Elon Musk is, unfortunately, still important

Elon Musk’s Kaleidoscope Of Shit

The week before Christmas, I was sitting down for dinner at a little schnitzel place in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin when my phone started blowing up. My sister was FaceTiming me. Some friends were sending texts. Even a couple readers emailed me. All worried I was hurt. I had spent the day blissfully offline, recovering from clubbing the night before by eating comically large sausages at Christmas markets and strolling around the city. So to say I was confused was an understatement.

Unbeknownst to me, a man had just driven a car through a Christmas market in the German city Magdeburg, which American media was reporting as Berlin (It’s about two hours south). And the reason my loved ones were panicking was because my most recent Instagram Story was this:

Which, I guess, would have been a pretty funny final post if it was the last thing I ever published online.

The man who carried out the attack was a 50-year-old Saudi citizen who was reportedly incensed by Muslim immigrants in Germany and had used his X account to post in support of Alternative For Germany (AfD), the country’s far-right party that Elon Musk spent the holidays praising online. To the point that AfD co-chairperson Alice Weidel posted a Christmas message to both Musk and Trump thanking them for all the promotion.

As I’ve sat with my experience in Berlin a bit, I’ve come to realize that it was, in many ways, a perfect snapshot of how life now works inside of Musk’s kaleidoscope of shit. Where nothing makes sense, but, also, doesn’t really matter. That is, until it does, oftentimes with dangerous consequences.

A few days after the Berlin car attack, X users began speculating that a “strange fog” was descending across the US. They shared ridiculous videos claiming that someone was using the fog to do something. No one ever figured out what was going on, of course. But that was fine because many of those same accounts quickly moved on to new random conspiracies they’re using to farm engagement, like speculating about the New Orleans truck attack or pouring over the alleged manifesto left behind by the man who orchestrated the Las Vegas Trump Tower Cybertruck explosion. Both incidents, themselves, bizarre echoes of the attack in Magdeburg, but with even more incomprehensible politics attached to them.

This flattening of everything — terror attacks, conspiracy theories, and random memes — is, ultimately, what Musk has been building to since he purchased Twitter in 2022. He clearly feels emboldened by his newfound proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. And he clearly sees X as a cudgel he can wield against the global liberal establishment. Which is why he’s also aligning himself with far-right parties in the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands. The European Union is the last real institution that cares enough to push back against him. The other, perhaps less obvious, reason he’s so fired up right now is because X’s user base is cratering. Which is why the site’s premium service increased by almost 40% last month. Musk doesn’t have any real, tangible influence on the masses, but he has the perception of it. And, in 2025, there’s no meaningful difference between the two.

Which brings us to what will assuredly be the main question of Trump’s first year back in office: Exactly how big does X have to remain to matter politically? A question not so different from one I asked 10 years ago, in regards to 4chan. Though, to save ourselves some time, I think the answer is that, as long as Musk is in charge, and as long as the corpse of mainstream media continues its death rattle, the site will continue to matter, regardless of how few real human beings are still on it. Though perhaps the ultimate example of how our new Muskian information age operates is the saga of Adrian Dittman, an account that may or may not secretly belong to Musk.

Musk’s estranged daughter has claimed for months that the Dittman account probably belongs to Musk. But speculation reached a fever pitch last month after Dittman attended a bunch of X Spaces and users became convinced it was Musk using voice modulation software to disguise himself. Then, last week, Dittman went on a Fortnite stream and, well, sounded even more like Musk (and also sucked at Fortnite). A 4chan user claiming to be Dittman then went on a posting spree, sharing seemingly photoshopped screenshots that appeared to reveal he had X admin access, only to get thoroughly roasted for being cringe. Right-wing magazine The Spectator then posted a deep dive claiming they had identified Dittman as a very real and very pathetic Elon Musk fan living in Fiji, supported by research, which wasn’t credited in the piece, done by Maia Arson Crimew, the Swiss hacker behind the TSA no-fly list leak. Though, none of it really proves Musk isn’t using Dittman’s X account. Making matters stranger, The Spectator article is currently being blocked on X, as are posts from anyone else claiming that Dittman lives in Fiji.

What does it all mean? Almost certainly nothing, and yet, it’s all anyone is talking about. Which is what Musk has always wanted. He is the media and now he is the news. Well, that is until Trump fires him for getting more attention than him.

