Elon Musk Is In The News Again For Yet Another Stupid Reason

From bona fide artists to people whose pet has a slightly weird way of sitting, if you've ever posted anything original on the internet, then you also know what it's like to have that content reposted by everyone and their kid brother without your permission or credit. But of all the lazy excuses we've ever seen to justify not including a simple @, none have been more gloriously hypocritical than the one recently employed by the grand king of people who pretend those who did all the work don't exist: Elon Musk.

Ever since a court decided that Musk can no longer tweet about serious things without a lawyer double-checking that it won't cost his companies millions of dollars, his Twitter has slowly devolved into that of every grounded prepubescent with nothing to occupy their time but random shitposting, memes, and video game art. But only Musk can somehow find a way to get into trouble with all three of those. Last weekend, the bored billionaire reposted a piece of Nier: Automata fan art by the talented Meli Magali with nothing but the caption "2b." When several of his 27 million followers then asked him to kindly credit the creator, the man who named his company after the most cheated inventor in history simply responded with "No."

Musk proceeded to respond to criticism with every obnoxious bit of credit-stealing behavior short of linking to his SoundCloud, including trolling his more ethical followers by saying he would make sure no one would ever know who the artist was. But not content with simply being a villain, Musk asserted that his refusal to pay respect to the people whose work he consumes is actually the highest form of art appreciation.

You see, according to master critic Musk, ever since the first stuck up artist put a palm print next to their cave painting of a bunch of buffalo, credits have muddied the form, and to post the name of an artist online would "destroy the aesthetics of a post." People who want to find out should just look it up for themselves, he says. So he doesn't have to name the artist. For art's sake.

Of course, you may not want to take social media etiquette advice from a man who has been sued and fined for being bad at Twitter. But don't go pretending this was a bit of harmless trolling, either. Musk eventually deleted the entire thread, offering no apologies and no credit to the artist. And that's the kind of cowardice we really shouldn't tolerate from our most respected academics in this field.

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