tryingsohard

“They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”

“Young people are just smarter.”

“I’m going to have to go with no. I am not a lizard.”

“I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this.”

“There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

“Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

“Oh my f***ing god. Well, maybe that was a little too hard.”

“Yeah, we call that Boob-er.”

“Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

“You just have a drone follow the car. It’s very simple in the age of autonomous drones.”

“Death makes me very angry. It doesn’t make any sense to me. … How can a person be there and then just vanish; just not be there?”

“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”

A long hesitation, then: “Yes.” — asked whether the human race should survive.

“I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting.” — on transfusing young people’s blood.

He stands against “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”

“I look forward to working with each of you in creating a golden age in digital assets.”

“Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

“The influence and impact that we are going to have on this Earth is going to be so big.”

“We’re basically holding the planet together.” (adding: ‘and it’s not untrue.’)

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

“… this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths, and so everyone likes us.”

“Clearly, people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time. I don’t know how I would’ve done that.”

“My mind observes — my mind no longer decides.”

Asked “Do you think that you’re going to die?” he answered: “No.”

“I don’t find him desirable in any way, shape or form.”

“There’s a lot I would do for the country, but having sex with Elon Musk is not one of them. I can’t.”

“In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured.”

“Why do these guys keep reading science fiction, which often is a searing social criticism — why are they reading it as a user’s manual?”

“After all these years and thousands of tweets and free content, this worm has the nerve to de-certify me!”

“He’s Michael Scott meets Dr. Evil.”

“The movie explains that Elon is kind of a fraud.”

He’s a “trash ass beta male” with “pork skin.”

“He is a small little creature with a shriveled soul to do this.”

“Why are his pecs so high up on his chest?”

“The body obsession, the PDA, the cowboy hats, the phallic rocket: they’re a performance, they’re cartoonish, a distraction, a deflection.”

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto has “the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but [lacking] the ideological coherency.”

He leapt into the air, both arms up, shirt riding over his belly — his own chosen entrance onto a campaign stage.

He bragged he was a top-ranked Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2 player — then got caught playing from someone else’s account, and admitted the boosting.

He sipped whiskey and took a puff from a joint on camera. Tesla stock fell ~6% the next day; the Air Force opened a review.

He touted the ‘armor glass’ as unbreakable; a steel ball shattered both windows on live stage.

He posted a flat, dead-eyed VR selfie to celebrate a launch — crude low-poly Eiffel Tower and all. Kevin Roose: the graphics ‘look worse than a 2008 Wii game.’

The avatar is “a legless knock-off of a Nintendo Mii … with the eyes of a corpse.”

He named his personal AI agent ‘Agrippa’ after a Roman general, rendered it as a ‘cute teddy bear’ in a toga, and had it watch his MMA training — it told him he was ‘really lazy that round’ and sent a photo of him flat on his back.

Looks like “Eddie Redmayne was cast to play Ice Cube.”

“He looks like a dirty container of soy milk.”

At 19 he scraped classmates’ ID photos — without permission — and asked strangers to rank which woman was ‘hotter.’ It was the direct precursor to Facebook.

“I guess it’s true what they say — billionaires and their rockets end up looking just like each other.”

“So he went into space and somehow became extra divorced.”

“Oh myyy. That…shape.”

“I’m not an engineer but if I was the world’s richest human I would simply design my rocket to not look like a giant hog.”

“That’s 400 billion bucks … shredded on his yacht in the Mediterranean.”

His ~$500M superyacht was so tall a historic 1878 Rotterdam bridge would have to be dismantled to let it out. Locals organized to pelt it with rotten eggs; the plan was scrapped.

He went from tech-geek build to six-pack abs between 2017 and 2022; the engineered ‘buff billionaire’ look became a running joke.

After public cage-fight challenges with Musk, he leaned into an MMA ‘shredded’ image, posing shirtless with pro fighters. The fight never happened.

He ran a multi-generational plasma exchange — taking a liter from his teenage son — then reported ‘no benefits detected.’

He personally put $180 million into an anti-aging startup whose stated mission is to add 10 years to the human lifespan — as its sole backer.

He is reportedly among the backers of Altos Labs, a ~$3B cellular-‘rejuvenation’ startup. (MIT Tech Review could not confirm the stake.)

“These guys, mostly men, who are obsessed with longevity … I find them not very happy people.”