The dorsal fin of the tiny remora fish conceals a suction mechanism, enabling it to cling to sharks, which are full of urea and can live for many years. And on Monday, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, the billionaire playman and galactic space-lord of the decomposing social media channel Twitter (currently X), revealed the depth of their mutual admiration in an eider-soft and incompetently livestreamed interview. Trump said horrible things for two hours and Musk giggled. TV executives wanting to reboot Top Gear, with that classic Jeremy Clarkson/Richard Hammond chemistry, need look no further.
The shark-remora relationship is mutual. The remora consumes leftovers dropped by the shark and eats parasites that live in its mouth. This delights the shark – parasites can be irritating – and predators that might harm the remora are deterred, as the shark gives it a ride through the dangerous oceans. Could Musk help peck clever black women out of Trump’s mouth? Would Trump’s election deliver Musk free passage through the choppy seas of communication regulation? Just how hard can Musk’s remora suck?
Musk’s inflated felching event was embarrassingly delayed for 40 minutes because of, according to Musk, a coordinated cyber attack or, according to Trump, his own massive popularity jamming the system. This tells you all you need to know about the two professionally delusional men’s respective rules for reorganising reality. Either “It’s a conspiracy” or “Many many many people, so many people, were watching bigly”.
Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market of the European Union, had warned Trump and Musk against possible “amplification of harmful content”. But Musk trashed his own global opinion platform Twitter (currently X) in months, like a teenager in charge of his parents’ house over a weekend (“Please! This is our home!”). His business model now relies on amplification of harmful content. Asking Musk to scale the unpleasantness back is a bit like asking a crack dealer to diversify into quinoa.
Musk, who eats the horse tranquilliser rave drug Ketamine to treat his depression, and is a walking tower of Adidas crap, had shared a fake headline in the small hours of Sunday morning saying Keir Starmer was sending rioters to internment camps on the Falkland Islands. The once uninhabited islands’ ownership is historically disputed, but its only indigenous inhabitant is the Falkland steamer duck. This means, by their own logic, that any racists transported there must learn to fit in to their new home by subsisting on molluscs and laying eggs every 38 days. Can it be a worse diet than six-packs of cider, cocaine and all those stolen Greggs sausage rolls?
Prior to his Falklands falsehood, Elon Ketamusk had already told his millions of fans that a British civil war was imminent. Ketamine creates visionary states, so Ketamusk groks all possible futures, whether they happen or not. And if they don’t happen, he uses his unfettered influence to try to make them happen, just to prove himself right. To Ketamusk, Thierry Breton is just a stupid Cnut, powerless in his wooden Euro-throne before Ketamusk’s incoming waves of online filth. Pussy in bio.
Thierry Breton urged Ketamusk to “ensure compliance” with EU law, including the 2022 Digital Services Act, which addresses disinformation. In response, Ketamusk, who is ultimately responsible for maintaining civility on Twitter (currently X), advised the 69-year-old European mathematician to “fuck his own face”. But it seems unlikely that the said act is within Thierry Breton’s skillset, and is yet another example of Ketamusk’s inability to debate thoughtfully or accurately on the global stage.
I was the co-librettist of the most swearingest show ever broadcast, Richard Thomas’s 2001 show Jerry Springer: The Opera. Its swear count was inaccurately estimated at 8,000 swears in two hours by protesters on the Christian right, numbering roughly just over one swear per second. This would leave no room for any coordinating conjunctions or transitioning words. I would love to have seen that show. It would be like a night in Tommy Robinson’s Cyprus hotel room set to music.
Sadly the opera only included 174 swear words – making the Christian right’s claims an early example of rightwing disinformation – but the composer Richard Thomas taught me how to do swearing properly. And let me tell you, Elon Ketamusk is doing it all wrong, the stupid space-c***.
In my opinion, Ketamusk has gone in too hard and too fast by telling Thierry Breton to fuck his own face off the bat, and has left himself no room to escalate his rhetoric for comic effect, hardly the actions of a space-genius. Cicero said that the funniest thing was an indelicate idea delicately put, and vice versa. By Ciceronian logic, Ketamusk should have advised Breton to “pleasure his own mouth with whatever personal tools were at hand” or suchlike. But I can’t talk. I made a Cnut joke 500 words into this column, thus diminishing the effect of calling Elon Ketamusk a space-c*** only 200 words later. It’s harder than it looks, funny swearing.
Elon Ketamusk might want to learn from the example of our own Nigel Farage, who thought he could court extremists to further his interests, but is now their stained gimp. The misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has denounced Farage for “selling out freedom fighters to appease the matrix”, and his homunculus Tommy Robinson accused the MP for Clacton of “throwing him under the bus” again. That’s what happens when you swim with sharks.
The shark mates using a pair of claspers, similar to a mammal’s penis, one secreting sperm. Elon Ketamusk might yet find out how it feels to be clasped.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is streaming on Now TV. He appears in a benefit for War Child headlined by Idles at the Bristol Academy this Saturday 24 August, curates and hosts the Komedia stage at the Brighton Psych Fest on 30 August, and his 2025 tour, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, begins at London’s Leicester Square theatre this December
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