I think Elon's getting Vivek'd after this one, folks

Elon Musk’s Only Real Skill Is Burning Through Lots Of Money On Stupid Shit That No One Cares About In Sad Attempts To Get People To Like Him That Only Make People Think He Sucks Even Worse

There’s a quote from President Donald Trump that’s been rattling around in my head since I first read it back in January. One that I’ve come to believe answers all of the questions surrounding the president’s bizarre deference to Elon Musk. An explanation for why Trump, noted egomaniac, would let Musk’s son embarrass him in press conferences, why Trump would do a car commercial on the White House lawn for Tesla, and why Musk and his Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been given unfettered access to America’s vast digital infrastructure.

At one of Trump’s last events before entering the White House, he told the crowd, “[Musk] knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote-counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So, it was pretty good, it was pretty good. So, thank you to Elon.”

The quote has stuck with me over the last few months, not just because “he knows those computers better than anybody,” is really, really funny, but, also, because it makes no sense. Either Trump was saying that Musk’s astroturfing of the site once known as Twitter helped him specifically win Pennsylvania or, as many have since asked, was Trump accidentally admitting to Musk literally rigging the election? And the latter reading has spun off into something of a little conspiracy theory among #resistance libs. They found a Joe Rogan episode from November, right after the election, where Rogan claimed that Musk “had an app” that showed that Trump had won “four hours” before the election was called. (Was it the New York Times app?)

But the idea that Musk and, most importantly, Musk’s technology had some hand in Trump winning in November has persisted and it’s only helped Musk consolidate political influence. He’s spent the months after Trump’s victory tearing apart the federal government’s various IT departments and recently stumped for Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. And the AfD did do well, coming in second in the election last February. Which, once again, only added to belief — and growing fear — that Musk had built some kind of digital influence machine.

And then Wisconsin happened.

As I wrote on Monday, Musk spent a considerable amount of time and money — reportedly around $25 million — trying to convince Wisconsin voters to elect Brad Schimel to the state’s Supreme Court. Musk capped off the influence campaign with a rally where he personally gave out two checks for $1 million to two voters. But none of it really mattered. Liberal judge Susan Crawford did very well last night. As congressional candidate (and former Panic World guest) Kat Abughazaleh wrote on X, “America hates Elon Musk so much that he can literally wave millions of dollars under voters’ noses and they’ll still tell him to fuck off. You love to see it.”

But Musk’s meddling in Wisconsin was, to date, the clearest example of what Trumpism has become — a pyramid scheme built to bribe voters into dismantling their own democratic rights. One of the Wisconsin voters Musk gave a check to even made a video this week, telling viewers, “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: Sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars.” Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, has since pulled down the video, probably because the woman in it is absolutely admitting to a crime.

And this entire mess in Wisconsin has clarified, for me, exactly what Musk is doing and why it “worked” before and why it didn’t “work” this time.

Musk has spent his entire career using his money to convince people he’s smart. This is why Musk sued the actual founders of both the platform that would become Paypal and, also, Tesla to make sure he’d have to be called a founder of both. And why he has spent considerable energy over the last two decades trying to convince credulous journalists and idiotic politicians that he was irl Tony Stark. Now he’s found the dumbest, least inquisitive, most media illiterate people to ever walk the Earth as his new marks: Republicans. So he bought their favorite website and set up his super PAC and is now, once again, using his money as a way to convince American conservatives that, as Trump put it, “he knows those computers better than anybody.” Maybe Trump thinks X posts helped him win (they absolutely didn’t), maybe Trump thinks Musk actually rigged the election (also doubtful). But I imagine it’s similar to when you help your grandfather reset his Netflix password. Doesn’t matter what happened in the computer, but it worked. The PDF rotated. And if Musk did have any actual impact on last year’s election, it was almost certainly thanks to the $290 million he spent on Trump’s campaign, around $50 million of which were spent on million-dollar giveaways like the one he tried again this week. But, once again, did it matter? Seeing as how things played out in Wisconsin, likely not. Which is a problem because the only thing Musk is truly a genius at is burning through unimaginable amounts of money on dumb shit no one cares about.

And it seems like Trump — a man so equally good at burning through cash that he bankrupted a casino — is finally catching on. As Politico reported this morning, the president is already whispering that Musk is getting Vivek’d out of the administration in late May, once he hits his 130-day time limit on his “special government employee” Big Boy Who Does Important Stuff badge.

Or, as writer Roxane Gay so succinctly summed up all of this on Bluesky this morning, “Apartheid Clyde is a petty, dangerous, incompetent man, but what always amuses me is how no one likes him and he can’t even buy his way into getting people to like him. He can’t buy a good sense of humor or good looks or good reputation.”

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What’s All This Then?

I’ll be in London later this month and I realized it’s been a while since I saw my UK Garbage Day readers. So my former podcast co-host (and, for now, still current friend) Luke Bailey and I are hosting a little get together for Garbage Day readers in London on April 23rd! It’s free and will be very fun I think. You can RSVP here. (My apologies if British people don’t use Partiful.)

