The tweet that has finally taught Elon Musk a lesson

“Well, one lesson l’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X”.

If you’ve got better things to do with your time than muck around on social media (anyone?) then you might have missed that rare glimpse of self-awareness on the part of Elon Musk, posted on X, better known as Twitter. The tweet referred to an earlier one he’d posted, a quote tweet in response to a favourite of his, @DogeDesigner – “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”

Musk made a topical joke in poor taste about assassination. He’s now deleted it. In case you missed it (ICYMI), it read: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” – with a “thinking face” emoji attached.

The graphic vaguely suggested, predictably enough, a Democrat (or “far left”) conspiracyto murder Donald Trump. Maybe it’s being run out of the pizza restaurant the Clintons supposedly used as a front for their international paedo ring. Who knows? Musk was certainly trying to be funny, but with a satirical edge that is quite beyond him. It made the wisecrack even less amusing and more of an indictment of the tweeter himself. So he took it down.

It’s worth pointing out that there would have beenno chance of the Twitter moderators taking any action about such a hateful tweet for the obvious reason that he owns the platform, fired most of them – and removed almost all of the old rules against hate and violence; all because he is a self-styled “free speech absolutist”. This means that his social media channel is so clogged up with racism, Holocaust denial and neo-fascism that it’s almost impossible to breathe on there.

His conversionto Trump and Trumpism (despite Trump’s well-known and