From settling a sexual-harassment claim to overbidding on Twitter, Elon Musk’s crazily banal week

tech.hindustantimes.com:

And so, we reach the end of another week of drama in the Elon Musk show. But what really stands out about this one is how drearily banal it was.

Think of it reduced to a few headlines, just as the man himself reduces it to (so many, many) tweets.

Yes, there is a lot of detail here to get hung up on, from Musk’s pseudoscientific sample poll to the defense strategies of that pitiable gang known as the Twitter Inc. board of directors. Strip it away, though, and it is the most familiar of merger-and-acquisition stories.

Clearly, it doesn’t naturally follow that being a billionaire means you throw in your lot with the Republican Party. On the other hand, if you are a billionaire who tends to rail against and flout regulatory oversight — whether it’s to do with securities fraud, vehicle safety or public health measures — then it isn’t terribly surprising that you might lean toward a certain end of the political continuum. Coming just a few days after a massacre in Buffalo, New York, that was explicitly linked to a hateful, divisive “Replacement Theory” that is definitely embedded in that end of the political continuum, Musk’s claimed reasoning is also patently ridiculous.

As a bonus, the paranoid element also echoes the style of a certain ex-president who still looms over that certain end of the political continuum. Which segues into: Facing Mounting Criticism, Tycoon Claims Conspiracy.

Much like some financial and product guidance proffered by Tesla Inc., where Musk is the chief executive officer — the solar roof springs to mind — this one had a vague baseline, timescale and endpoint. Musk later tweeted about the danger of a “woke mind virus” destroying civilization, thereby ensuring we never make it to Mars. I find