The cool kids nowadays insist they never felt that way, but peering back into the mists of the 2000s, there was definitely an era when Elon Musk seemed like a pretty inspiring guy.

Sure, he made his initial stack of money doing conventional software startup stuff. But then instead of doing more software stuff, like most tech dudes, he used that money to build SpaceX (which has built some legitimately impressive rockets) and Tesla (which has built some fairly impressive cars.)

Nowadays, though, he mainly seems to make headlines for his bizarre business decisions at those previously impressive companies, firing workers because of those bad decisions, and posting incredibly cringe stuff on Twitter (which he bought, ruined, and inexplicably renamed X.)

And that brings us to one of Musk's most irritating — yet somehow illuminating — tweets to date.

While waxing off about international relations, which seems to be one of his favorite activities on Twitter-formerly-X, he asked another poster whether they'd ever played the videogame Fallout 3. Someone else shot back with a line from the game's intro: "war — war never changes.")

And then Musk, because he apparently simply cannot help himself, lobbed this extraordinary little dirty bomb of self-congratulatory pedantism.

"They do say that frequently in the game, but actually war changes a lot!" he wrote.

There's something almost awe-inspiring about watching a person miss the point this badly. Of course some things about war have changed — the weapons, the strategy, the motivations, the technology — but that obviously isn't the point of the quote.

It isn't like the line — it appeared in the intro of Fallout 3 and has also been referenced elsewhere in the series — is ocean-deep in the first place. It's basically a callback to that scene in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" where Arnold Schwarzenegger's character muses that it's in humankind's nature to destroy themselves, or for that matter your grandad telling you as a child that he landed at Normandy and war is hell, not something glamorous.

"The point of 'war never changes' is not to say that nothing about war ever changes," wrote one redditor in a thread about Musk's tweet. "Obviously things have changed since we fought with chariots and bows to now. The point of the phrase is that, no matter how much war changes on the surface, no matter how much the mechanics of war are 'improved' or innovated upon, the fundamental character of war remains the same: destruction, killing, death."

What do you take from this? That one of the world's wealthiest people has poor reading comprehension? That he consumes media while taking exactly the wrong message from it, loudly broadcasting his braindead interpretation on a site he bought so he could tweak its algorithm to favor his own posts?

At the end of the day, there's no way to say. This is a man who seems to have fired or divorced anyone comfortable disagreeing with him, and what's left is an empty well of hubris; the Dunning-Kruger effect embodied as a billionaire.

Maybe another redditor in the same thread said it best.

"Musk is the type of person that Fallout points to as responsible for the nuclear wasteland," they quipped.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Didn't Like What a Woman Told Him, So He Fired Her Entire Department


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