Sometimes a trending news piece will hit me kind of sideways. It causes me to ask what seems to me to be an obvious question, and yet the article doesn’t answer that question. That makes me wonder if I see the world differently than others, or if, in fact, the media, their subjects, and those who devour the resulting stories have all, collectively, lost their ever-loving minds.
That was my reaction just now when I read a Newsweek story entitled, “Elon Musk Claims ‘Stalker’ Targeted Car With Young Son Inside”. Newsweek didn’t hesitate to mention the son in the headline, to grab your attention. Mission accomplished. I must admit that Elon Musk does not impress me one bit, and it’s a rare occasion when I’m compelled to read anything about him. I think he’s a nitwit. But Newsweek got me when they said “Young Son”. I took the bait.
So I read the short article, which discusses a stalker who followed a car that was carrying his son. The guy apparently blocked the car and climbed up on its hood. Elon says the guy mistakenly thought he himself was in the car, but no such luck.
Elon even tweeted footage of what appears to be a rather well-groomed, unsweaty white male dressed in black, wearing a mask and looking for all the world like the love child of a leading man in an Alfred Hitchock movie and a high-end ninja turtle. And get this: he’s also filming the filmer! There is no explanation as to how this footage was obtained.
The filmer of said footage was able to approach this car, which had its window conveniently rolled down, and not only talk to the guy (who didn’t seem the least bit agitated), but also get a clear, unobstructed view of his license plate. And yet no one seems to wonder how, under those circumstances, the guy managed to get away in his little Hyundai. If any of the elements of this story are true, you couldn’t provide the police with more clues if you covered the guy in neon paint and hung him feet first from a billboard.
It feels to me like this story comes with a hefty dose of laughing gas. We have been habituated to weirdness since 2016. But I still find it astounding that people seem willing to leave their critical thinking at the door, and take this weird story at face value.
The article goes on to say that Elon blocked someone’s Twitter account because it was tweeting the real-time location of his private jet. He discusses the lawsuit he has against this guy, and also mentions that anyone doxing real-time location info of anyone will get their twitter account suspended.
If you aren’t looking closely, it would be easy to assume that his stalker was the guy he’s suing, or at least someone acting on his behalf. But in truth, that connection is never even attempted, let alone established. That’s a strange segue. But that’s not even my primary puzzlement.
My question is, “How did this story become all about Elon and his safety? What about the two-year-old who probably just had the wits scared out of him? Is he okay? And what are you doing to make HIM safe, Elon?”
I mean, for the love of God, he’s talking about lawsuits and doxxing and his own safety when his 2-year-old was probably pooping in his little diaper from the sheer terror of it all. How is that not the main story? A normal parent wouldn’t be thinking about himself in this situation. A normal parent would be so freaked out for his kid that he wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else.
The kid already has enough problems by having a father who seems to lose more of his marbles every single day, a man whose life is a spectacular, slow motion train wreck. And to make matters worse, they name the kid “X Æ A-Xii” so that he’ll feel even more like the richest turd in the punchbowl as he grows up. But you have to wonder how old the kid will have to get before he realizes that it never occurred to his dad to say something like, “I dropped everything to rush to X’s side to make sure he was okay.”
In fairness, I suppose Elon could have done so, but he certainly didn’t give that impression to the reporters, and I suspect he would have. He’s all about trying to spin his image positively, although he often fails spectacularly in that effort. Instead, in this instance, he seems to have been quite focused on his tweeting.
What more proof do you need that Elon Musk cares about nobody but himself? He has turned Twitter into a 24 hour hate fest where there are no holds barred, but heaven forefend someone tweet some publicly accessible information about where his stupid jet is. His kid’s very life is threatened, and Elon’s zeroes in on physical safety violations… directed at him.
There’s more to this story, dear reader. I can feel it. Something is rotten in Musk-land.
It breaks my heart that this cute little kid lives in such a rarefied, drama-filled, overly-entitled environment. In that atmosphere, the odds that he’ll grow up to be mentally healthy, compassionate and decent are extremely long. It’s not fair to him. He never asked for any of this.
He’ll have to become paranoid out of a sense of sheer self-preservation, because no one is at a higher risk for kidnap than the son of someone who was, until quite recently, the richest freakin’ man in the world. In addition, he’ll never know who his friends really are. That right there is a good reason to have trust issues.
As he grows, I dread the stories that X will generate for the media. I anticipate a lot of emotional pain and poor decisions, and some epic rebellion. He has so many hurdles standing between him and any chance of becoming anything approaching a level-headed, content, and happy human being that it will be heartbreaking to behold. I hope he manages to pull it off, though. He could do a lot of good in this world.
I don’t know about you, but I have never had less of a desire to be super rich. Please say a prayer for little X, if you’ve got ‘em. He and his siblings will need all the help they can get.
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The View from a Drawbridge 
Hope there’s someone helping raise his kids that’s a stable, positive roll model. Even before Musk’s true face was shown, and everyone was still so impressed, I got bad vibes off him. Tesla must be turning over in his grave knowing his name’s been used to gain Musk’s fortune. Wouldn’t be surprised if Elon staged that incident to justify suspending journalists as doxers when they were just doing their jobs. At least Twitter users voted for him to step down as CEO. Maybe now he can focus on his mental health for his kids sakes. Have to wonder how Barron is turning out. Here’s an update that just adds to the crazy drama… https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/20/police-provide-first-official-details-on-elon-musks-alleged-stalker-incident
And even the story from your link seems bizarre. The “stalker” seems as rational as he looks in the video. And I can totally imagine a security guard going all Rambo—that’s the type that often takes that job. But then that paragraph that says the “stalker” “said he was a delivery driver for UberEats, the Washington Post reported, and “made several bizarre and unsupported claims, including that he believed [Grimes] was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts; that Musk was monitoring his real-time location; and that Musk could control Uber Eats to block him from receiving a delivery order”. But I had to go back to the original Washington Post article https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details-of-musk-stalking-incident/ to discover that the guy said that to them after the fact, when the post interviewed him on the phone. And that article adds even more murkiness to the story. Footage from the gas station doesn’t seem to show the guy hopping on the hood of the car, but it’s not sure if the guard and the guy had had an encounter before the gas station. And… there’s no evidence that the kid was even in the car!!! The world’s gone mad.
Not saying it’s aliens… but it’s aliens. Must be why Musk got into the space race. Just as reasonable an explanation as anything he has been claiming. Actually, with Elon’s access to the most advanced tech, the alleged stalkers’ claims might not be so crazy. Remember how Martha Mitchell was dismissed as a mad woman when she told the ugly truth about powerful men? Held captive, roughed up and drugged to silence her. You never know what men (or aliens) with power are up to behind closed doors. If this is what he does publicly… https://www.ibtimes.sg/musk-intends-dump-twitter-files-covid-19-lockdown-targets-anthony-fauci-68097?utm_source=Internal&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=related …what must he be up to privately? Thankfully he isn’t a natural-born American citizen and can never be our president. He’s seems to be following in the Cheeto’s narcissistic footsteps.
A true Cheeto/Musk partnership would either be terrifying or it would self-destruct before it did any damage. Let’s not find out.
I quit caring about Elongated Muskrat before I ever heard of him. I like a grandiose tech scheme as much as the next geek, but the supersonic train in the vacuum tunnel sounds quite out of our reach. I hear/read like this [arm spread] and believe like this [pinch gesture], and I hope you are keeping warm all right–how about blogging about the weather?
You’re very wise. 🙂 And as a matter of fact, I am writing about the weather even as we speak. Stay tuned.