Musk Man Vs. Cave Man, Part Deux

It’s all so exasperating. As I’ve said privately, if firefighters placed Tesla CEO Elon Musk next to any one of California’s devastating wildfires, he’d have immediately sucked up all the oxygen in the area, smothering the flames in an instant.

Is it any wonder why investors, analysts, and Tesla board members are reportedly bothered by CEO Elon Musk’s tweeting? While a recent New York Times interview provided an interesting, if troubled, glimpse into Musk’s life of late, the magic of social media provides a portal through which the entire globe can view Musk’s inner machinations.

Last night, Musk made the brilliant decision to tweet further (potentially libelous) speculation about a man he’s never met, but did once apologize to after calling him a pedophile on Twitter. Of course, this all came about after that man — Vernon Unsworth, the architect of a life-saving Thai cave rescue — dissed Musk’s homemade submarine and essentially told him to stuff it up his ass.

Hey, it’s not like Mary Barra, Jim Hackett, Mike Manley, Carlos Ghosn, Takahiro Hachigo, and Akio Toyoda don’t do the exact same thing in their off hours…

Having screenshot the offending tweets out of an abundance of caution, here they are. It started after Musk took exception to an author claiming he bawled during the NYT interview. (Listen, men are humans, too, and it’s okay to cry sometimes.)

Okay, so for the record, Musk says his voice cracked but didn’t actually cry. This is an important thing to tweet at journalists on the heels of a stock-sinking go-private bid that sparked an SEC investigation and multiple lawsuits. The CEO then got into it with former tech writer Drew Olanoff:

This is the CEO of an automaker risking a threatened lawsuit from a man he’s already apologized to. Something’s amiss in the state of Silicon Valley, if that wasn’t already abundantly clear.

Maybe it was the Ambien talking, but, as Hollywood has shown us, that excuse only gets you so far. Suffice it to say that Musk’s recent blog post, in which he pledged to funnel all of his strength into building electric cars and saving the planet, should have come with an asterisk.

[Image: Elon Musk/Twitter]