Standing on the rear mattress of his best boondoggle, his face obscured in shadow, the billionaire who constructed a rabid fanbase by means of seemingly inhuman feats of engineering and willpower reduce a tremendously lowered determine: Elon Musk was presiding over the primary buyer deliveries of a Tesla truck that, like most issues Musk touched, was drastically over price range and much past its authentic delivery timeline. Plus, only a couple days earlier Musk had basically sealed the dismal destiny of one other of his firms by publicly telling advertising partners to “go fuck [themselves].”
To say he was wanting diminished is placing it mildly.
The Cybertruck launch, like most of Tesla’s supply occasions, was not a substantive affair. My extra affected person colleagues have achieved a significantly better job truly recounting what happened there than I ever could. Suffice it to say that Musk touted his gaudy stainless-steel monstrosity’s skills for some time earlier than explaining to a handful of the sycophantic first new Cybertruck homeowners (together with one Alexis Ohanian) the extraordinarily non-obvious solution to open their doorways after which repeating a obscure and perplexing assertion about how wild it’s going to be to see these driving round earlier than calling it a day.
I discussed the odd selection to face on the truck mattress in semi-darkness regardless of having a stage lighting setup very clearly designed for him not to do this, however I uncared for to notice the second when a sheepish Franz von Holzhausen was drug out to weakly toss a baseball on the Cybertruck’s home windows, in a second that appeared like unintended satire of when he smashed the windows of the original prototype at a reveal event in 2019. The one takeaway from this watered down reenactment was that if von Holzhausen had replicated the 2019 mishap faithfully, with metal balls and a correct toss, I’m just about satisfied he would’ve smashed the home windows once more.
Musk didn’t deal with his crumbling social media product or how his frequent, inflammatory feedback and amplification of false and harmful conspiracy theories have made it unimaginable to see a path ahead for X that doesn’t finish badly. He didn’t discuss how his vary of distractions, together with a repeatedly exploding spacecraft he’s periodically launching from south Texas, are giving Tesla traders some severe misgivings. Largely, he talked in regards to the Cybertruck’s potential advantages to homeowners in case of the tip of contemporary civilization. And once more: about how cool they’ll look.
Not the assured, if controversial, prognosticator and massive swing options engineer, Musk has as a substitute turn out to be a mad-eyed, rambling and raving advocate of far-right nonsense and vacillating convictions. Even his seemingly existential objection to OpenAI’s fast-paced growth of AI ended up being little greater than petty jealousy, as evidenced by the harried introduction of Grok, his personal, way more puerile and muddy-minded equal.
Undoubtedly, Musk continues to profit from legions of devoted fanboys – lots of whom I’m positive might be letting me know the way wonderful he nonetheless is and the way rubbish I nonetheless am – however it’s arduous to disclaim any longer that his affect is on the wane, and the crowning second of his stupidest thought made flesh within the type of the Cybertruck looks like a significant bookend on his period of energy.
