It’s keyboards at dawn, folks! Elon Musk has been comprehensively trolled on his own social media platform, and if that irony wasn’t delicious enough, his online nemesis isn’t some Fortnite-playing 12-year-old boy but an octogenarian literary icon. American author Joyce Carol Oates branded the tech boss “totally uneducated” and “uncultured” in a damning post which has evidently got under Musk’s skin.
The spat began when Musk bullishly defended his proposed trillion-dollar Tesla pay package. That inspired 87-year-old Oates to post a savage indictment: “So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates”, such as “praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads)”.
Oates ended her attack: “In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’” The fact that she referred to the platform by its original name, Twitter, rather than Musk's attempted rebrand, was the icing on the cake.
The post about Musk went viral, with 5.5 million views, plus 11,000 retweets and 89,000 likes – and the subject of her stinging rebuke has not taken it well. In a series of erratic posts, Musk first went on the counter-attack, writing the following day: “Everything she says in her post about me can be shown to be demonstrably false with a simple search. Oates is a lazy liar and … an abuser of semicolons!” He followed that up with the cattier post: “Eating a bag of sawdust would be vastly more enjoyable than reading the laboriously pretentious drivel of Oates.”
However, Musk appeared to take Oates’s words to heart. Amusingly, right after the veteran author accused him of being culturally inert, Musk took great pains to demonstrate his bona fides. He shared such profound film insights as “Man on Fire is great”, "Edge of Tomorrow is a “great movie”, and “Fifth Element has great style”. Top tip for Musk: perhaps try using more than a single adjective when you’re feuding with a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
In an astonishing coincidence, X then promoted an ad from the book app Blinkist claiming that “Elon reads a lot” and sharing his nine non-fiction recommendations. Musk also advised his followers to listen to an audiobook of Homer’s Iliad at 1.25 speed, but linked to Homer’s Odyssey instead; he has since deleted the post.
If Musk hoped that this burst of cultural engagement would silence Oates, he was sadly mistaken. The author landed another right hook on November 11, replying to a post about Musk always wanting to leave an event by saying: “That’s because when he gets there, he has brought his own self along; & whatever club he’s invited to join has been devalued by the invitation.” Oates also said of Musk’s estranged transgender daughter Vivian Wilson: “A normal parent would be very proud.”
Musk clearly didn’t know who he was messing with. This particular literary lion simply loves to sharpen her claws on social media, and Oates has proved to be oddly well-suited to the medium thanks to her combination of intellectual acuity and unapologetically blistering, often outrage-sparking, opinions.
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