Who’s Afraid of Elon Musk? | A Penguin Pete’s Halloween Special!

Ooooooooh! Elon Musk! Elon Muuuuuuuuusk! He comes like a towering Godzilla of Capitalism, like the old Sim City game punishing you for your economy running too hot.

Elon-Musk-GodzillaIt’s like if you took every evil adjective of every Bond villain, ran it through a Warner Brothers’ cartoon filter, had Mel Brooks direct, and… fudge, there’s no use comparing this self-digesting multimedia fireball of midlife crisis frenzy. YOU explain Elon Musk? I dunno, “lovechild of Cthulhu and Mammon?” “The business news world’s equivalent of ___ye West?”

Here it is, Halloween 2022, and the scariest recent event that anyone can think of is that the Musk-Twitter deal went through. People bailing, mass panic. Yet it has been a few days, and Twitter is not, to me, noticeably worse than it has been over the 13 years I’ve been there.

This is precisely what I predicted would happen up to now. And now, speaking from my experience in media science studies in the context of eCommerce marketing, I will walk you through the logic of How I Knew That – and how I know the ways this social media storm is likely to abate.

elon-musk-terminator

I don’t blame anybody for bailing right now. Yes, the big stomping global gazillianaire muppet monster towering down Fifth Avenue is an impressive public spectacle which the media likes to follow around like puppies being fed a trail of breadcrumb treats. Join me after the jump, I promise you that once again, it’s not the end of the world…

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