Because look: Frankly, it’s not enough to have spent my childhood wanting for nothing due to my father’s massive wealth, to have struck it rich off of a fairly dull money-transfer service idea that I didn’t even come up with, to have alienated and berated everyone I’ve ever worked with, to lie repeatedly that I was the original founder of Tesla, to amass enormous wealth off of taxpayer-funded subsidies while insisting that I’m self-made, to wield my influence and inane ideas for unworkable projects to prevent actual functional improvements in multiple cities, to receive uncritical adulation from the fawning business and tech presses, to foster a repressive and even racist workplace in my factories replete with numerous labor violations, all in the name of making cars that don’t even really fucking work—no. It’s not enough. What I desperately, desperately need is for you to think that I’m cool and funny. I need this. Please give me that satisfaction.
I brutally tortured some monkeys for literally no reason, for Christ’s sake! That’s so cool! Doesn’t that count for anything?
I’m cool. You know I’m cool.
Please.
. . . It almost makes me wonder why the hell I continue subjecting myself to this.
Oh, right—it’s that I’m hopelessly in need of your approval. Me, a 50-year-old man with the net worth of a decent-size country, forced to stoop to bizarre and pathetic stunts for attention. Either that, or cultivating a personal brand of eccentricity generates publicity and financial support that I can then leverage to distract from my essentially fraudulent business endeavors. Yes, it’s one of those two things for sure.
Well . . . at least we have TheOnion back. That's something.