The most dangerous man in the world
Not a genius, nor an idiot, but a secret third thing…
Elon Musk is not an idiot, although lately he pantomimes one.
Elon Musk is not a genius, although historically he poses as one.
Elon Musk is a conqueror, and he is currently the most dangerous man on Earth.
Factional sentiments
Many of you, especially if you have bags in TSLA 0.00%↑ or the many Muskovite synthetics like RKLB 0.00%↑, are sympathetic to this idea and may in fact desire it because it seems self-evidently good. The simple news I have for you is that Elon Musk doesn’t care about you, or anyone like you, at all. He is an ambitious person who is taking advantage of your susceptibility to (social) media narratives and your selfish cynicism through stock market gambling to empower himself at the expense of everyone else.
But many of you across the political spectrum are wise to this. For example, here is someone on TikTok who goes by the handle @realestatebulldog (wow, sure doesn’t sound like a communist loser) who authored a classic ‘visualising wealth inequality’ video. This genre is almost as old as the mainstream Web as we know it, but if you watch to the end you see his word choices take a remarkable tone:
“Who’s hungry?” is a hell of a finisher. I don’t know guys, if real estate bros are clued into this, and we already know liberals and communists are… who else is there? Everyone except the patsies we pejoratively call ‘tech bros’? It sure seems like it, but it’s hard to tell with how manipulated X.com is these days.
Lying machines
Moreover, all of the major platforms have an angle about what viewpoints they ensure rises to the top via algorithmic manipulation. The lie with X.com is that it isn’t doing that. It’s very straightforward to figure this out: On August 23, 2024, Elon stated that the algorithm is open source. On December 18, 2024, Elon stated that the algorithm has been updated. The GitHub repository for the algorithm, as originally published by Elon and bearing X.com’s logo despite still being named ‘Twitter’, shows the algorithm was last updated on July 23, 2023. Lying!
But what are you going to do about this? Ah, that is the real object of interest here. The first thing you are going to do about it is be utterly buried for noticing. There are three components behind this:
people who do not follow you will not be shown any of your posts (as favoured accounts so often enjoy, to the dismay of many)
people who do follow you will also not be shown some or even many of your posts
people who are nonetheless shown your posts will have their engagements (likes, reposts, and comments) discounted—as in they are received but not shown in the tallies—effectively making them disappear as a metric
This is accomplished through a very basic automated detection algorithm that performs some crude comprehension of sentences by marrying up negative words that modify sentence subjects which happen to refer to sanctified people. A tweet of the form “Elon + [negative word]” is detected and deducts your account of social credit score, and when you amass enough of this, everything you tweet is buried following the three mechanisms above. Brutal, right?
No country for old dissidents
If you are nonetheless big enough to persevere through this slaughterhouse of interactive gerrymandering—say, perhaps you were a big dissident pre-takeover—then some day you will invariably write a thread that blows up and causes you to be marked. A recent example of this is @718Tv, display name ‘stained hanes’:
What thread caused him to be marked, you may ask? Well, it was probably his inexplicable journalism about the corruption of the mayor of Springfield during the 2024 Presidential election. He authored a massive exposé, immaculately sourced, which showed that the mayor of Springfield was the primary financial beneficiary of the social destruction of the town via mass importation of illegal Haitian migrants. It’s not the libs guys, sorry. It’s just some fucking guy.
One of the elements of this story that bolsters its credibility so immensely is the ascribed culpability is introspective. In contrast to every fake story people are told by ambitious liars where some inapprehensible Great Other is held in contempt for all our earthly woes, this exposé points inward at people who are similar and knowable to us. This could be your mayor or your local bastion of the ‘community’ — is it? Has it even occurred to you to check?
In any case, architects of Trump’s campaign wanted to stage a story about this issue of illegal migrants ruining America, but for whatever reason they were not interested in apportioning culpability where it truly, obviously belonged: at the hands of small-time corrupt politicians who sold out their own people for silver from the federal government. The fact that this story was hijacked by a bona fide dissident and steered away from their desired narrative plug of empty identitarian hatred is what I believe pissed them off. And if that didn’t rustle enough staffers’ jimmies, then I’m sure the rest of them are content to assent to the purge due to his careless handling of the anointed VP’s public image. No one haphazardly slanders our chosen guy that way and gets away with it.
And so, twelve days after the election was over and sixty-two days after the offending thread was posted, that came to pass. Nobody can miss an anonymous coward, they point out. What a shame.
