I Have a Deeply Unhealthy Parasocial Relationship With Elon Musk That I Should Probably End

I have a problem. Actually I have a LOT of problems but the one that I am going to discuss in this blog post is my incredibly dysfunctional, toxic and self-defeating parasocial relationship with Elon Musk.

I’m not sure when or why I started caring way too much about Musk. When he was merely the world's richest man and the owner of the biggest electric car company in the world he was barely on my radar. I don’t care 't about  cars, electric or otherwise and the world of business is one that I will never understand. 

The catalyst for Musk going from being someone I could care less about to someone I hate with a white-hot burning passion might have been Musk’s enthusiastic evangelizing on behalf of The Babylon Bee, which is likeThe Onion if The Onion was Alt-Right, transphobic, deeply unfunny and had only one joke.

Musk at one point was a fan of The Onion but it committed the unforgivable crime of treating the richest, most insecure man in the world with something less than fawning reverence. So he doubled down on his support The Babylon Bee, which would never court his disfavor by making fun of him. 

This signaled a hard right shift from pretending to be a centrist Democrat to impress electric car owners and actresses, models and singers he hoped to sleep with to being a MAGA die-hard eager to use his tremendous power and influence to fight the imaginary menaces of "Woke" extremism and Cultural Marxism. 

My hatred of Musk grew considerably when he bought what I will always call Twitter. I used to have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I thought it was a great cultural plague and a colossal waste of time and energy for myself and society as a whole. 

That shifted into a hate-hate relationship when Musk took over. Organizations almost invariably take after their leader. Twitter is no different. When Musk took over and reinstated a whole bunch of far-right and Nazi accounts it made a hard right turn that mirrors Musk’s own. 

It was like my favorite bar having a new owner who jacked up the prices, watered down the drinks and instituted a White Power Night every Friday where folks in brownshirts and Klan robes drink for free.

Taking away badges of distinction and replacing them with badges of sycophancy marked a crucial change in the dumbing down and Trumping up of Twitter. I lost a badge that I earned through decades of being a professional writer of note but could acquire a new, worthless badge by giving the richest man in the world money on an ongoing basis for having destroyed my social media site of choice. 

nice hat, jackass.

Elon Musk has made it impossible to ignore in much the same way that Donald Trump and Kanye West have made it impossible to ignore them by being crazed narcissists who angrily insist on being at the epicenter of everything. 

I block and then unblock Musk constantly because if you don’t then the Twitter algorithm assumes that even if you do not follow Musk and regularly disparage him in your tweets and blog posts, you nevertheless desperately crave access to his words and ideas. 

In “For You” Musk is always first in my feed. Musk doesn't seem to care whether he's loved or hated as long as he gets way more attention than he would if he were merely the richest man in the world.

Back when I lived in the group home if someone was engaging in what the staff called negative, limit-testing behavior we were instructed to ignore them. The idea was that attention of any kind was what they craved, so by not giving them what they desperately wanted they’d get frustrated and give up. 

That's Musk. He’s a giant man-baby who has been engaging in negative, limit-testing behavior for a period of years. He's an overgrown child who gets off on people hating him as well as loving him. 

My anger towards Musk affects him in no way whatsoever. He does not know that I exist. I can't conceive of a world where he has seen even a single negative tweet that I’ve written about him but I still feel the need to rail against him on his own site all the same.

I do this because Twitter gives us the irresistible, seductive illusion of access and power. It allows us to think that by quote-tweeting someone with power they might notice us and either be moved by our eloquent, albeit exceedingly brief commentary on the world or feel deeply wounded by our cutting criticisms. 

The truth of the matter is that the average Twitter user, and even the above average Twitter follower, has no real access and no real power. If people who think that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are god-like figures being crucified by the radical Marxist media because it threatens their evil power were open to reason and persuasive, rigorous arguments then they wouldn’t see Elon Musk and Donald Trump as god-like figures being crucified by the radical Marxist media because it threatens their evil power. 

Twitter is now full of Musk lovers who have gulped down the Kool-Aid and asked for more. One of the many depressing elements of being on Twitter these days is seeing some schmuck reply to an unhinged Musk tweet with, “You’re a genius, boss! The Communists who run all of our greediest corporations hate America and that's why they are trying to bring you down by illegally and unethically not giving you money to insult them.” and clicking on their profile and seeing, that, in addition to a whole bunch of right-wing hashtags, they have forty-thousand followers. 

Twitter belongs to those people now. It belongs to Nick Adams, Alpha Male and Catturd2. It’s their world. It used to be my playground. It’s not anymore.

I get nothing out of my hatred of Musk. It just wastes time and energy. I’m allowing him to negatively affect my mood and mental health on a daily basis when I could conceivably just ignore just him. 

I should end my one-sided, pointless parasocial relationship with Elon Musk but that is easier said than done. 

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