Elon Musk loves trolling, and knows exactly what buttons to push to get his outrage fix. But this time he triggered Grimes, and the Twitterati was quick to point out even worse tweets she's left unchallenged.
Is Grimes starting to feel Kim Kardashian's pain over her partner's Twitter antics? | Image: ANGELA WEISS / AFP
Normal people relax with a late-night Netflix binge, a good book, a walk in the park, a hot bath. But Elon Musk is far from ordinary. The Tesla CEO recharges his batteries with a stout jolt of outrage from the Twitterati.
This time the master troll got his girlfriend, Grimes triggered. After Elon Musk tweeted, “Pronouns suck,” Grimes slammed him in the mentions. She said, “I cannot support hate,” seeming to infer an attack on unconventionally gendered pronouns.
Grimes might be in on it. One could imagine Musk and Grimes giggling together over a staged Twitter spectacle. With these two, you never know. But she might just be getting tired of Elon’s antics. Musk’s growing friendship with the ever-controversial Kanye West might be throwing fuel on the fire.
West’s latest outbursts in his quixotic bid for president have left Kim Kardashian worried that he’s coming undone. They might push the power couple from the verge of divorce to signing papers.
Getting tired of your billionaire husband or boyfriend making people mad on the Internet is the epitome of “first world problems.” It’s like the one percent of the one percent problems. But are you not entertained? Many commentators on social Twitter were quick to point out the oddity of where Grimes draws the line.
She had no objection when Musk seemed to admit the ouster of Bolivian President Evo Morales was a U.S.-led coup for the country’s lithium resources. On top of that, Grimes let him name their baby after a CIA spy plane deployed in the deadly skies over Vietnam.
Grimes’ priorities aren’t unusual for young socialists in America today. They’ve elevated gender politics above fiscal and foreign policy.
Elon Musk’s old PayPal partner, Peter Thiel, would say that reveals the “interiority” of modern thinking. He argues we emphasize what’s happening in our interior worlds above what’s going on outside in the “real” world.
Bomb Vietnam? No problem. Overthrow sovereign governments? Go ahead. But make someone uncomfortable, “micro-aggress,” disagree with how they perceive themselves, and you’ve committed an unacceptable transgression. The interiority of social thinking is evident even in how Musk’s tweet is interpreted.
The father of seven didn’t attack transgender people. He said, “Pronouns suck.” That could be the exasperated tweet of a transgender person.
He could have referred to demonstrative, relative, or interrogative pronouns, to start a grammar nerd out. The anime-loving Musk may have been showing his love for Japanese, which some linguists argue has no pronouns.
The tweet is a Rorschach blot, and Twitter socialists saw an attack on evolving norms in gendered pronouns. Elon Musk has publicly said he’s raising his baby gender-neutral. The Twitterati still perceived an attack on their new norms.
In May, Grimes’ mother slammed Musk for tweeting, “Take the red pill.” She thought it was Men’s Rights Activist “bulls——.” Maybe Elon just likes “The Matrix.” (Which was created by two trans women, the Wachowskis.)
Musk is a known Twitter troll. He hasn’t left any doubt that he primarily uses the platform to troll–and that he thinks that’s pretty much all it’s good for. The billionaire engineer has said so explicitly himself. Musk even fought for his right not to be taken seriously on Twitter in court–and won.
The court determined it was not libel when Elon Musk called someone a “pedo guy” in a heated Twitter debate. That elevated the legal threshold for defamation in future suits when it comes to “casual rhetoric” and “hyperbole” on social media. Musk has even told his followers not to take his tweets seriously.
It’s amazing to see crowds of Twitter socialists taking Elon Musk too seriously. You’d think a troll’s power would evaporate once he reveals his game. Like Rumpelstiltskin, once the miller’s daughter knows his name.
Liberal Twitter can’t help breaking the oldest rule of the Internet: Don’t feed the trolls. Or as the socialist playwright and humorist George Bernard Shaw said long before the Internet:
I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.