Musk reading

Whatever you may think of Elon Musk — and I don’t recommend thinking about him too much — he’s a boon to the legal profession.

If he isn’t suing, he’s being sued. There’s so much litigation that us news types have trouble keeping up with it all.

I don’t keep up with it all — I have what’s left of my sanity to consider. But I couldn’t help noticing a trio of Musk and Musk-related lawsuits filed on the same day recently in California (two in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles). I won’t go into all the details but there are a few tidbits and questions in there the rest of the media missed.

For one thing, Musk and his “agents” may have outdone Vladimir Putin.

This is from a lengthy lawsuit filed by a Tesla short seller named Aaron Greenspan against Musk and a group of others: “Defendant Omar Qazi … was and remains a ferocious paid propagandist for Defendants Musk and Tesla, having authored and/or coordinated over 318,000 tweets praising Tesla and scapegoating its critics — plus essays, podcasts, and promotional videos touting Tesla’s FSD features. For the sake of comparison, Yevgeny Prigozin (‘Putin’s Chef’) employed a ‘troll factory’ that ‘generated one of the largest known online disinformation campaigns, churning out 71,000 tweets … .’”

Someone call Guinness. You’ve got to be impressed.

There’s also this: “Defendants smeared Plaintiff as mentally ill, a psychiatric patient, a rapist, a pedophile, a child molester, a likely school shooter, a stalker, a conspiracy theorist and more … .”

Yeah, but what did they really think of him?

The suit by a former employee of Neuralink Corp., a company founded by Musk, got a bit more media attention, mainly for just one of a bunch of allegations: The employee claimed she was scratched a couple of times by rhesus macaques that had the Herpes B virus.

Neuralink is a company supposedly developing a brain-computer interface. There are mysteries here.

Why are there monkeys with herpes at this company? Does this mean the brain links will only work if we have herpes? How exactly did the monkeys get herpes? Do computer chips transmit venereal disease? Do we need to infect a computer with a virus to make this work?

Why has no reporter asked these questions?

The future may be weird.

On the upside, even if we do have to have herpes, we might be able to avoid a computer takeover by linking directly to computers.

Or we could be their puppets …

Finally, I’m not a fan of offending people (unless they’re really awful people), but sometimes I have to give props to a clever turn of phrase, even if it may be a tad problematic.

You have to go to the exhibits filed along with a sexual harassment suit against Musk and Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. You’ll either be amused or disgusted or both by the series of tweets and memes supposedly posted by Musk.

Or, like me, you may think that a 12-year-old posing as an adult created this stuff.

Be that as it may, this is the message, amid all the dick jokes, that I had to admire: “Finally, we get to use Elongate as scandal name. It’s kinda perfect.”

You’re not going to forget Elongate.

Well done!

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