I’m sure this revelation will surprise you; I am not a particular fan of Elon Musk. I think he’s a bit of a twat, although I admit I don’t know much about him other than him being offensively rich, giving his kids stupid names and spending his cash blasting into space for lols.
His most recent headline-grabbing endeavour – which you can’t have missed, even if you tried very hard – is the story of him buying Twitter for $44 billion.
FOURTY FOUR BILLION DOLLARS.
That’s around £34,500,000,000 to us Brits – roughly the same as a completely useless Track and Trace System, or a half of the UK’s national debt interest payments.
It’s an obscene amount of money for any one person to control, let alone to spend on a social network which is mainly used for arguing with bots called Terry9652311, complaining to companies about shit service, the odd witty one liner, live tweeting of events that never actually happened, telling people ‘that never happened’ and, of course, porn.
Many very loud American conservatives have hailed it as a great day for freedom of speech.
What they mean by that, I assume, is that they are hopeful that they’ll get their daddy Trump back, and they will now be free to use Twitter to spew all the hate speech they like, calling people pedos without fear of reprieve.
Whoopeedoo eh?
Anyway, even if they did throw in getting my old Twitter account back, if I had $44billion right there burning a figurative hole in my MASSIVE pocket, I still wouldn’t buy Twitter.
As it stands, it’s a terrible investment because Twitter really doesn’t make a lot of money as it currently operates. I’m sure this will all change in the near future (You must watch this ad before you can rage tweet! Responding to Dave238614 is only available to people on our £6 per month silver plan! Upgrade to the gold plan to have the freedom to tell Jacob Rees-Mogg to go fuck himself!) but it seems like a lot of work to get there.
Mostly though, there are about 44 billion things I’d rather spend the money on*.
Approximately three months of gas and electricity for example, or a return train ticket from London to Manchester bought on a whim.
44 billion things would be rather a long blog post though, and by the time I’d finished writing it, the whole story would be in the past; and we’d all be long dead along with the rest of our species, so instead of the full list here is a selection.
*Obviously this doesn’t include anything useful or sensible, like solving word hunger, poverty etc etc because that is definitely not Elon Musk-esque.
Things I would buy with 44 billion dollars that are not Twitter:
- Genuine Center Parcs holidays for all the idiots stupid enough to fall for the fake holiday competitions on Facebook, and then once they’re all safely inside I’d lock the doors, thus raising the average IQ of the remaining population by a good few points and saving them for themselves. For extra points I would book Ed Sheeran to have residency there. NB This would probably have to be during term time, due to financial restrictions.
- Daily car valets, so my back seats would enjoy at least a few crumb-free hours every day. Or maybe I’d just get a brand spanking new car each morning and pass the old one on to a random poor person on the street, for example a mum driving a beaten up ancient shitsubishi.
- A big fuck-off house, with a massive fuck-off swimming pool, because the council pool is grim and multi-billionaires shouldn’t have to get changed in a puddle of ‘is it water, is it urine?’ and share showers with extremely overfamiliar old ladies. And there would be people to cook, and clean, and put all the bloody washing away.
- Peperamis. A never ending supply of Peperamis.
- Surgery to get rid of all the Peperami weight. And then pay a person to create calorie-free Peperamis.
- A cleaner specifically hired to follow my children around and yell at them to pick up their shite – and then ultimately do it themselves – so I don’t have to.
- Hair bands, because I reckon that between my daughter and I we could probably lose $44billion’s worth in a few weeks if we really put our all into it.
- Some kind of system – and I’m still waiting on the tech side of this but I’m hopeful – which delivers electric shocks directly to the frontal lobes of anyone caught saying ‘Boris is doing his best’.
- A remote island, where I would invite the cabinet to a very important and exclusive event with the promise of lots of extremely rich people in attendance. Once my private jets had dropped them off, I’d fuck off and leave them there. With some food and water, and rope and a torch and stuff. I’m not a monster. In fact I could televise it, like some kind of reality TV series – our Nads may has been in the jungle before but my money would be on Patel to win. She’d eat the others without a second thought, even if she wasn’t that hungry.
- A massive Ferrero Rocher pyramid.
I’m sure I’ll come up with plenty more overnight…
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