Elon Musk, the Midwit Messiah and the Collapse of Complex Thought

There once was a man who built his fortune by standing near smart people and pointing dramatically. A man who could summon billions in capital with a meme, who mistook attention for intelligence, and who believed that every thought that entered his head deserved a podium. His name was Elon Musk, and for a time, he was hailed as a genius.

But that time has passed, or rather, it has peeled away like a strip of sunburned skin, revealing the frail scaffolding beneath the myth.

These days, Musk spends less time revolutionizing transportation or saving the planet and more time posting feverishly from his broken bird app, reposting conspiracy theories, spewing ethnonationalist nonsense, and awkwardly cosplaying as the victim of a global left-wing cabal. If you listen to him, he’s not the richest man in the world but the most persecuted. George Soros is funding paid protests in all 50 states, the media is out to get him because he's too powerful, and the real threat to civilization? Not climate collapse, not authoritarianism, but “mass immigration” and transgender people with confusing pelvis angles.

You’d think the man who claims to want to colonize Mars would have a firmer grasp on Earth. Instead, he recently explained immigration using a thought experiment that could’ve been ripped from a 5th grader’s creative writing assignment: if you teleport all the Italians out of Italy and replace them with “foreigners,” Italy is no longer Italy. Get it? It’s science! Borders! Culture! Teleportation! This was Musk’s entry into the “poisoning the blood of our country” genre of political discourse, a rebranded great replacement theory wrapped in sci-fi metaphors and served cold from a billionaire who thinks nations are as easily managed as inventory spreadsheets.

And yet, despite the philosophical depth of a puddle, he insists he’s saving Western civilization, one self-own at a time.

Take, for example, his deeply intellectual contribution to the gender discourse: a repost of a diagram comparing pelvic angles, suggesting that archeologists in the future won’t care about your identity, only your bones. Because nothing says “forward-thinking innovator” like using 19th-century forensic anthropology to erase entire communities of living people. Elon, who once wanted to be the architect of the future, now proudly reduces gender to 30 degrees and a smug shrug.

Meanwhile, over at his pet project X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, Musk is busy crowning himself a media mogul. “We’re the media now,” he declares, as if a firehose of ragebait, conspiracies, AI-generated clickfarming, and right-wing propaganda is somehow equivalent to journalism. But X isn’t a newsroom. It’s not even a credible aggregator. It’s a digital coliseum, where outrage is the currency and facts are optional. Calling X the “#1 news app” is like calling YouTube comments the #1 educational institution.

Still, Elon wants us to believe that this chaos factory is why the “traditional media” hates him. Not because he’s silencing journalists, boosting white nationalists, or warping the public square with his own insecurities, nope, it’s jealousy. It’s persecution. Like clockwork, he reposts his own tweets as prophecy, claiming he knew the left would come after him as soon as he “bravely” admitted he was voting Republican. Not because he’s a billionaire with fascist tendencies and the emotional maturity of a teenage Reddit mod, but because he dares to speak truth.

Musk isn’t just deluded. He’s dangerous precisely because so many still mistake his performance for brilliance. But if you look past the press releases, past the staged demos and curated narratives, what you find is a man who thinks in memes and governs by vibes, a midwit cosplaying as a messiah. He’s not building the future. He’s selling the illusion of it, using the oldest tricks in the demagogue playbook: blame the immigrants, mock the vulnerable, elevate the conspiracies, and claim that any attempt to hold you accountable is proof you were right all along.

He’s not a genius. He’s not a victim. He’s a very rich man with a very basic, simplistic mind and a very large megaphone.

And the more we treat him like an oracle instead of what he is, a bored billionaire spiraling into reactionary nonsense, the more damage he’ll do, not through innovation, but through amplification of ignorance.

Elon Musk is not our Da Vinci. He’s our pharaoh with Wi-Fi. And history will not remember him for the rockets. It will remember him for the tweets.