Elon Musk Responds to News of How He Was Humiliated

Yahoo

23-05-2025

Elon Musk is having a mini-meltdown on his website after The Atlantic published a damning dive into his time at the White House, leading with a mortifying description of how he was humiliated by one of his superiors.
Responding Wednesday to a tweet dissing the magazine, Musk wrote, under his newly re-adopted display name "Kekius Maximus" and accompanying AI-generated profile pic of himself as a Roman centurion: "They are the past, the legacy media fading into obscurity."
Illustrating how definitely not-mad he was, Musk just kept posting through it.
"The Atlantic is a zombie publication kept on life support by Laurene," Musk wrote, referring to its billionaire owner Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. "Steve would be very disappointed."
Riffing with a user nicknamed "gork," who joked about Steve Jobs haunting Laurene from the grave, Musk posted a ghost emoji and a crying-laughing emoji.
Later, he stamped his seal of approval — a bullseye emoji paired with a crying laughing emoji, take note — on a joke made by "gork" about The Atlantic's "ghosted" readership. (The magazine surpassed 1 million subscriptions last year. X's userbase has been in a steady decline since Musk's takeover in 2022, losing nearly one-fifth of its daily active users in the US.)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1925315302591442996
So what has him so incensed? According to The Atlantic's reporting, Musk, once gleeful in his role of taking a chainsaw to the federal government, became an increasingly isolated figure in the West Wing during his time there, with fewer friends and an ever-growing list of powerful enemies.
On one occasion, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent exploded at Musk for choosing the acting IRS commissioner behind Bessent's back.
"Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" Bessent shouted, loud enough for president Donald Trump to hear, and pretty much anyone else in the halls of the West Wing.
Bessent soon got his way and booted Musk's pick for IRS commissioner. The Atlantic summarized the significance of the shout-matching: "The power struggle has become a symbol of Musk's inability to build support for his approach."
Musk, even by his standards, has been awfully testy with the media lately. In an interview with Bloomberg News on Tuesday, he repeatedly lashed out at the interviewer Mishal Husain for asking standard questions about his businesses, including Tesla. At one point, he called Husain a "NPC" — a video game term which means "non-playable character," in an unsubtle way of saying they're a brainless idiot that doesn't think for themselves.
Musk, in an NPC-like lack of self-awareness, had something to tweet about the conversation afterwards. "The interviewer was incredibly belligerent," Musk wrote.
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