If he doesn’t get his way, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk is willing to take his ball and go home.
In a stunningly idiotic tweet, Musk asserted that “every great endeavor, from high-speed rail between our cities to making life multiplanetary,” would be made “effectively illegal” if vice president Kamala Harris were to beat former president Donald Trump in the upcoming election.
“We will never reach Mars if Kamala wins,” he added.
Following a disastrous performance by Trump during Tuesday’s first presidential debate, Musk has been on a tear on his social media platform, threatening to impregnate Taylor Swift and retweeting racist MAGA memes.
In that rocket crash of stupidity, his “never reach Mars” tweet might just take the cake.
First off, humanity already reached Mars, starting way back in 1971 when the Soviet Union — which unlike the center-left Harris was an actual communist country — touched down its historic Mars 3 lander on the Red Planet.
The even dumber context is that Harris has chaired the White House’s National Space Council for years, where she’s been a vocal advocate of NASA who’s respected by its leadership. In fact, she almost picked a former NASA astronaut as her running mate.
In other words, Musk’s outburst is the high-grade brain rot of a powerful low-information voter who’s suddenly realizing that his chosen candidate may not make it into the White House after all.
Needless to say, Musk’s opposition to Harris almost certainly has more to do with his personal hunger for power than anything involving space exploration.
He recently agreed to head a so-called “government efficiency commission” if Trump wins. What exactly such a commission would entail beyond haphazardly dismantling the US government from the inside out remains unclear.
“America is being slowly strangled to death by an accumulation of millions of regulations,” Musk whined in a follow-up tweet. “Tens of thousands of new rules are added every year, but very few are ever removed.”
“Eventually, everything becomes illegal,” he added, nonsensically.
Over the weekend, Musk predicted that the space company’s massive Starship rocket will start making regular trips to Mars in a matter of just two years. But the massive spacecraft has yet to launch into orbit and then safely land, making it a characteristically overzealous prediction.
“If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in four years,” he tweeted at the time.
In reality, SpaceX is built on hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts awarded by both Republican and Democratic leadership.
Now that he’s put all of his eggs in the basket of a bumbling racist septuagenarian, though, Musk seems to be bristling at the idea of having somebody in the White House who could hold him accountable for his increasingly bizarre behavior.
