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Mic
Mic
Politics
Rafi Schwartz

Elon Musk challenged Vladimir Putin to “single combat” for Ukraine

I couldn’t tell you what it’s like to be the wealthiest person in the history of the human race. I’d imagine running a beep-boop car company and an explodey rocket company and trying to reinvent the concept of a “city bus” is the sort of thing that would take up a lot of your time. Then again, if Elon Musk’s latest desperate scramble for social media attention is any indication, being unimaginably rich just means you’ve got endless time to be an absolute jagoff online.

“A jagoff?” you say? How so?

Well, by making fun of people for ... caring about things:

Or sharing grammatically incorrect shitposts about a humanitarian crisis:

And finally topping it off with a vainglorious gurgle of tough guy machismo that couldn’t possibly be overcompensating for some other personal shortcoming or sense of misplaced self-worth, nope, no siree:

It takes a very special breed of rich boy shithead to take a bloody war of imperial conquest and reduce it to a dick-measuring contest in which your sole qualification is being enormously wealthy. As much as it might be satisfying to watch Vladimir Putin, a black belt-holding judo master who spent his formative years as a KGB operative for the Soviet government, absolutely dismantle the jaunty son of an apartheid-era emerald mine owner, Musk’s penchant for crowbarring his terrible opinions into situations in which his sole useful contribution would be “an enormous sum of money” is particularly offensive and grotesque given the scale of bloodshed and suffering he has essentially reduced to a winner-takes-all wrestling match. If he actually cared about the plight of Ukrainians suffering under Russia’s invasion, then there are countless ways he could actively do something this very instant to alleviate their suffering — all of which end with him cutting a check to the people on the ground who are actively involved in humanitarian work in the region.

And yet, here he is, claiming the rights to represent a country he has no connection to, so he can go toe-to-toe with the power-mad head of a global superpower. In other words, this is all just the insomniac ego-fluffing of a man who should have more important things to worry about.

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