A Troubling Post

Corey Booker Steps Up — Or Rather Stands There For A Long Time, But, Still…

I have been hard on the Democrats over the last six months. I’ve been frustrated, to say the least, that they haven’t seemed to really care that they very publicly pooped their pants back in November when we needed them most and possibly cost us constitutional democracy in America forever. But you know who didn’t poop their pants in public? Sen. Cory Booker during his 25-hour and five-minute Senate speech yesterday.

Booker beat a record held by Sen. Strom Thurmond since 1957, but, unlike Thurmond, Booker actually spoke coherently the whole time, didn’t resort to reading the phone book, or go the bathroom. (Was Booker diaped up? You can reach me securely on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420.)

If you’re looking for some leftist critiques of why Booker’s big speech was actually kinda meh, I thought this post on X made some interesting points. But the modern Democratic Party is like 90% theater kids at this point, so, you know, if you make them feel like they’re trying out for Hamilton, maybe they’ll actually start taking Trump’s coup seriously.

But, to be more generous to Booker, 25 hours is a lot of footage. And if his team is smart, they’ll be clipping as much of it as possible while bragging about the record he broke and hopefully turn the moment into something that can actually break through culture and reach voters.

Please Don’t Have A Meltdown On X About Your College Essay

—by Adam Bumas

A high school student named Zach Yadegari applied to 18 colleges and only got into three, and decided to post about it on X. In a vacuum, this should be fine, if you ignore how pathetically embarrassing it is for a teenager in 2025 to have a verified!!! X account. Applying to college has become more and more competitive, and rejection is especially hard when you’re 18, so go ahead, be mad about it online. We’ve all been there.

[Ed. Note: I picked the college I went to because it was on Long Island and when I toured there in 2007 I saw a lot of cute girls with side swept bangs.]

The problem is, we all live in Post World now. If the algorithm picks you up, then whatever you were saying gets put on the same level as the most important pieces of news  — and biggest ad campaigns — on the planet. To complicate it further, Yadegari knows this. He’s “the founder and CEO” of a tech startup, so his post was a roundabout form of an actual college application in its own right. Tagging Elon Musk shows he clearly wants some kind of recognition, if not restitution, from his virality.

X’s algorithm decided this was headline news and so everyone from Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to Bari Weiss’ Hustlers University has mixed it up with Yadegari in the replies. Whether they were clowning on his essay or making supportive jokes about DEI, I don’t think he (or we) should have to deal with any of it. Because the lens of Post World distorts in both directions. Is this someone climbing atop the biggest soapbox we have left to rail against the education system? Is it treating college admissions like bad customer service, where you might get what you want if you complain online? Or is it just a teenager who worked hard for less than he hoped, being understandably unhappy about it? Let’s be nice, pick the last one, and find something else to worry about.

Another April Fools’ Is Thankfully Behind Us

It’s 2025 and no one knows what’s real or really cares. So April Fools’ Day, which started being the internet’s worst day at some point around 2012, doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

For instance, Kevin Hart did a Tiny Desk concert for NPR, performing under the name Chocolate Droppa. Was that an April Fools’ joke? He did actually do the concert, technically. AriZona Iced Tea announced a partnership with The Rizzler for “Arizzona Iced Tea”. It seems like everyone just sort of assumed this was real and moved on. Though, AriZona did eventually clarify that, no, it was not. But would it be all that surprising? I can buy MrBeast chocolate at Target. And I, personally, fell for Bluesky’s announcement that they were increasing their character limit. I mean, sure, why not. Twitter decided to do the same after a few years. That’s just what social platforms do.

Fifteen years ago, when a brand announced something unhinged, everyone was, first, shocked, and, then, would laugh about it. But there are no limits to how craven and desperate a brand can be in 2025. Nintendo is literally sponsoring The Rizzler right now on TikTok.

Speaking of both brands and being fooled…

Hollywood Studios Briefly Tried To Monetize Those Fake AI-Generated Trailers On YouTube

—by Adam Bumas

You’ve probably been fooled — at least briefly — at some point by an AI-generated fake trailer on YouTube. These trailers carefully mimic the presentation of the real thing but come out before them, sometimes for movies that don’t actually exist. That gets them enough attention to have priority in the algorithm, to fool actual TV networks, and to support a whole parasitical ecosystem of content creators.

Last week, Deadline reported that several major movie studios, including Sony and Warner Bros. Discovery, were actively supporting the fake trailer economy. Instead of issuing copyright takedowns for the phony trailers, they were apparently working with YouTube to get the ad revenue from them, secretly turning the “fanmade” videos into official advertising for both real movies and the studios’ portfolios, in general.

It’s a genius marketing tactic, so long as you don’t care about your reputation, your products, or the sacred spark of humanity that sets us apart from unthinking beasts. And surprisingly, some people are still capable of feeling shame — YouTube cut off monetization for the most popular fake trailer channels after the report came out. But it’s an illustrative case of the kind of embarrassed surrender that seems to be the expected response to anything that you can describe as “AI”. Because at this point, it comes across as eager self-sabotage. You have to be deep in the tank for the robot overlords to officially endorse something like this trailer for Venom 4, a movie that you’re not going to make.

Waking Up In Roku City

Some Stray Links

• “Something bizarre is happening to people who use ChatGPT a lot”

• “Donkey Kong champion wins defamation case against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst”

• “Ghosts in the Kinect”

P.S. here’s marmot lying still experience like washing a carpet.

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