Hey Elon, assassination is hilarious, right? #duck!

Hey Elon Musk, I need a favour. I’m thinking of getting a gun licence and I need a rancid, preposterous, hate-mongering multi-gazillionaire to use for target practice. Are you busy tomorrow around lunchtime? Hashtag just jokes. What? You didn’t think I was serious, did you? When I said that to my friends, they totally laughed their heads off. Assassination is hilarious.

No really, Elon, I know you’ve found yourself at the bottom of a global pile-on since you took to your website, X (nee Twitter), this week to question why “no one was even trying” to shoot US President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, but your friends – the ones you cited, who think gun violence is funny – sound great.

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Besides that, you and I have loads in common. I, too, have 12 children, one of whom is named “X Æ A-Xii”. Hashtag coincidence! (OK, fine, my 12 children all have normal names. Algebra – actually, make that maths generally – really isn’t my jam.) But look, like you, I’m a huge believer in free speech, which is why I know you won’t mind my saying that I sometimes wish someone would truss you up, stuff you into one of your SpaceX rockets and fire you permanently out into the cosmos. There’s something about your resting chortling-private-schoolboy-caught-mid-stupid-prank face that periodically gives me the ick.

On the other hand, you were one of the five founding fathers of PayPal, which has got me out of any number of questionable retail transactions over the years, so there was a time when I literally could not afford to stay angry with you for long.

The thing is though, Elon, between your ardent support of Donald Trump and the hatchet jobs you’ve done on Twitter, Taylor and Tesla of late, I’m starting to wonder whether you accidentally stuck one of your car chargers into the wrong hole, rendering your every utterance the verbal equivalent of an increasingly vicious electric shock.

How else to explain your offer to impregnate Taylor Swift after she had the temerity to endorse Kamala Harris for US president last week? Your own daughter Vivian Wilson (who, thank Pythagoras, named herself after she came out as transgender in 2022), described your suggestion as “heinous incel nonsense”. Either stupidity is capable of skipping a generation, or that girl takes after her mother.

Then there’s the tanking fortunes of your beloved Teslas. Evidently, the European market share for electric vehicles slipped from 14.6 per cent in 2023 to 13.5 per cent in 2024, with global analysts blaming “lack of clarity about incentives for electric vehicles, low residual value of EVs and consumer perceptions around Elon Musk” for the downturn.

Now, unfortunately, I’m not fluent in Corporate Schmuck-ese, but if I was, I might surmise that flogging cars whose batteries cost the equivalent of little Algebraic Equation Musk’s left lung to replace, while playing to an audience of faceless, simpering, ultra-right-wing keyboard warriors, isn’t the cakewalk it used to be. Hashtag bummer.

And speaking of fearless defenders of filthy dens of online iniquity, can we just have a quick chat about your ceaseless global campaign to browbeat, bully and bend democratically elected leaders to your will under the guise of protecting free speech?

Here’s a sentence you don’t find yourself writing every day: your outrageous, disgraceful, shameless efforts to use the Australian court system to keep footage of the Wakeley stabbing atrocity online earlier this year, along with your recent characterisation of Anthony Albanese as a “fascist”, had me yearning for an audience with your current favourite sparring partner, Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes. You know him, right? He’s the guy who last month ordered his nation’s ISPs to block access to X until the platform complies with a number of state laws. You’ve been exchanging virtual blows with him for several years, but your response to suddenly being denied access to 20 million Brazilian X users was ripped straight out of the chapter titled “Unvarnished Self-Interest” in the tech titan playbook: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”

Obviously, the question of whether the South American ban on X paves the way for other liberal democracies to push back against soft powers such as the one you currently wield is a live issue for you, Elon. God forbid that other world leaders start taking their cues from “an unelected pseudo [Brazilian] judge” and cutting off the power to your online microphone.

I know you’re the world’s richest man and all, but, as canvassed previously, you have a lot of mouths to feed. As such, you might need to consider pivoting to your side hustle: moving target for prospective gun licensees. Just kidding, not. Hashtag start running Elon.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.