In the early hours of November 6, as the result of the US presidential election was called, Elon Musk posted a picture of himself walking into the Oval Office carrying a heavy porcelain basin. The image showed him standing on the iconic plush blue carpet with the presidential seal, gold curtains in the background. The chair behind the Resolute desk was conspicuously vacant. The post read: “Let that sink in.” A dad-joke, ha ha, from a man who has had 12 children and accumulated the largest pile of fuck-you money on the planet.
The picture was in fact a Photoshopped screengrab from a video Musk had posted two years previously, in October 2022, when he bought Twitter and walked into the company’s HQ carrying the sink. In the spirit of bad puns, there were many who said he would sink Twitter by sacking 80 per cent of the workforce and reinstating legions of far-right conspiracy theorists.
Musk became the object of mockery and scorn. They called him “Space Karen”, a buffoon with grandiose ideas about colonising Mars, who had squandered $44bn on a social media vanity project that was haemorrhaging users, value and advertising revenue.