I Can't Read about Elon Musk Anymore

Can someone else do something interesting? Please?

There is a 688-page book about Elon Musk out this week, and frankly I’d rather read 688 bottles of Dr. Bronner’s shampoo.

I cannot read anymore about this man. I have reached my limit. It is like I am rushing a frat, and if I have one more sip of whiskey I will puke, and the media is my pledge master funneling Jack Daniels down my throat.

688 pages about Elon Musk. The last year has felt like we are living inside a 688-page book about Elon Musk, hasn’t it?

The thought of reading a book about Elon Musk is insane to me. I’d rather do a Tough Mudder. I’d rather listen to a Libertarian explain Bitcoin to me.

I’d rather get hit by a Tesla 688 times. If I were forced to read this book, I’d request a Japanese translation so that at least I wouldn’t have to understand any of it.

Fuck it. I’m starting Infinite Jest again

I know too much about this man. In the past year I have learned all about his Incel-adjacent politics, his Jewish Persecution Complex, his children’s stupid names, his monkey-killing habit, his environmentally-ruinous rockets.

I am forgetting important passwords and key mathematical skills because my brain is getting bombarded with information about Elon Musk.

Why do I know that Elon Musk once dated Amber Heard? Is that why I can’t remember how to calculate the area of a triangle anymore?

Pictured: Three things I would rather read than Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk book

Elon Musk has dominated headlines this year in a way that no one has since Donald Trump in 2016.

There is one key difference, though: Donald Trump could be both shocking and funny. Elon Musk is neither.

Have you ever hung out with a 4-year-old who goes “Watch this watch this watch this” and then does a pathetic little somersault?

That is the feeling I get observing Elon Musk. Oh, you named your new child Tau Techno Mechanicus? Woooow, so cool, buddy. Okay, Daddy is gonna watch the football game now, all right?

What every new headline about Elon Musk reminds me of

I am not denying that Elon Musk is important, or consequential, or dangerous. He is all three of those things.

But he is somehow important, consequential, and dangerous in the most tiresome way possible. He is like a fart on an elevator: noxious, all-consuming, inescapable.

I am not going to Barnes & Noble to spend $28.99 to recreate the experience of being on a farty elevator.

I keep on getting served up listicles from this book. “9 WTF moments from the new Elon Musk biography.” “13 OMG Facts We Just Learned About Elon Musk.” “17 Scenes from Elon Musk That Made Us Say ‘OMG WTF NO CAP!!!”

I see this clickbait and I think, “Hmm. I wonder what is happening with literally anyone else?”

So I am broadening the news I read. This morning, for example, I read a fascinating story about a rich couple in Brooklyn who bought a posh $5 million apartment in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The apartment is directly above a public toilet, and apparently the toilet flushes so loudly and with such extreme force that they can hear it throughout their home.

Every time some German tourist or drunk picnicgoer takes a dump in this toilet, this family’s whole apartment shakes with the resultant flush.

Not to belabor the point, but: What is Elon Musk at this point but an extremely loud toilet sound?

We finally exit the Trump years, and the worst of the pandemic, and you think maybe we’ll have some peace and quiet, but then — WHOOSH! — Elon Musk buys the best social network and turns it into a 120-decibel public latrine.

It would be swell if Walter Isaacson’s cinder block of a book represented the apex of media attention on Elon Musk, if he could fade into irrelevancy like Madison Cawthorn or Chewbacca Mom.

It won’t happen. Long after Elon Musk fades from the best-seller list we will still be reading BuzzFeed lists about Elon Musk’s 19 craziest sexual fantasies involving robots, or whatever.

Alas: He owns Twitter, and Tesla, and SpaceX, and an AI company, and a drilling company, and a brain-chip implant company, and somehow all of them merit attention.

I am sure he is not done announcing new companies, either. My guess? By the end of the decade Musk will declare he is building a flying skateboard. It will never exist, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be 6000 headlines that say “Elon Musk Is Building the Flying Skateboard from Back to the Future Part II.”

I can’t read anymore about this man. Yet as soon as I close this post, new information about Elon Musk will be waiting for me on whatever website I open.

“Okay,” I will whisper, a single tear rolling silently down my cheek. “What did he name his kid this time”

There is no escape. I can’t read anymore about Elon Musk. But I will, and so will you, forever.