World’s Richest Dumbest Billionaire and the Essential Avatar of ‘Whiteness’

Gayle Leslie
3 min readOct 2, 2023

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So self-congratulatory that he thinks he needs to keep making babies, spreading his seed, even as his grown kids won’t speak to him. Yeah, that guy.

Elon Musk

Cancel Culture: the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.

Consequence: a result or effect of an action or condition.

This is an excerpt from a more comprehensive piece I wrote on the banality of ‘whiteness.’

I’d thought to write a piece on the cascade of uber wealthy saying the quiet part out loud in recent weeks, telling us — to our faces — that all those decades of working people ‘complaining’ about the institutional racism, misogyny and classism that we intuited were keeping us on our knees, unable to prosper, to move forward, to thrive — all the reasons, the excuses these self-congratulatory gatekeepers had for not treating working folks with dignity, let alone paying them — was all in our heads. That all ‘we the people’ had to do was work harder, be sweeter and stop complaining and that we would be fine.

The self ordained ‘ruling class’ were not ‘gaslighting’ us, they were just smarter, they worked harder, they just knew better than we did what was good for us. That ‘we the people’ were lazy and ungrateful.

‘We the people’ aren’t fine. In fact, weren’t f*cking pissed and over it.

My first thought was to write about them, but lately they’ve done such a stellar job of telling us themselves, saying the quiet part out loud that I’ve elected to let these clever folks speak for themselves.

There’s so much to expound on with Elon Musk’s particular insanity that this will be limited to the most recent ‘mad man on the mountain’ episode: his privately owned Starlink satellites are moving data all over the world allowing him to control all manner of communications between nations. The United States has essentially farmed out its space program to this freak, what could possibly go wrong?

When the Ukrainians were equipped to move drones across the Russian lines to disarm the military strongholds that were bombing Ukrainian cities — after private communications with Vladimir Putin — Musk decided that he personally did not want to engage in the conflict so he ordered Starlink satellites in the region to be essentially ‘turned off’ mid-mission: the Ukrainian drones fell into the sea because Elon Musk decided he wanted them to.

Musk attributes much of his inability to connect, to even function as a human being, to his Asperger’s: I know people with Asperger’s. In and of itself that doesn’t make one a narcissist or an a**hole. Greta Thunberg — quirky — not an a**hole; Albert Einstein — high maintenance — not an a**hole; Nikola Tesla, Ben Franklin, Daryl Hannah, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin: not a**holes. In fact, they worked for the benefit of mankind.

Musk also had a beast of a brutally abusive father. So did a lot of us and we didn’t turn into monsters with delusions of bringing the world to its knees.

Elon Musk has no excuse, he needs to be stopped.

Chuckleheads like Elon Musk leverage their whiteness to access the levers of power: power to gerrymander elections; power to gerrymander the stock market; power to gerrymander the mechanisms of governance, taxation, regulation and the judiciary; the power to gerrymander the assembly-line floor, to withhold life altering healthcare, to rape with impunity and to decide who becomes a star and who is never heard from again.

While the rest of us are expected to resign ourselves to our lesser station in the social order, bend over and grab our ankles and take it up the a** without resistance or complaint.

Begging the question: how’s that goin’ for ya’?

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Gayle Leslie
Gayle Leslie

Written by Gayle Leslie

Author of “Dwelling in the Vast Divine.1 & .2" Political consultant, policy wonk. https://www.amazon.com/Dwelling-Vast-Divine-1-Serialized-Memoir/dp/1495477746

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