Musk was celebrated as “a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. And there he was, standing before an audience he considered to be his people: mostly alpha bros who enjoy transphobic, antisemitic, misogynistic “jokes.” And yet, there was no denying that they were booing.įor Musk, this was a novel experience, “a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” he said in a now deleted Tweet after a video of the episode went viral, generating an echo chamber of ridicule on the very platform that he now owned.Ī year earlier, almost to the day, Musk was being cheered as TIME’s Person of the Year, riding high as a bull market boosted his personal fortune to a peak of $340 billion, surpassing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man ever to inhabit earth. This, after all, was San Francisco, the cradle of tech innovation, land of the creators and the disruptors who move fast and break things, the home of Twitter Inc., which Musk had recently purchased for $44 billion. And noise they did make, though not the kind that Musk was expecting.

It was at San Francisco’s Chase Arena, to be precise, where comedian Dave Chappelle asked his audience to “make some noise for the richest man in the world,” aka Elon Musk, who subsequently stepped onto the stage. When the AI-powered chatbots chronicle the history of the social media era, they will note that the myth of the Genius Social Platform CEO died on December 11, 2022, not with a data center outage or a violent mob spurred on by a Tweet or sweeping government regulation, but onstage at a comedy show.

Paparazzi app founder