Elon Musk Isn't Joking

I thought I would be following up the recent post about JD Vance’s disingenuous use of the word joke to describe his reposting of a video in order to lambast Kamala Harris, but there’s been another joke that tumbled out into the world that demands attention. This is the recent post from Elon Musk in response to the second assassination attempt on presidential candidate Trump. Before I go any further, political violence is not acceptable in any way. I don’t condone it and the fact that political violence is becoming more prevalent, is not a healthy indicator of life in the U.S.A. Dialing down the rhetoric seems woefully inadequate to what needs to happen in our society.

In the social media frenzy that followed the actions of Ryan Wesley Routh, Elon Musk tweeted the following words which you can see in the picture below. The tweet read “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”. After a swift and furious outpouring of disapproval, Musk removed the tweet and responded with the following statements.

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”

“Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text” he wrote in a second post on X. 

Let’s begin with the fact that even some of the edgiest comics around rarely have bits about assassinations. Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad, among others, made a joke at the 2013 Oscars about Lincoln’s assassination and it wasn’t well received and that was in an entertainment space. I won’t go so far as to say humor about assassination can’t work. I recall a comic making some sort of joke about the Lincoln assassination, but the joke was more about Boothe being an actor, than about the act itself. I wish I could track down the reference.

The examples above should tell you that this topic is just too fraught with difficulties to joke about, even for practicing comedians with audiences that would expect or be expected to tolerate boundary pushing bits. Musk is certainly no comedian and he’s not in a club. He’s the owner of a large social media platform. Certainly there is room for comedy, memes, and other forms of lighthearted and humorous fun on any social media platform, but when the owner and someone who has clearly come out in support of the candidate not named Harris, tweets that it’s odd that no one has made an attempt on her/their lives, that’s not going to come across to anyone as a joke.

There are more reasons to think that the tweet wasn’t a joke. There are no emojis to indicate humor or sarcasm. Surely Musk is a savvy enough user of social media to realize that we need to communicate explicitly that we’re being funny. Surely someone at the helm of a social media company knows of Poe’s Law. He even admits that not using emojis and relying solely on plain text was a colossally bad idea. He may have meant the post to be a joke, but there was no way anyone could reasonably think that it was going to be taken as funny. Not with the way Musk has decried Democratic policies.

Then there is the matter of his deletion of the tweet and his responses. The tweet was toxic and nothing was going to change that. Keeping it out there would have continued the controversy. He tries to play the tweet off as something he said in a group of folks who thought it was funny and that it was simply him sharing the same joke with the rest of the world. His second response, which tries to assert that he is guilty not of making a joke, but of making the joke poorly known, agrees that people would have a hard time seeing the tweet as a joke.

The thrust of all of this is that here’s yet another person with an outsized place of importance in the world because of his status, making a comment that got him into trouble. His response is to hide behind the veil of humor, as Vance did. How successful he was at this, or how anyone person would believe him and his rationalizations likely depends on your political leanings before the tweet was posted. But that shouldn’t be the reason we critique or not Musk’s actions.

Musk is simply offering that it was possible that he was joking. Once he can assert this barest of possibilities, his hope is that he will be spared any condemnation. But the problem is, there’s literally no reason to assume that the possibility that he was joking is actually true. All the evidence suggests he wasn’t joking. We should stop letting public figures off when they simply help themselves to defenses that aren’t legitimate. It degrades comedy, joking, and real, helpful political discourse. Joking about an assassination attempt, or rather lack thereof helps no one and nothing in our current politics. Letting Musk off on this doesn’t help our political climate. It makes it worse.