Elon Musk is the Poster Boy for Hiding Your Inner Ugliness Behind a Cute Child
I’ve always been annoyed by sketchy dudes who hide behind their children and pets on social media. I am unhealthily addicted to Facebook and what I will always call Twitter. Incidentally, is it just me, or has Facebook turned into even more of a flaming garbage fire since Trump was re-elected? That’s a blog post for another day (Thursday, specifically), but it is jarring to see Facebook devolve into a Muskian tangle of AI, white nationalism, and Alt-Right super fandom.
I get it. The whole fucking point of social media is to impress strangers and potential friends/lovers/partners/mates into thinking that your life is more impressive and idyllic than it actually is.
That’s why we take pictures of our tots smiling and not weeping. That’s why we post our wins more than our losses.
This is an official post for the White House. Could use a cute kid.
When you first have a child, it changes your world. You instantly become a different person. You no longer live for yourself; if you’re any kind of a parent and human being, you live for your children and put their needs before your own.
It’s natural to want to share your baby or puppy’s cuteness with the world. Yet when middle-aged bros do it, it sometimes feels cynical and disingenuous. I am beyond irritated with hateful online bigots who hide behind cute images of their children and pets to create the illusion that they’re super-dads when they see their unfortunate spawn twice a year and spend most of that time staring at their phones.
I’m writing this because I am subtly apoplectic at how Elon Musk has used his four-year-old son X (who I will always refer to as Twitter) as a ubiquitous prop in a cynical effort to convince Donald Trump’s Christian base that he’s a loving dad who shares their commitment to traditional family values when he has thirteen children, many out of wedlock, and brags about 120 hour work weeks.
A 120-hour workweek is an invitation to insanity. It similarly does not allow for much family time.
Before Musk started carrying his son, Twitter, on his shoulders, all of the famous iconography involving him was negative and embarrassing. It’s a glorious gauntlet of humiliation. I have a folder on my laptop just for embarrassing pictures of Musk.
There is, of course, the wonderful image of Musk trying to convince Joe Rogan that he’s a cool guy and should totally be able to sit with him at the tough, macho kids’ table by smoking a joint in a way that suggests that he’d never smoked anything before, and would never smoke anything again.
There’s the picture of Musk on a yacht looking more than a little like a beached whale, in addition to the equally iconic (in the worst way) iconography of him jumping up and down with excitement at a Trump rally, his pale white belly exposed. Finally, there is the whole business of giving multiple Nazi salutes.
If I were Musk’s image consultant, I would encourage him to go easy on the Nazi imagery and lean into a loving dad persona.
Musk is hiding behind his child. He’s using him to soften his image and make everyday Republicans feel better about giving seemingly unlimited power to a Ketamine-addicted, unelected billionaire lunatic from South Africa.
Nothing screams “great dad!” like secret children.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of optics in Trump’s world. Trump nominated Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense because he looks like a soldier in a direct-to-streaming action movie.
People who Trump has told that Musk is a good man, a patriot, and someone who cares deeply about our country and its citizenry are primed to see Musk as a good dad who is active in his children’s lives.
Of course, it’s easy to be a doting dad when a child is four years old, and you can hand him off to a nanny the moment cameras stop rolling.
The image of Musk’s son at a press conference in the White House surprised and alarmed the boy’s mother, musician Grimes. Grimes has reproduced repeatedly with Musk. In a related development, the eccentric singer and self-professed Manic Pixie Dream Girl took to Twitter to plead, “(Our son Twitter) should not be in public like this. I didn’t see this. Thanks for alerting me.”
Elon with Twitter
It’s a surreal and awful world when a baby mama of the richest and most powerful man in the world (easily surpassing Donald Trump, Renfield to his Count Dracula) learns that her child Twitter was a key part of a presidential press conference by a random account on the social media site your ex-partner owns.
It could be worse. It recently came out that Musk is the father of a child with Ashley St. Claire, a Conservative influencer and the author of a transphobic children’s book who, at 26, is young enough to be Musk’s daughter.
Like Grimes, she took to Twitter to beg Mr. Family Values to acknowledge her and their child, whom I will guess is named Truth Social. In desperation, she posted that she had been trying to communicate with him for days without success. Musk did, however, respond to a mocking tweet from Alt-Right ghoul Milo Yianopoulis, who is officially uncanceled and could very well end up with a role in the Trump administration, suggesting that the mother of his baby is a greedy gold digger who had been plotting to ensnare Elon Musk in a baby trap for five years.
“Ashley St. Clair plotted for HALF A DECADE to ensnare Elon Musk,” read the tweet, which was accompanied by a screenshot of a 2020 post about wanting “Musk’s attention for a marriage proposal.”
How did the Father of the Year respond to his latest baby mama’s earnest plea? Did he defend the honor of the woman who most recently had his child? Nope. His only response was, “Whoa.”
Musk was siding with a right-wing troll and kiddy-diddling advocate over the mother of his child.
Musk was cosigning Milo’s depiction of his baby mama as a selfish opportunist angling for a massive payday. And he was doing so publicly, where Musk lives and works.
Then, of course, there is Vivian Jenna Wilson, the trans daughter who so despises who she characterizes as an absent and cruel father and his anti-trans crusade that she changed her last name because, like all good people, she wants nothing to do with him.
For the MAGA faithful, the defining iconography of Trump 2.0 is Trump with an upraised fist after getting shot and Musk with his four-year-old son Twitter on his shoulders. Musk is a geek who loves cosplaying as a decent father. These images are deceptive. They’re supposed to make Trump look tough, and Musk look like a good dad when Trump is a thin-skinned little bitch who loves drama and rages impotently if someone on TV hurts his feelings.
Elon Musk doesn’t want to go through the bother of being a good dad. It’s a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of effort, but he wants very much to be seen as a good dad for the sake of his image as a traditional family man and defender of Judeo-Christian values, not a crazed libertine out to destroy our country for his own selfish purposes.
Musk is the poster boy for creeps hiding behind their children. Oh well. Because Musk thinks that he is doing humanity a tremendous honor by spreading his high-IQ white super-billionaire seed far and wide, he’ll probably have a dozen more chances to be a good dad to the small army of children he already has, as well as all the children he will go on to sire, then ignore.
He’ll undoubtedly fuck that up too.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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