Elon Musk's Tweets Are Bad and His Ideas Are Even Worse

He wants a good website that doesn't whiff out the window when you're driving.

Frederic J. BROWN / AFP

One of the funniest skits in Tim Robinson’s brilliant series I Think You Should Leave is the “Focus Group” scene, where a group of people discuss ideas for a new car. The group is quickly split between Paul, who offers anodyne but generally helpful suggestions, and an unsettling old man with a thick accent, who suggests that the car be “stinky,” “too small” and have a “good steering wheel that doesn’t whiff out the window.” The two stand at odds as the old man ridicules and trolls Paul, eventually bringing the rest of the room around to his side through creative bullying. It’s extremely funny. Here, just watch it.

Robinson’s skits largely follow two formats: one where the audience is made to feel sympathetic to a character doing outlandish and confusing acts, like buying shirts only from Dan Flashes or yelling about steering wheels, and one where the person doing something bizarre is played against a straight-man supporting cast that the audience relates to. I’m not exactly a TV critic, so I’ll leave my analysis of the show there.

The analogy I’m making here is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and clearly think’s he’s the funny old man and that we are all Paul. The joke of the skit, of course, is that the old man is the one who actually doesn’t have any good car ideas (Paul does), but we still like him because he’s funny. The problem for Elon is that he’s not funny. He wants to be the old man so bad but he is not — he’s just a massive weirdo who is immediately messing everything up.