Digital dementia
Regardless of how you may feel about this, or the extent of which you even know about this, you’re just not going to have the bandwidth to act on it. That, too, has been robbed of you by the dark patterns pioneered under the banner of ‘Web 2.0’:
Endlessly scrolling timelines that one can never be fully ‘caught up’ on
Manipulation of ordering and priority of timeline content to bias what owners want you to see as important
Completely artificial trends and fake events, like Peanut the squirrel or the elite obsession with Luigi Mangione
Real events are buried and ignored so they effectively don’t happen
Gaslighting from authorities when everyone instinctively feels something is deeply wrong with the service
All together, these things in concert give you, the user, a synthetic kind of dementia. Days feel like weeks, your memory constantly fails to offer any specificity regarding things you know you remember and you cared to know about, and you are therefore utterly helpless to perform sense-making of the world around you. This is deliberate of course, because it politically conveniences powerful people who don’t want you to understand what they are doing, because if you did, you and everyone else would be at their throats the very next week.
The fake rebel dissident
Everything I have explained up to this point has not mentioned Elon Musk or his ilk, and I’m highlighting this to explicate that none of these ills are unique to them. In saying this I want to show you that, in fact, Elon and his ilk weaponise this as a point of contrast between themselves and their opposites in other power bases such as those in Brussels or Tel Aviv. This contrast is completely fake, and the machinations explained above show why they get away with nakedly lying like this. Elon and his supplicants pose as dissidents, most famously ‘champions of free speech’, as a guise for seizing power. Last I checked, ElonJet is still banned, and these days we’re right back to the old pre-takeover bullshit of doing site-wide purges. Free speech on X.com? What a crock of shit. Sure, you’re free to espouse esoteric Hitlerism, but it came at the cost of banning ironically Hitler-themed accounts that wrote poetry like Grumpenfuhrer. This is not liberty by any definition of the word.
The usurper’s lieutenants
Earlier this week I was tweeting about how Pee Marca had kind of lost his marbles over the last two weeks about Luigi Mangione, coining this new, ludicrous concept he calls the ‘pro murder bloc’. He’s been slandering basically any notable news outlet that reports basic truths about the situation and its consequences as exhibiting fealty to this ‘bloc’ he considers his political enemies. He’s also been making empty legal threats to them that they can be prosecuted for inciting domestic terror, among other bouts of delusional disgustingness.
While it is manifestly insane, it’s important to understand that in doing this, Pee Marca is actually kissing Elon’s ring. He’s behaving like a loyal dog and putting the work in by sitting on Twitter all day posting constantly pro-Muskovite narratives, acting as a bulwark of their bullshit eschatology for Americans to lap up so they’ll want to hand them the keys to the city. Pee Marca is Elon Musk’s narrative launderer-in-chief.
As for why he cares enough to jump into this shooting story in the first place, it’s important to understand that the murdered CEO was personally known to them, however incidentally. This is why they were tweeting about it pretty much immediately, in contrast to other equally if not more noteworthy news stories with lots of violence and political implications, like that time someone threw a homemade bomb into a courtroom and it exploded. In addition to that disconnect, the general fact that a CEO was targeted for political assassination stokes deep anxiety in them as well. A recent interview of Peter Thiel shows him being extremely disturbed when the topic of Mangione was brought up:
I can understand why Peter would be at a total loss for an angle in this. Peter is out of the game, having resigned his jewels to the United States government voluntarily after being shook by the suiciding of his lover Jeff Thomas. He wanted out after this, struck a deal, and is nothing but a bystander to the trials and tribulations going on today. However, many of his associates, like Elon, Pee Marca, the Weinstein brothers, and Paul Gee, are still very much active and aware of things, particularly the smattering of hit jobs that we have witnessed over the last year or so. Peter knows what’s going on here and it scares the shit out of him. But the others see it as an opportunity to seize power through chaos.
Hits… hits everywhere
About that… there are two major instances of this which are mostly unambiguous mob hits by my judgement:
Thomas Crooks’ attempted assassination of Donald Trump
Luigi Mangione’s assassination of the United Healthcare CEO
While doubtless there are many more, I am not privy enough to the details and do not care to delve into them so much due to their extraneousness to the political problem at hand here. We’re going to talk about Thomas first, and after Luigi I’ll show you what they have in common.
If you’re familiar with Sherlock Holmes, you probably know there are three keys to pinning a culprit: motive, opportunity, and means. We’re going to go over these three things for each of the shooters here, and I will detail how they come up short and what that implies about what’s ultimately going on here.
Thomas
The story of Thomas Crooks is basic and kind of sad. He is a loser in Pennsylvania with shitty parents, and he’s smart enough to realise that he’s basically fucked for life. Remarkably, he was actually quite intelligent: he had no known social media presence, and whoever he did talk with online remains unknown except through voluntary real life disclosure to this day. It’s reasonable to infer that he knew his opsec, for whatever it was worth.
