Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/16/elon-musk-to-his-sycophant-pet-journalist-matt-taibbi-you-are-dead-to-me.html
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Toadies and courtiers will never learn. For all Taibbi’s smirking pretenses of sophistication and superiority, his surprise at this turn of events marks him as yet another fanboi rube.
I really hope this breaks Taibbi so badly he reboots to his 2011 version.
Something something leopards, faces
Taibbi once reeked of Musk, but now smells of the desperation of a jilted lover.
Hey Matt…
What is a Taibbi? Anyone? Anybody???.. Bueller?
That’s a shame
The post-subprime-crisis version was better, but he never shook off the stink of his Moscow drugs-and-hookers days at The eXile. He and Mark Ames are extremely talented and hilariously vicious writers, but there’s always been a nasty and hedonistic edgelord undertone that makes them susceptible to promoting right-wing ersatz-populist Libertarians like Musk.
…whined the “independent” “journalist”.
There’s no going back to a version of Tiabbi that progressives will ever take seriously again. He’s shown who he is and it’s no one worth reading.
Taibbi is up there with Glenn Greenwald on my list of “What the hell happened to that guy?”
“a favorite strongman sport: ritual humiliation”
Kicked out of the Incel Nazi clubhouse? Oh no!
I guess no horse for him.
I suspect the FSB can reapply that fragrance as needed. He has some real bad opinions, but the public torching of his own credibility, particularly on Russia issues, feels coerced.
Does something like that ever happen? I envision a further slide to the right.
Please get off “Twitter”? Does this guy have a single consistent thought? Besides I’m going to take my ball and go home and destroy Western democracy?
I had the same thought, but then noticed that this exchange was from April 2023. The X rebrand happened in July, I think.
“Courtiers are indeed just like the counters on an abacus, which according to the will of the person doing the calculating are worth now a fraction of an obol, and a moment later a talent. Just so, courtiers become objects of envy and then of pity at the whim of the king.” – Polybius, over 2000 years ago