Musk Challenged Vladimir Putin To A Fight Because This Is The World We Live In Now

The only way this could have been dumber is if Putin had taken him up on it.

How did we miss this gem?

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk told an audience at West Point that he had once challenged Vladimir Putin to “one-on-one combat.”

Yes, this guy! This doughy, pillowylump of rice pudding the color of a frozen human corpse challenged the Russian president, reportedly a legit black belt in judo and taekwondo, to a round of ... what? Karate? Muay Thai? That thing on “American Gladiators” where two dudes wear pads and whale on each other with what looks like oversized Q-tips? (Joust, it’s called Joust.)

“He’s good at judo, I hear,” Musk told the crowd, which refrained from laughing at him for some reason.

Maybe (likely) Musk found himself in front of a crowd of very fit young people who are training to be real fighters, and in the desperate, grasping thirst to appear cool that is his baseline emotional state, claimed that he’d once told Vladimir Putin to meet him by the flagpole at recess.

The funniest part of this clip is Musk saying he put out the challenge on Twitter and made sure to spell Putin’s name in Cyrillic. Why is this funny? Because he probably could have simply picked up the phone and called the fucking guy in his office in the Kremlin. The two men do allegedly speak on occasion.

Musk tells the story of the challenge at the beginning of the clip, so lucky you, you only have to watch the first minute if you want:

There is no word on the stakes Musk was offering, though he said on Twitter that it had something to do with Ukraine. Sure, how about the winner of the grudge match gets Ukraine? That seems like the kind of cavalier dumbassery that Musk would offer up. Donald Trump would go for it.

History tells us that if this challenge was anything like Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, the ghoul from South Africa would wimp out while citing some unspecified injury that requires back surgery.

The West Point conversation was intended to get Musk’s thoughts on how the military will fight wars in the future, given the rapid advancements in technology and the battlefield adaptations we see today, particularly in the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The upshot was that the moderator asked Musk “How do you see warfare transforming in the future?” Which gave Musk a chance to mumble some dumb crap as if he has any idea what he’s talking about:

“The biggest effect by far I think is AI and drones.”

If you ever saw the old episode of “Newsradio” in which a “futurist” tells Khandi Alexander he thinks computers are going to be big in the future, you get the flavor of the conversation.

Then there was some babble from Musk about avoiding a scenario where we create the Terminator. It’s honestly embarrassing to watch. And this guy is advising the President of the United States on this stuff.

Musk’s foreign policy instincts in general totally suck. As Marcie wrote about on Monday, here he is sneering and name-calling Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs over the weekend after Radioslaw Sikorski called his threats to turn off Starlink unethical, and threatened to find a more reliable provider for the service:

Well, we know who the next Secretary of State is going to be if Marco Rubio flames out!

At least Musk had a bad day on Monday. Twitter went down for several hours, which probably sent him running to his ketamine dealer since he couldn’t exercise his tweeting itch. Naturally he claimed the site was attacked by a foreign country in an effort to silence him.

Also Tesla’s stock dropped by nearly 45 points and has now wiped out all the gains it had achieved since Election Day. And it had gained a lot, but now shares are worth about one-half of where they peaked in December.

It’s good to have a business genius in the White House. It’s even better that we have two.

[YouTube]

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