Motive
His motive is simple: he wanted to be famous by assassinating a former President on the campaign trail. Thomas was smart enough to know that there was realistically no path for him to have a life worth living, since he is too physically ugly to be loved by another, and not skilled enough to break the mould with anything that would free him from his low socioeconomic status. So he settled on what countless Americans do in a less bloody fashion: “I’m gonna be famous!”
Opportunity
His opportunity was also handed to him by God: Trump just so happened to be stopping by his backwater town for a rally. It doesn’t appear that Thomas had any sort of partisan animosity towards Trump, like so many would be inclined to believe. Secondhand knowledge about him suggests that he was actually orbiting the Dark Enlightenment and Accelerationist circles of political thought, which think nothing of Republicans or Democrats. For him, infamy and retribution for his rejection by society was front-and-centre, much like Arthur Fleck in 2019’s Joker.
Means
However, his means are not so understandable: how did he know to go up to that particular rooftop where the Secret Service protection just so happened to be compromised? Gee whiz, that sure was astoundingly convenient! And the other big buried lede is his failed getaway plan: he intended to blow up his car to create a diversion and then whisk himself away in the ensuing chaos. For a totally inexplicable reason, Thomas Crooks believed he was going to at least physically survive this whole thing, and go somewhere to do something we can hardly speculate on. But why would he believe he was going to do all of that? I contend that he was in communication with someone who suggested these things to him. Whoever that person was also gave him the knowledge of both where and when to go to shoot his shot, which would be structurally impossible for him to guess on his own. This just doesn’t add up as officially understood.
Luigi
The story of Luigi Mangione is more interesting than Thomas’, but still very basic and tragic all the same. Luigi was pipelined into the redpill movement to compensate for his crippling insecurity about his spinal fusion, becoming jacked and retweeting mainstream rationalist tech fixtures like Tim Urban, Steve Stewart-Williams and Sahil Bloom. He can also be seen boosting book scams about tech and self-help, but most remarkable is the coherent theme of intellectualised self-victimhood that all of his posts and retweets share. I explained succinctly what is wrong with this on my X.com account:
[it’s] nothing but the most intellectualised hope porn from all the typical rationalist fixtures, which never materialises IRL because twitter is fake as fuck and none of these people actually confront reality as it exists
they pretend like they care but can’t discard the arrogance that they have all the answers and “if only people would just do what i think is best!!!”
they persist in doing this because they have conflated their low self-esteem with humility
they have this problem because their parents are usually status-obsessed psychopaths that only ever cared about how their kids looked, not who they are or what they desire
I guess you could say that like so many tragic people, Luigi was groomed by Online. Oh well. Onto his crime, then.
Motive
His motive is painfully obvious, literally so for him: United Healthcare presumably denied him some care for his condition, and he decided to take revenge. It’s worth noting that most of the sentiment against the healthcare industry is aggregated, meaning that while countless people are needlessly suffering under a horrible system, their self-appointed saviours are rich kids with parental BlueCross BlueShield policies who got denied hormones, stimulants and/or antidepressants and attend shooter lookalike competitions because they’re unemployed losers. It may or may not apply with Luigi himself, and we won’t know for sure until his gambit of ‘I’m being framed’ is played out fully.
Means, antemortem
His means up to the murder are also quite straightforward: a gun, a bit of ammunition, a hooded jacket, and a bit of guts. That’s really all it took for him to clench the kill.
Opportunity
His opportunity is, unfortunately, not so clear, and much more resembles Thomas Crooks’ inhuman means to carry out the dirty deed. How did Luigi know of this private corporate seminar which was not advertised to the public, and on top of that know exactly where and when the CEO was likely to appear to enter into the event? Once again, the most reasonable conjecture is that someone told him, which begs the giant unanswered question of who that would be.
Means, postmortem
Furthermore the means he had to flee New York City were also absolutely inhuman. I don’t know if you’re aware, but NYC is the government’s ground zero for deploying their latest and greatest toys for mass surveillance — the city is a modern panopticon, and somehow, inexplicably, Luigi knew exactly where to go and where not to go to evade capture without even wearing a face covering. What the fuck?
He only got busted days later in Pennsylvania, wearing the same jacket, and in possession of the same gun, because someone in a McDonald’s recognised him during the ensuing nationwide manhunt. Look guys, if he wanted to get the hell out of dodge, he basically had a wide open road to do so. And this is a giant parallel Luigi’s story has with Thomas’: the puzzle piece that just so happens to be shaped like an interlocutor that leads these guys on and has them believing that they will get away with murder. They act like safe assets until the second they get owned.
But in the same way Thomas was set up and was realistically never going to get out of there alive, Luigi was also left for dead by whoever his handler was, because he was probably there to conduct a follow-up murder that was never going to actually happen. He did what he was told because it had been working famously for him so far, except the last thing he did made him a sitting duck to be scooped up by the authorities and hauled to jail.
