Briefly
Oates’s November 8 tweet questioned Musk’s obvious lack of pleasure or humanity, sparking hundreds of thousands of views.
Musk fired again with private insults—calling her “a lazy liar and an abuser of semicolons”—and reignited debate over artwork vs. engineering.
Even Musk’s personal AI, Grok, weighed in, diagnosing the feud as a conflict between “hyper-rationalism” and “humanistic wanderlust.”
In a peculiar collision of cultural forces, the esteemed novelist Joyce Carol Oates and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, have been duking it out in a viral slugfest over the elusive joys of peculiar life, wealth, and the presence—or absence—of “soul” within the hyper-rationalist age.
The acidic change, unfolding for the reason that weekend on Musk’s X platform, quickly generated hundreds of thousands of views and laid naked an ever-deepening rift between the humanities’ concentrate on empathy and the techno-optimist’s drive for disruption.
The kerfuffle was initiated Saturday by Oates, the embellished creator whose immense literary output consists of over 70 revealed books and a number of nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. Her preliminary put up, a cascade of refined barbs and cautious commentary on Nov. 8, focused the general public persona of the world’s wealthiest man, Musk, whereas quote-tweeting a screenshot of certainly one of his X posts.
“So curious that such a rich man by no means posts something that signifies that he enjoys or is even conscious of what nearly everybody appreciates—scenes from nature, pet canine or cat, reward for a film, music, a e book (however doubt that he reads); pleasure in a buddy’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for somebody who has died; pleasure in sports activities, popularity of a favourite workforce; references to historical past,” Oates tweeted. “The poorest individuals on Twitter might have entry to extra magnificence & that means in life than the ‘most rich individual on the earth.”
The put up shortly amassed almost 5 million views, 83,000 likes, and hundreds of replies, hanging a deep chord with customers who view the tech mogul as divorced from widespread human expertise. The implication—that Musk, for all his monumental wealth and ambition because the architect of Tesla, SpaceX, and X itself, is adrift in a world untouched by on a regular basis poetry—was unmistakable.
The thrilla in vanilla
The musing remodeled right into a no-holds-barred cage match spectacle when Musk, the self-appointed steward of free speech on X, retaliated with a sequence of private and dismissive assaults. By Sunday morning, Musk had fired again, accusing the literary creator of dishonesty and literary extra.
“Every part she says in her put up about me may be proven to be demonstrably false with a easy search. Oates is a lazy liar and … an abuser of semicolons!” Musk wrote. Calling somebody a semicolon abuser is unhealthy sufficient, however Musk escalated his assaults: “Oates is a liar and delights in being imply. Not an excellent human.” And in a remaining, withering dart, he declared, “Consuming a bag of sawdust could be vastly extra pleasurable than studying the laboriously pretentious drivel of Oates.”
The following hours have been thick with irony. The person accused of cultural barrenness spent a lot of the day trying to show his aesthetic bonafides by referencing Eighties science-fiction cinema, citing Blade Runner and Aliens as peak artistry (true!) amid a flurry of retroactive syllabus-building that many customers interpreted as solely reinforcing Oates’s unique critique.
Extra irony: One in every of X’s most prolific customers is Oates, who tweets with the passion and frequency of a teen. As for Musk, his newest, most fascinating tirades have been concerning the distinction between “makers and takers”—individuals who spend their lives creating issues versus individuals who simply eat and backbite. The ranting got here after Tesla shareholders awarded Musk a pay bundle that could possibly be price $1 trillion over the following decade, and the entire ensuing backlash that adopted.
The episode transcended mere superstar gossip. Oates, at 87 years previous, embodies the humanities’ quiet insistence on magnificence and emotional complexity; her work probes the very textures of empathy she invoked. Musk, who has declared human empathy the largest risk to civilization, represents a relentless march towards technological singularity.
The person by no means sleeps and by no means stops constructing, treating every of his monumental successes as simply one other new stage in a online game, in response to his biographer, Walter Isaacson.
Cannot all of us simply be buddies?
Possibly so. In the long run (not less than for now), Oates, ever the indifferent chronicler of human folly, declined to interact within the private mudslinging. As a substitute, she provided a seemingly remaining commentary Monday, reflecting on the advantage of “empathy.”
She praised Musk, albeit wryly, for permitting such important commentary on his platform. “It’s spectacular that Elon Musk permits important commentary of himself on X,” she wrote. “That’s not normally a magnanimity of spirit commensurate with the acute sort of non-empathetic individual.”
Typically Clever E-newsletter
A weekly AI journey narrated by Gen, a generative AI mannequin.
