If his relationships to the people close to him are a train wreck, Musk’s relationship with the public isn’t much better. As the years go on, it’s become clear that he badly wants to be seen as cool, funny, and popular, and yet the harder he tries to win everyone’s admiration, the less cool he becomes. Lately, his public antics just exude a desperate, sweaty energy that makes him painful to watch.

There was the godawful “let that sink in” joke that he used to announce his arrival to Twitter’s headquarters, carrying a physical porcelain sink; the stupid X-shaped jumping jack he kept doing for a while, apparently to resemble the logo of “X the Everything App”; the cowboy hat incident; the photo he posted of his bedside table with a huge gun and four cans of Diet Coke on it; the poem (Maybe religion’s not so bad / To keep you from being sad). In his comprehensive, largely flattering biography, Walter Isaacson writes that Musk’s “jokes tended to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen.” (More like a classroom of sixth-graders.)

[It seems that writing a methodical analysis of all the cringey things Elon Musk has done is such a odyssean feat that you begin to sound like James Joyce in your run on lists disguised as sentences that never end...]

At one point, Musk admitted that he pays other people to play video games for him, so he’ll quickly get the highest scores and levels and Twitch streamers will see him as a “living god of video games.” For him, the point is not to enjoy the games, but to acquire whatever token or icon marks you as having won them, and thus earn the admiration of nerds who watch livestreams all day. And he couldn’t even get that, because when Musk attempted to stream himself playing Path of Exile 2 last year, the audience trolled him relentlessly, posting “YOU HAVE NO REAL FRIENDS AND WILL DIE ALONE” over and over in the chat box. But just caring about this kind of thing in the first place is the pathetic part, and apparently no amount of money can fix that.