts) .
Four years ago, however, Elon Musk had not yet fallen into extreme omnipresence, sticking his nose in the most serious and complex geopolitical conflicts of the moment. The billionaire is in all business, has an opinion on all conflicts, thinks he can change everything with his wonderful ideas — the most worrying thing is that he can really change everything, but only thanks to his immense fortune and the total absence of contradiction that is opposed to it.
You only have to read his private SMS exchanges to realize it: Musk only surrounds himself with men who are completely fans of him, who praise him as soon as he opens his mouth and agree with him. to each of his most controversial ideas. His latest obsession: the takeover of Twitter, a platform that allowed him to establish his media domination by amplifying his words, but which he considers to be too left-leaning (while its algorithms actually favor right-wing comments, and that he uses it regularly to shout his hatred of “woke” people and to hit on trans people).
Elon Musk is, like Donald Trump in 2016, the same product of an ailing digital ecosystem, which extolled entertaining buffoons for doing the show and allowed to earn clicks. The backlash is catastrophic: a handful of men concentrate the wealth, the influence, the power, but also now capture a large part of our attention time.
The mix of genres has never been so striking: from one day to the next, there is talk of one of the greatest geopolitical betrayals, then of a perfume “burnt hairs”, then of the potential destruction of the platform most influential in the political and media world. We jump from news to news like ecstatic grasshoppers in search of entertainment, forgetting that these are the decisions of one and only man.
Experts are beginning to suggest that if he really wanted to save Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk should step back from their presidency, to allow them to continue to bring innovations beneficial to the quality of life of women and men, as well only for research and science.
If today we consider preserving companies, perhaps we should pay the same degree of attention to our democratic societies, in order to preserve them, too, from erratic billionaires.