Elon Musk being booed is the funniest thing ever to happen at a Dave Chappelle show

There’s an old saying that goes: money can’t buy happiness, but it’s a start. That’s true; you can’t buy your way to happiness, but you can put things in place to achieve it. You can pay off your debts, get out of your overdraft and make sure the people in your life are comfortable so that you don’t have to worry about them anymore. You can create a life for yourself that eases some of stresses that come with just generally being human.

What money can’t buy you is a new personality. If you surround yourself with people who tell you that you’re cool or smart, it doesn’t make you those things. If anything, doing that makes you even more of a loser. In fact, if you’re rich and you’re still worried about that stuff, there’s probably no amount of money on Earth that’s going to make you happy, so you may as well give up right now.

On a completely unrelated note: yesterday evening, at a comedy show in San Francisco, controversial stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle introduced slightly more controversial billionaire and Twitter owner Elon Musk on stage during his set. The guest appearance was a surprise, but the crowd reacted pretty much the way you’d expect if your night out was interrupted by a man who spent the GDP of a small nation to give the far-right a safe space to harass minority communities: they rained boos down on him from above like a vengeful (but somewhat lazy) God.

It was the funniest thing that has ever happened at a Dave Chappelle show.

I’d say you should go and watch the video of the incident as soon as you possibly can, but man, it’s hard not to feel at least a little bad for the guy. Don’t get me wrong: Musk has both done and deserves far worse. Chappelle too. You’re definitely not a bad person for indulging in some schadenfreude when it comes to two men who have seemingly decided to use their unimaginable wealth and enormous platforms to bully vulnerable people as revenge for that fact that they’re old, bitter and have realised that if they aren’t happy in their lives at this point then they probably never will be.

But watching somebody just crumple as they’re faced with irrefutable proof that they’re a complete dweeb in the eyes of most right-thinking people just sets my cringe alarm blaring. It’s not a conscious decision I’m making, to not revel in the misfortune (however minor) of a person I despise. It’s just that I have something that Musk and Chappelle both clearly lack: basic human empathy.

That doesn’t make me a saint, it just makes me a guy who struggles to watch somebody be torn down in front of thousands of people. It is still – and I cannot stress this enough – objectively very funny.

I think what’s so great about the incident is that it’s a living example of what happens when Musk is confronted by the thing he pretends to champion: freedom of speech.

Now I don’t believe for a second that Musk believes in – or even really understands – free speech. There’s a lot of evidence he’s actually a big proponent of the exact opposite, considering the fact that the account that posted the video of Musk bombing (on the platform Musk owns, don’t forget) has since disappeared. Never mind the reports that he’s threatened to fire people for criticising him, or his anti-union stance, or that he’s tried to gag the press who have exposed flaws in his business practices.

This is a broader issue on the right in general, but the fact is that while they pretend to fly the flag for free speech, what they actually want is to say whatever they want and never be corrected or criticised. But free speech lives or dies in that correction and criticism. That’s the value free speech adds to society: stopping idiocy or cruelty in its tracks and saying “sorry, we aren’t interested”.

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Musk saw real freedom of speech in full force last night, when a huge crowd of people told him in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going to kowtow to his ego. They weren’t going to join the cult of personality he’s built among 14-year-old boys and divorced dads on Twitter and 4chan.

The dream outcome here is that Musk will go away and reflect on why it was that a wall of Dave Chappelle fans – who are already clearly willing to put up with a lot, by the way – roasted him like a Christmas ham. Why a group of people who didn’t take issue with Chappelle’s increasingly problematic comments looked at him and said “sorry, it turns out there actually is a limit”.

He won’t, obviously. Money may not buy a new personality, or self-reflection, or moral growth, but it definitely buys enough yes men to convince you that you’re in the right even when the world keeps telling you that you’re the furthest thing from it. Musk’s first tweet after the incident was: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters” – so maybe don’t place all of your eggs in that basket.

I imagine he’ll withdraw into his little bubble, and spout conspiracy theories about how people don’t like him because liberals force them not to, and bask in the praise of people who are somehow even more pathetic than he is until this all blows over. But hey, we’ll always have this video of the light going out in his eyes as he realises just how hated he really is. That’s something, at least.