‘I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter,’ he said. It truly was no-holds-barred stuff
It is wrong to enjoy the pain of others, unless that person is Elon Musk and the pain is about his purchase of Twitter. In an interview with the BBC reporter James Clayton this week, Musk enumerates the ways in which buying Twitter “hasn’t been some kind of party”, describes the thousands of lay-offs at the company as “not fun at all” and puts the pain level of the whole experience at “extremely high”. As interviews with CEOs go, these comments count as immensely revealing, although for me the real takeaway has been that you can be the second richest man in the world and still struggle to find dental veneers that fit.
Apologies; that was petty. But there is something about the ludicrousness of Musk that triggers the most childish responses. To watch Clayton grapple with him in the last-minute interview – Musk apparently gave the reporter a 20-minute heads up, not a controlling manoeuvre at all – is to witness an almost unmatchably awkward collision between reverence and contempt. The BBC, with its forelock-tugging “just happy to be here” energy (I don’t fault the reporter for this, by the way; there’s an argument that Clayton’s unthreatening demeanour extracted more from Musk than Emily Maitlis would have done), and Musk, working hard to get his reasonable-guy persona off the runway but coming across like a character from an Anthony Trollope novel.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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