BWould you like to travel to Mars in advance, aboard the space rocket of a man who can’t even do a livestream? Ideally, for that species-level honor, you’d have to line up behind thousands of Earth’s leading shitposters who not only blindly trust X-owner Elon Musk, but genuinely believe that he’ll see one of these posts one day when they’ve spent hours slogging away telling him so on his platform. I hope he does, folks!

Meanwhile, my favorite headline about this interplanetary colonization program was, “Elon Musk denies his sperm will start a Mars colony.” Sure. It’s just a guess, but I have a feeling they’ll have a lot more sperm up there than they need. It’s that other little bit that’s necessary for human life that you feel is going to be in short supply.

Anyway, from the future of the red nebula planet to the future of political discourse: Monday night’s conversation between Musk and Donald Trump on X (audio only, only nearly an hour late, and only to massively fewer live listeners than preliminary estimates suggested). It was so dysfunctional that even Trump’s teeth tried to escape. Hours after it took place, Musk issued an intriguing wanted notice: “Does anyone have a

In the absence of his, here are mine. We’ll start with Musk telling Trump, meaningfully, “We stand at a fork in the road that will determine the fate of civilization.” And you’ll recognize that fork in the road because it’s marked with an error screen. In the UK, we have a standard-setting term for incompetence: we say someone couldn’t even organize a booze crawl at a brewery. But a tech boss being unable to organize a tech event on a tech platform feels like a new industry standard: a brewery’s booze crawl boss being unable to host a booze crawl at his brewery. On Monday night, live footage could be seen from numerous bird nesting boxes around the world, but it was impossible to see the wannabe President of the United States. Still, I fear both species have soiled their floors.

If only there had been a warning that X could be trusted to screw up these live events. Remember, Musk previously endorsed former Republican nomination candidate Ron DeSantis and last year managed to convince the governor of Florida to launch his campaign on X. The technical failure that followed was “a DISASTER!” Not my opinion, dear fans, but that of a certain Donald Trump.

Either way, releasing it as audio only felt anything but futuristic. Someone said it could have been email, but it would have worked best as a fax. It wasn’t so much like the tech revolution hadn’t happened, but more like the industrial revolution hadn’t happened. Hopefully, over time, Musk will upgrade his server to a spinning jenny. In the meantime, he wants you to believe there was some kind of cyberattack on his old looms. He explained to frustrated users that X Spaces had been subjected to a “massive DDOS attack” that, oddly enough, hadn’t affected the rest of X. This is definitely the most self-defeating excuse since Katy Perry claimed her recent single about plastic feminism was “satire” and “a reboot for my idea of ​​feminine divinity.” After Monday night, the haters need to understand: Elon’s sonic rebuke of Trump was satire and a reboot for his idea of ​​masculine divinity.

It was certainly a reboot for the spectacle of power-trading in the 21st century. Witness billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who recently came out in support of Trump, responding miserably to his preferred candidate’s cobwebby X-name on Monday night: “Please tell Elon we can’t attend.” He posted helplessly on a presidential account that Trump hasn’t personally used in three years to bitch that the meeting host won’t let him in… I feel like a big part of rebooting the idea of ​​the masculine divine is old men screaming about how they can’t get their computers to work. Have you tried just turning the masculine divine off and on again?

Let’s just briefly touch on the content of the fireside chat between Elon and Donald, as long as we realize that the fire they were sitting next to was a dumpster whose sparks had long since set their pants on fire. “I want to shut down the Department of Education,” Trump slurred at one point. According to Trump, Biden was overthrown by a “coup.” Hey, at least the Democrats can organize a successful coup.

For a genius, Musk’s interview technique is surprisingly similar to that of a dim-witted breakfast host. (Donna Air once asked the Corrs how they met.) He laughed his way through most of Trump’s ramblings, particularly admiring the authoritarians and dictators he’d encountered. Trump mentioned a meeting with Kim Jong-un. “That was cool,” gurgled Musk, whose platform is banned in North Korea. “If anything happens in this election,” Trump concluded, “the next time we’ll meet is in Venezuela, because that’s a far safer place to meet than our country.” Thankfully, like pretty much everywhere these freedom-hating rulers rule, X is currently banned in Venezuela. That would at least save us from having to cheat our way through another meeting of the minds like this one.