Photo: YouTube screenshot
Apart from being the spark behind the whole current EV trend, kind of revolutionizing space travel, and starting a tunnel-digging company out of pretty much a joke, the one thing Elon Musk is best known for is his Twitter activity.
The Tesla CEO is a constant presence on the social media platform, and his interventions don't always refer strictly to the industries his businesses are related to. That, obviously, is perfectly normal - we too might ramble on about things outside our area of expertise, the difference being we're not among the top three world's richest people, nor do we have close to 40 million followers on Twitter.
With specs like that, it's only natural that everything you say will be closely scrutinized, especially when, on top of all that, you're also the main figure in a community that a lot of people think resembles a cult. For some people, your tweets are like gospel, which means extra attention is required before hitting that "Tweet" button.
Last Friday, Elon Musk posted a question to his 39 million followers asking, "what can't we predict?" Depending on where you put the emphasis, the question can be interpreted in two ways: in the first case, the emphasis is on "what", so the question is just that - an honest inquiry on the sort of things we still can't foresee; the second option is to have the emphasis on "can't", in which case the question turns into "we can predict anything, prove me wrong".
It looks like some people read it in the latter way, so they decided to take advantage of the situation and administer Elon a heavy dose of Internet trolling. The answers some people gave varied from "the name of your (Musk's, Ed.) next child" to "your (again, Musk's, Ed.) tweets" or some political stuff we're not going to get into here.
However, the best answer belonged to reporter Ken Klippenstein who didn't even have to write anything. Instead, he simply replied by inserting a screenshot of Musk's tweet from March when he very wrongly predicted the U.S. would have zero new cases of COVID-19 by the end of April. Needless to say, Musk never replied.
With specs like that, it's only natural that everything you say will be closely scrutinized, especially when, on top of all that, you're also the main figure in a community that a lot of people think resembles a cult. For some people, your tweets are like gospel, which means extra attention is required before hitting that "Tweet" button.
Last Friday, Elon Musk posted a question to his 39 million followers asking, "what can't we predict?" Depending on where you put the emphasis, the question can be interpreted in two ways: in the first case, the emphasis is on "what", so the question is just that - an honest inquiry on the sort of things we still can't foresee; the second option is to have the emphasis on "can't", in which case the question turns into "we can predict anything, prove me wrong".
It looks like some people read it in the latter way, so they decided to take advantage of the situation and administer Elon a heavy dose of Internet trolling. The answers some people gave varied from "the name of your (Musk's, Ed.) next child" to "your (again, Musk's, Ed.) tweets" or some political stuff we're not going to get into here.
However, the best answer belonged to reporter Ken Klippenstein who didn't even have to write anything. Instead, he simply replied by inserting a screenshot of Musk's tweet from March when he very wrongly predicted the U.S. would have zero new cases of COVID-19 by the end of April. Needless to say, Musk never replied.
https://t.co/aQdtOniVKj pic.twitter.com/cS4oYXpZFK
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) September 25, 2020
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