In a typical display of the actor’s love for overdramatic pearl clutching, Star Trek host Wil Wheaton has come to believe that new Twitter CEO Elon Musk is a “malevolence” who is actively “hurting our society”.
The chain of events that led Wheaton to his meltdown began on November 19th when Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he would be leaving Twitter following its official takeover by Musk.
“I’m about to depart,” Reznor said on the red carpet to Bones and All, a romantic horror film for which he and the sole other member of NIN, Atticus Ross, provided the soundtrack for. “We don’t need the arrogance of the billionaire class to feel like they can just come in and solve everything.”
“Even without him involved, I just find that it has become such a toxic environment,” he added. “For my mental health, I need to tune out. I don’t feel good being there anymore.”
Making good on his word, Reznor would go on to delete his account the very next day – a move which in turn drew outright mockery from Musk.
On November 21st, in reply to the observation made by user @catturd2 that it had been “48 hours since @elonmusk, reinstated President Trump’s Twitter account and the world still hasn’t ended,” the platform’s new CEO laughed, “And it turns out that Trent ‘Nine Inch Nails’ Reznor is actually a crybaby“.
It seems Musk’s tweet was the tipping point for Wheaton, as shortly after it was published, the actor took to his personal Facebook to decry, “I can not fathom the emptiness, the insecurity, the insatiable need for attention and validation, the staggering arrogance, the malevolence and total void of human experience that is Elon Musk.”
“He’s the richest man on the planet,” added the host of Paramount’s Star Trek franchise post-episode talk show, The Ready Room. “You can’t go anywhere or do anything without interacting with something he’s part of in some way.”
“There are literal millions of people who uncritically worship him, in spite of overwhelming evidence that he’s a douchebag,” Wheaton continued. “Some number of them will come after me, as they come after anyone who points at their naked emperor.”
“They’ll spend entire days going after me and people like me, slavishly serving a man who does not even know they exist,” he dismissed. “They are his army of fools, uncritically serving his every whim. And it still isn’t enough.”
Wheaton then opined, “He can have any material thing he wants, and he will *never* be happy or satisfied. He has no real friends. Every single person around him is either a viper, a parasite, or both.”
“So what does he do?” asked the former The Next Generation actor. “He bullies and threatens and harasses and trolls and behaves like the weak, scared, insecure child he has always been. That’s a tragedy for him, but it’s dangerous for us. He doesn’t care what he destroys or who he hurts as he chases this existential thing he can not ever have.”
Drawing his rant to a close, Wheaton ultimately asserted, “You know the saying ‘hurt people hurt people’? He’s a hurt person who is hurting our society, making people I care about less safe.”
“The consequences of this one man’s midlife crisis are global,” he concluded, “and that terrifies me.”