Adding to the credibility of this theory is the fact that he was angrily telling the press during his inmate transfer that he was being framed, ranting and raving that this is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. While I don’t doubt that he actually did the crime due to the motive and means explained above, I do believe he has to have some reason to feel betrayed even though he’s not innocent. And so, I think Luigi knows he’s been had. Aw, shucks.
A real, true blue mafia
Somebody is setting these people up and feeding them key information, and the similarity of pattern means it’s almost certainly the same person or group. Due to the recent political profits of the tech mafia I am overwhelmingly inclined to believe it is they who are behind these things, thereby upgrading their title of ‘mafia’ from a mere pejorative of their immorality to a fully-fledged descriptor of what they are.
Like with any mafia, you have to understand that the machinations through which they conduct their business are necessarily obscure. The dons of many of these operations are likely totally legally innocent as far as their complicity in the murders, but then again so was Alfonse Capone. Once again we find the likelier conviction for these powerful monsters is over tax evasion rather than burying guys in concrete.
I am reasonably sure this technical but legally full innocence applies to Elon, Pee Marca, Paul Gee, Vivek, and most if not all major figures incoming to the executive branch in 2025. They simply know people who do this of their own volition, are not aware of those associates’ criminal businesses, and they are friends because they share in a stagnant mutualism of their own enrichment and empowerment. “I’m not going to wonder where you got all of those fine pieces of jewellery or that big yacht, not at all! I’m sure it’s legitimate, I mean I would never presume otherwise, and besides, you’re such a great friend anyway!” And then he goes down to a giant conviction for racketeering and you’re left there with the passive benefits of being in his company all without having to get your hands dirty. This is the essence of how corrupt power works, and I think it’s probably an accurate picture of what the tech mafia is doing lately with their foray into politics.
Elon is playing the long game
All of these mafia machinations will come and go in a spat, and I don’t expect them to last for more than a couple of elections, if that. Doubtless some of them will go under from infighting before the 47th’s second term is even halfway finished. This is what sets Elon Musk worlds apart from everyone else I have mentioned or could mention: he is playing a 40 year game in the company of 4 year mobsters.
His gambit with DOGE is a total bungle. It’s not a real department, it’s unlikely it will ever have hard power, and it has revealed a lot about how Elon sees Trump and vice versa. Many important events Trump appears at have Elon conspicuously absent, sometimes to the chagrin of friendly hecklers he sends in his stead to bust Trump’s balls for not inviting him up on stage.
Also noteworthy is the fact that while Trump has been remarkably short on what DOGE is going to be able to do, he has already set an expiration date for it: July 4th, 2026. Talk about priorities.
Your opinion doesn’t matter
He has also been pissing off an increasingly diverse spectrum of politically sentient sectors of the population, inspiring them into a haphazard alliance through his sheer inability to get off of his own bullshit and at least act like he cares what people think about his conduct. It seems Elon’s calculus is that it doesn’t matter, and on the longer term, with no meaningful opposition in sight, he appears to be correct. What you think doesn’t matter, because in 10 years, or 20, or even 40, Elon will have the power to do whatever the hell he wants, and if you stand in his way he is just going to destroy you.
Finding out who’s who
Elon doesn’t think any of these short term blunders matter at all. The stage he is in is the early one of signalling intent, amassing loyalists and marking opponents. The algorithmic manipulation, his callous disregard for public opinion, and his constant self-insertion into the second Trump administration all reflect this viewpoint: X.com, and the broader world for public persons, is being used as a gigantic sorting hat by Elon. Whatever his next phase is, it will run on the information being gathered today.
The goal is total domination
Recalling Elon’s first wife’s memoirs where she referred to him as her little Alexander the Great, understanding Elon’s ultimate ambition here is easy. He wants to conquer and rule the United States and by extension the rest of the world. He is very handicapped by the fact that he is an illegal South African immigrant from Canada who has not assimilated into American culture due to his ever-present affluence affording him the privilege to self-relegate to Ivy League nooks and cosmopolitan house parties. He is not legally allowed to become President and he is not very relatable to the American people. But again, to him, this doesn’t matter.
I have to tell you, while it is quite early, everything him and his ilk are doing so far seem to be mostly the right steps… if the goal is to eventually have undisputed power and control over the United States.
I wonder, how many people actually recognise this for what it is? How many more think that he is an idiot simply because he behaves like one? Don’t you remember 15 years ago when his affect in interviews was intelligent to a fault? He is inspired by the Don here into acting like an idiot to get what he wants. In my view, all of this sums up to make him the most dangerous man on the planet. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton — let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.