Another week has passed and yet another rich stupid person is in the news for being rich and stupid.
We barely had gotten out of the news cycle of a rich stupid person turning themselves into pudding feet from the Titanic, when another rich stupid person who paid $44 billion dollars for a website after getting high and saying “I’ll buy you” like it was a US Weekly at the checkout line, has now turned that website into an unusable pile of garbage.
Yes, I’m talking about Elon Musk and his dumpster fire Twitter site. This is a fella who wanted to spring into action and immediately dropped the value of his $44 billion dollar investment in half by putting in an archaic set of rules and welcoming back free speech accounts that included actual Nazis and racists. But that wasn’t enough for him. Months later, he’s still making tweaks both big and little – the latest – setting rate limits on how many tweets non-paying customers can see. This, according to his brain, would encourage people to buck up for a $8 a month account, and would also limit “bots” and “crawlers” that scrape Twitter for content to go elsewhere. This is also how Twitter had become the world’s most quotable and newsworthy website. But if it’s fixed, Elon will break it. And he has. But good.
What Musk has managed to actually do is take a thing and make it unusable. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and were only allowed to look down two aisles unless you were a member of the premiere grocery club. I guess it’s just the cookie aisle and the chili beans aisle for me. Or if you went to an amusement park and could only walk within a 50 foot radius before being charged to go to other parts of the park. I hope you like the teacups, because that’s all you get.
Being rich allows you certain privileges in this world – we know this – we’ve seen it with our politicians, and our business leaders – but it should be very clear that wealth does not mean one is smart. It simply means that you’ve amassed money – be it by inheritance, sheer happenstance, or through shrewd decisions.
More and more, however, we are seeing the real dummies come out of the pile of cash like Scrooge McDuck jumping into a pile of coins and getting a concussion not realizing that a pile of coins is basically a concrete wall.
So those of us who use these businesses and pay taxes to the government and are at the mercy of these rich folks, are also at the mercy of their intelligence. Let me tell you, I’m not at all impressed.
At this point in my column, I would normally wrap up with a quip or a cute little sentence to bring it all home – but I have decided to rate limit this column. Yet another attempt by a millionaire–who is a million dollars short–to have his way.
(Get more from Chris Kamler on Twitter, if you can still stand Twitter, where his is @TheFakeNed)