Elon Musk, the wealthiest pre-teen shitposter on the internet, challenged Vladimir Putin to a duel on Monday, but the Russian President has yet to take Musk up on his offer. Instead, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, an ally of Putin, gave Musk some advice on how to properly train for a fight in a Telegram message that Musk reposted.
“Elon Musk, a word of advice: Don’t measure your strength against that of Putin’s. You’re in two completely different leagues,” Kadyrov posted on Telegram according to an English-language translation.
Kadyrov continued that Musk was just a “businessman and Twitter user,” while Putin is a “world politician and strategist” who “inspires awe in the West and in the U.S.” Admittedly, Putin does seem to inspire awe in some westerners, though only in the worst people to ever wander the globe.
Kadyrov, a right-wing extremist who has previously claimed there are no gay men in Chechnya, wrote that Musk would need to “pump up those muscles” so that he can “change from the gentle (effeminate) Elona into the brutal Elon you need to be.”
Musk changed his Twitter display name to “Elona,” and declined the offer for training, tweeting “such excellent training would give me too much of an advantage.”
Musk, who’s worth roughly $US225 ($312) billion, seemed to take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seriously in the early days of the war. But he’s since devolved into his regularly scheduled shitposting.
On Monday, Musk even tweeted a meme featuring a non-playable character holding a Ukraine flag with the words, “I support the current thing,” apparently a suggestion that supporting Ukrainians who are fighting for their country was simply another fashionable online cause and not a lived reality for the thousands of civilians who have died.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2022
After that, Musk tweeted a meme with the caption, “Neflix waiting for the war to end to make a movie about a black ukraine guy falls in love with a transgender russian soldier.”
Over 3 million people have fled Ukraine as refugees, according to the United Nations, with 1.8 million of them currently in Poland. And while Ukraine has reportedly been showing stiff resistance against Russian military forces that are struggling with supplies, no one knows how long Ukraine will be able to hold out.
Despite being the richest person on Earth, Musk has shown himself, time and again, to be an unserious person. Whether he’s manipulating stock prices, comparing the Canadian Prime Minister to Adolf Hitler, or calling random people pedophiles for no reason, Musk has shown himself to be a needy and pathetic billionaire craving the adoration of the worst people online.
Where does Musk go from here? Maybe he’ll accuse the Ukrainian Prime Minister of being a pedophile who worships Hitler. He’s been down that road before and he’s paid precisely zero consequences for it.