He keeps jockeying back and forth with Jeff Bezos for the honor of being the richest person in the world, but when I looked a few day ago, Elon Musk was Numero Uno. Tesla. SpaceX. Boring (the company building the underground transportation loops). Elon's got it all going, accumulation of wealth-wise.
Enough is never enough, of course, so he's been braying of late about taxing billionaires. In his response to this proposal, he ever-so cannily echoed Pastor Martin Niemöller's "First they came for the Socialists..." post-war confessional prose, tweeting “Eventually they run out of other people’s money, and then they come for you.” Clever boy!
Of course, Musk was happy enough in 2008 to take the $465M in bailout money (a.k.a., other people's money, a.k.a., taxpayers' money) to keep Tesla going when it looked like the only place it was going was under. (The company did pay this money back. Still, it was a low-interest loan, and Musk had no problem receiving the government help that put him on the road to super-billionaire status. There's speculation that he'll be the world's first trillionaire.)
Anyway, while a lot of Musk's operations are in California, his growth plans increasingly involve moving to Texas, where there's no grievous personal income tax to worry about.
And it looks like he may not just be interested in building his business deep in the heart of Texas. He's now considering founding/funding a new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science, or TITS.
"Massachusetts," he noted, "has MIT. California has CIT." And Texas would have TITS.
As we used to say in Worcester,
"Count to three and I'll laugh for you."
"One two.."
"Ha-ha, couldn't wait."
And he's looking forward to cashing in on all the "merch" - Musk's word - that'll come out of TITS. Just imagine, if everyone in the country with the mentality of an 11 or 12 year old boy (the ones of the horny variety) buys just one item. Why, Musk'll be - wait for it! - a millionaire.
I'm not all that big on policing the language, other than for the obvious and egregious slurs. And no one has ever accused me of not having a sense of humor. But how is this funny to anyone who isn't an 11 or 12 year old boy? "He said 'tits.' That's so funny." And how is this anything other than insulting to STEM women?
Mostly it's not funny. It's stupid. (By the way, which one is he? Beavis or Butt-Head?)
But - or is it butt? get it? get it? I said butt - Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, so I'm sure his entourage, followers, and worshippers - even those who aren't 11 or 12 year old boys - are well beyond the chortle, through the guffaw, and well into the belly-laugh phase in their response. "Good one, Elon. Good one."
Could Musk get any more juvenile?
He probably can, and as his wealth increases, he probably will. Who's going to stop him?
Makes me want to go hang out with one of the other members of the billionaire boys club. Maybe not Zuck, but I could probably at least have a convo with Jeff Bezos.
Elon Musk. What. A. Jerk.
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