Elon Musk: entrepreneur, billionaire, and Twitter’s most sensitive man | Jack Marshall’s column

I mean, where do you start? He’s the richest guy on Earth who has his own space company and 10 kids. Growing up, his dad owned a diamond mine in Zambia. He helped found PayPal, is the CEO of Tesla, and has a brother named Kimbal who always wears cowboy hats. He wants to colonise Mars.

He started an artificial intelligence research lab and a tunnelling business called The Boring Company. He’s been widely criticised for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and once called a caver who helped rescue 13 people during the Tham Luang cave rescue a "pedo guy". He owns Twitter, which he purchased for $44bn this year.

He really wants people to think he’s funny and cool, but he’s powerfully unfunny and uncool. Just like how athletes are jealous of rockstars and their hedonism-permitting fame, Musk has ticked the box marked ‘wealth’, but humour constantly evades him even. It’s almost tragic, this man with his billions unable to purchase the one thing he desperately wants: coolness.

Lord knows he tries. He went on Joe Rogan’s awful podcast and smoked weed badly. He took part in the least funny episode of Saturday Night Live ever. He’s too innately goofy, and people are letting him know, which he doesn’t like. Someone on his own social media platform described his Twitter purchase as ‘an insecure narcissist buying a criticism factory.’

Another hilariously said: ‘All this Elon Musk stuff just keeps making me think of when Monica's millionaire boyfriend Pete wanted to become The Ultimate Fighting Champion,’ while another tweeted: ‘Every Elon post is like watching Joe Pesci enter the Home Alone house.’ People are laughing at him, and Elon hates that. He’s now banned parody accounts.

He wants clout on Twitter so badly, that he bought the company. And nothing sums up this fragile man better than this: ‘The hilarious tragedy of Elon Musk is he really wants to post but he can’t. The man can’t post. It’s not in his blood and it never will be. He can spend all the money in the world and he’ll never be a poster. The real ones know exactly what I mean.’