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I am not a screenwriter and I don’t have any screenwriter friends. I have watched movies, though, and these days that qualifies me as an expert on the social development and interior lives of screenwriters. And you can take it from me that a very large percentage of the men shopping their screenplays around Hollywood were complete dorks in high school. They were about half as cool as that socially awkward but also very sweet boy character they have written into their scripts. We have all pulled for that character and thought that the world would be such a better place if more guys like him got the girl and rose to prominence. We were so wrong.
I have no first-hand experience of dorkiness. The fact that you are not reading a screenplay leaves no doubt about that. I have, however, taught science to kids in seventh through twelfth grade and have seen real-life versions of that lovable movie character try all the wrong things in their sad attempts to be seen as cool and/or masculine. Based on that experience I can tell you that Mark Zuckerberg’s perm-and-chains makeover is such an eighth-grade move. It screams: “I would bounce around at a school assembly like Elon Musk at a Trump rally.”
Zuckerberg’s dabbling in martial arts could have moved the needle if we didn’t all know about it, and his play for man-o-sphere credibility on Joe Rogan’s show was, in my kids’ words, “cringe”—like Elon Musk at a Trump rally or that Vogue photoshoot of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. Speaking of which, Zuckerberg will never really fit in with this billionaire Avengers group until he leaves his wife for another woman or at least gets caught in a messy affair.
These billionaires are desperate to prove they are James-Bond manly men and also regular guys like the one next to you at the bar in Karlsruhe, North Dakota, or the after-party at Sean “Puffy” Combs’s house. Unfortunately for Jeff Bezos, his vibes are more Bond villain than 007—so much so that I am sure I am not the first to make this comparison. Mark Zuckerberg would be nobody’s favorite James Bond, but with his fresh hairdo he could be cast as the new kid on Stranger Things. It would be the season where they forge deep into the Upside Down and find multiple planes of Elon Musk bouncing around at a Trump rally.
There aren’t many stranger things than Elon Musk. The thing that he thought would make him cool—buying Twitter—turned out to be the thing that unraveled his carefully marketed boy-genius mythology. The more he tweets, the more he talks, the more we see him, the less we think of him. My friend Sven said that seeing video of Elon Musk on election night is what made him finally accept that some kids really do need to be put on a leash when taken out in public. This is not what we thought oligarchy would look like.
The oligarchs in my end-of-the-republic nightmares were so much more staid and professional than this group of icky bootlickers desperate for respect that their money can’t buy and for the attention of Captain Gulf of America, who may be the ickiest and most desperate of all.
Donald Trump is easily the most aggrieved person on the planet. No one has ever been treated so unfairly or had it so rough. This despite the fact that he is the best at everything and the smartest person in the history of mankind. He just desperately needs us all to acknowledge that and give him credit and adulation for every good thing that has ever happened. This is why he is so easily played.
No one needs a briefing on how to negotiate with Trump. TikTok blatantly followed the formula. They thanked him, gave him credit, and called it a “strong stand.” They made sure every user saw it when returning to the app. It worked like a charm:
Our adversaries must have been howling with laughter, and our allies shaking their heads. The President of the United States of America got played, bigly, like no one has ever seen before . . .
These billionaires are all icky and desperate and feel like their share of the pie is unfairly small. They will never have enough, except for when they’ve had enough of each other, which appears to have happened with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Maybe Ramaswamy noticed that SpaceX contracts are the biggest boondoggle in government.
Musk’s DOGE office will be at the Eisenhower Office Building, near the White House. How long until someone has had enough that? It is going to be so cringe.
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