Elon Musk would be better off taking career advice from kindergartners: Blundo
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Elon Musk shoots rockets into space. He builds electric cars. He’s trying to figure out how to link our brains directly to computers. He’s digging futuristic tunnels in the hopes of transporting us from here to there at 600 miles per hour.
But what he really wants to spend his time on is ... Twitter?
Twitter, infested with trolls, bots, misogynists, racists, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and politicians? Part of the larger social media world that daily demonstrates how little our fear-driven lizard brains have progressed despite thousands of years of evolution? That’s what he’s going to concentrate on now?
Sheesh.
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Any kindergarten class in America could have given Musk solid career advice on where to venture next if he really needed something else to do — which he didn’t.
The kids would have heard his resume — with its sleek vehicles, spaceships and giant digging machines — and said one word: “Dinosaurs.”
Bring back the dinosaurs, they’d say. Also invent a magic cape so we can swoop around the neighborhood like hawks. And bore a hole clean through the Earth so we can see what’s inside.
But Twitter? Where people talk with their fingers? And say mean things to each other while hiding behind fake names? We kids would be much more impressed with dinosaurs.
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Look, I get it: A guy has a few successes, amasses a billion-dollar fortune, earns some adulation, hosts "Saturday Night Live" and pretty soon thinks he might as well rule the world. Happens to the best of billionaires (except for the Russian ones who have to obey Vladimir Putin).
But let’s think strategically for a minute. If world domination really is the goal, what would be a better way of winning the hearts and minds of the masses: Policing online claptrap or perfecting that Hyperloop tunnel thing that could propel us from Columbus to Chicago in a half-hour?
No more airport security lines, no more six-hour car rides, take in a Cubs night game and be back home before the clock strikes 12. People would adore him. He’d be the fifth stone face on Mount Rushmore in no time.
I know, I know: Musk bought Twitter so he could strike a blow for free speech or influence elections or something. That’s already bogging him down in complexities that defy solution. How is Musk going to control disinformation when people can’t even agree on what reality is?
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Consult some 5-year-olds, Musk. They’ll tell you to forget this social media nonsense and create an invisibility cloak or lead an expedition to Saturn or, yes, resurrect the dinosaurs.
And what if that backfires, a la Jurassic Park? Well, far cooler to be eaten alive by a tyrannosaurus than by Twitter.
Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.
@joeblundo (but don’t expect me to Tweet)
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 5-year-olds could give Elon Musk better career advice, Joe Blundo says
