Elon, what?

Script Kiddy

Is Elon Musk a generational tech genius? Evidence suggests not.

We submit this poorly constructed, years-in-the-making joke that Musk seemingly made to flaunt his programmer — and culture warrior — cred, in which he bizarrely admits to having once been "woke."

"traceroute woke_mind_virus," Musk wrote in a tweet in December 2021 in the style of a Linux command.

Now, years later, he's followed it up with this mockery of command terminals everywhere:

woke_mind_virus found at 127.0.0.1

woke_mind_virus deleted rm -rf.

The "joke" is that the IP, 127.0.0.1, is the localhost, or the computer that's being currently used (which many were quick to point on on social media). Ergo, Elon's brain. Corny stuff that only gets worse when Musk follows up on it.

"Local host was infected," replied one user. "But not anymore," Musk responded.

Does Not Compute

This joke doesn't work for multiple reasons, so please indulge us as we overanalyze it.

The traceroute command does what it says on the tin: it displays the path that a request made to a server takes through the internet. It does not, however, do the job of actually "finding" something. So "woke_mind_virus found" is a non sequitur. The standard way to lookup files is literally just the "find" command — but our guess is that Elon thought "traceroute" sounded smarter.

But whatever. Let's say he did find the woke mind virus. In Elon's joke, it's found at an IP address — his brain — suggesting it's a running virus/application with its own server.

Then he uses the very powerful and dangerous-to-wield "rm -rf" command, which forcefully removes an entire folder or directory and all its files without asking you for confirmation. Permanently.

Using this command for a single virus is overkill. To reiterate, the point of the remove command with the -rf flag is to nuke entire directories, not the odd file.

Here's where things get extra dumb. Elon elides showing us the actual deletion command, but he does show its success message in the form of "woke_mind_virus deleted rm -rf." This is also puzzling, because these commands normally don't output a message saying the file was deleted.

Now in his defense, it could be that "woke_mind_virus delete rm -rf" is meant to be the deletion command — but if this is the case the order is all wrong, and since no directory is specified, nothing would be deleted anyway.

In sum: this joke is not the product of a programming virtuoso's upper story.

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