Colm O'Regan: How can we trust Elon Musk when his laptop is so manky?

Colm O'Regan. Photograph Moya Nolan

Elon Musk – he just doesn’t sound real. First the name, it doesn’t sound like the name of a real person. It seems fictional and futuristic. Elon Musk is the name of an outlaw who carries out daring raids on thorium transportation convoys in the badlands of Jupiter’s moons. “Musk cradled his ion-gun as the dust clouds harbinged the hovertrucks’ arrival. ‘Like takin soy-chocs from a baby’, he laughed”.

But it’s actually harder to believe why the richest man in the world would be on Twitter arguing with people or agreeing with dodgy types. He fires rockets at the moon for goodness sake. I still can’t get my head around the fact these people have smartphones and then write the first thing that comes into their heads. Billionaires are simply not what they used to be.

At the very least, I would have imagined him to have to have one of those old Nokia phones. The 6310i, the ‘CEO phone’ where the battery goes on forever and has very little else on it to distract you from ruling the world.

What happened to the secretive billionaires we know and love to hate in the past? The ones hiding behind layers of oily lawyers. An advisor who is secretly in love with him. Henchmen?! Why doesn’t the richest man in the world have henchmen? I’m surprised there isn’t more protests from men and women of Hench.

It all feels so grubby. Literally. He even posted a screenshot of his laptop screen recently and it was filthy. I don’t mean he was sending nudes. I mean the screen was MANKY. How can the richest man in the world have a dirtier laptop screen than me? Are shammies a sign of lack of ambition?

When he’s being oldschool billionairey it all makes more sense. The recent email he sent to employees is an example of this. “Going forward” it begins. Going forward?! The sleeveen-est politician stopped saying “going forward” in 2015. “in an increasing competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity.”

That just doesn’t work anymore. Aside from the fact that hours are the same length, regardless of how busy you are, and what he’s actually looking for is “more hours”, I think people are starting to wake up to the fact good stuff is rarely made without people having enough sleep.

“Long hours at high-intensity” a lot of the time just creates a load of shite that you have to spend other long hours at high-intensity fixing.

I don’t want to speak for his staff but if it were me I’d be saying “Nah, life’s too short for that. I don’t know how much livable planet hours we have left. I’m not sure I want to spend most of them working for someone who names his son after a Wifi password.”

If nothing else comes out of all of this, maybe once and for all we’ll stop uncritically worshipping ‘tech geniuses’ just because they don’t wear socks and can seemingly sit down at a computer, type really quickly and then SUCCESS! WORLD SAVED starts flashing on the screen, all the while spouting about wanting to make the world a better place.

It would seem almost impossible to become a billionaire without being an asshole.

And the nice ones just have better PR. (Except for Dolly Parton of course. She’s just plain sound.)

It’s scant consolation to people who work or used to work in a company that, for all its flaws, made some good stuff happen and built things they were proud of.

But people will want them again in different jobs. And better than anyone, they’ll be able to spot if someone is going a bit Musky.