Elon Musk's Just-Revealed Texts to His Friend Tell You a Lot About His Character
Oculus founder-turned-defense-contractor Palmer Luckey is opening up about his relationship with mercurial CEO Elon Musk — and about the politically incorrect stuff they discuss.
In an appearance on the Wall Street Journal's "What's News" podcast, the intelligence weapons maker said that although he's not quite sure the billionaire considers him a friend, the pair do text each other pretty regularly.
Despite both being major donors to president Donald Trump, their most recent text exchange wasn't explicitly political.
"The last thing we were talking about was the fact that the Black Eyed Peas' Grammy-winning song, 'Let's Get Retarded,' has been taken off every single music platform," the Hawaiian shirt aficionado recounted, "and replaced with the child-safe version that was for children's sports games, 'Let's Get It Started.'"
"So that was the last thing that we were talking about," he continued, "and how it's an example of memory-holding that nobody even really talks about, despite everyone agreeing that it has happened."
As Business Insider noted in its write-up of Luckey's comments, the stridently "anti-woke" defense contractor was wrong on several counts. For one, the lyrics were initially changed to "Let's Get It Started" in 2004 — just a year after the one with the ableist slur dropped on Black Eyed Peas' third album, "Elephunk" — for an NBA ad. For another, it was that "child-safe" version that won a Grammy in 2005, not the original that included the so-called "R-word."
Aside from revealing that he ascribes to half-baked "Mandela effect" conspiracy theories, Luckey did not say who began the conversation or which of them said what about the original title for that 20-year-old hit.
However, we don't need text message transcripts to know that Musk is very fond of using the "R-word," and deploys it with aplomb on his Nazi-boosting social network.
From using it to insult the intelligence of an astronaut he disagreed with to poking fun at himself with the slur, the world's richest man seems quite taken with the offensive epithet. What's more: his usage of the term dovetails with (and likely spurred on) an increasing trend online that seeks to normalize the slur, which was until recently considered taboo thanks to successful awareness-raising campaigns about intellectual disabilities.
It's worth noting that despite his love affair with the "R-word," Musk also insisted in 2023 that the term "cis" or "cisgender," which simply means not transgender or identifying with one's assigned gender at birth, would be considered a slur on his social network.
That policy change, like so many others on the site formerly known as Twitter, seems to be enforced haphazardly. Still, it's both outrageous and ironic that the same billionaire who got upset about that "heterophobic word" is now tweeting the ableist slur so regularly that he's even acknowledged that he "used that word too many times."
As with so many other disparities in Musk's fractured worldview, it appears that he's fine with certain slurs so long as he finds them amusing — and he's preoccupied enough with the "R-word" that he's talking to fellow billionaires about it during his downtime.
More on Muskian messaging: Elon Musk Defends Hitler, Mao and Stalin
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