A Good Post

Chappell Roan Steps On The AI Landmine

Chappell Roan set off a big round of drama last week after she posted a story to the private @lovekishakisha Instagram account she uses with her creative director Ramisha Sattar. In the story she asked for fans to make AI images of her and Sattar.

There were plenty of Roan fans who were dismayed that she was seemingly embracing AI, but this story was overwhelmingly amplified by anti-fans that have been waiting for Roan to slip up in some way. If you don’t spend any time down in fandom fever swamps — and you absolutely shouldn’t — you might not realize how competitive different stan armies are. And there are plenty of communities that have grown to hate Roan because, at least up until now, she was very effortlessly passing the internet’s authenticity checklist. And, thus, making their own faves look bad. If you want to read more about why fandoms have become so competitive and deranged over the last few years, I wrote a bit about it before the break last year.

As for the AI dimension here, it seems like an unforced error on Roan’s part, but I also think policing celebrities who use AI is a losing battle, unfortunately. The companies that want us to use these services have baked them into everything and, unless the whole industry bottoms out — possible! — it’s going to get harder and harder for the average person to even know what is AI and what isn’t. Which is, of course, the whole point.

Bluesky Still Exists Downstream Of X

Here’s an interesting little snapshot of where Bluesky is at the moment. According to data Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas and I pulled for Garbage Intelligence last week, Bluesky growth is settling down after its big post-election spike. And while there are more users on the app than ever before, it still hasn’t formed a distinct culture. In fact, it seems like the influx of #Resistance libs has actually turned it into even more of an X offshoot than it was previously, at least on a macro level.

Case in point: Weird Internet Guy and Verified X user Matt Forney, who once published a “book” titled, Do the Philippines: How to Make Love with Filipino Girls in the Philippines, posted some ragebait last week about how “eating out is often more economical then cooking due to lost productivity.” It caused a bunch of dumb discourse on X and was then screenshot by a Bluesky user, where it went viral a second time over there. Which inadvertently kicked off a whole new round of “is it ablest to tell people to buy groceries” drama among online leftists.

This is not a problem that’s specific to Bluesky — X discourse is running the web at the moment. But it’s a bigger problem for Bluesky than, say, Reddit, simply because Bluesky still doesn’t have enough of a distinct user experience to really compete with X. But, for the sake of all our sanity, hopefully that changes soon.

Dan Hentschel Needs A Lawyer

Online performance artist and comedian Dan Hentschel — you probably know him as the guy on X constantly screaming in his car — is apparently in hot water after recording a video about wanting to shoot up his high school in 2013. It seems like this is the video that law enforcement are now investigating. Like with a lot of Hentschel’s work, there isn’t an obvious punchline in it, but if you watch enough of his videos, you do start to get the kind of satire he’s doing.

Police in Bel Air, Maryland, do not get it, though. The city’s police department posted a notice on Facebook that they’re currently investigating Hentschel. I had assumed this was just another layer of Hentschel’s bit, but, no, it’s a real page and a real police department. Uh oh!

Gen Z Is Scared Of Billy Joel

Gen Z is not just scared of alcohol and dating and phone calls and grocery shopping and tight pants and sex scenes in movies and going outside. It turns out they’re also quite frightened by Billy Joel. An X user named @plumjae posted that they were recently in an Uber and heard a song “that had the most sinister vibes ever.” They then revealed that the song was… Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl”.

Now, does Joel have extremely sinister vibes? Yes, I used to live on Long Island and, yeah, there is a Joel-centric darkness that haunts the whole island. But it’s also a hilarious reaction to “Uptown Girl”.

That said, there are a couple theories floating around as to why “Uptown Girl” may be giving young people the creeps. One explanation, which I thought was kind of neat, is that the song actually does have two musical modes happening within it that conflict with each other and create a tension for the listener. Neat! The other possibility is that horror movies have relied on “old music” as a creepy trope for so long that now anything recorded before like 1990 feels cursed to young people. Also possible!

Sonic And Shadow Do Not Kiss On The Official Sonic 3 Poster

Well, it was bound to happen. Over the summer, Sonic fans photoshopped the Sonic 3 poster to make Sonic and Shadow kiss. Obviously. The photoshops started circulating around the web. And, over the weekend, a movie theater in Croatia accidentally used one of the photoshopped posters instead of the real one on their website. A story as old as time.

A Piece Of Romanian History

Some Stray Links

• “The End Of News”

• “Spotify’s plot against musicians”

• “Why Netflix looks like that”

P.S. here’s an eggsplore page.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***