Elon, we hardly knew ye. After spending the last six months stuck to Donald Trump like quick-drying cement, Elon Musk is backing away from politics and sounding mighty petulant about the whole thing. Appearing at the Qatar Economic Forum, Musk was questioned if he was going to donate more money to politics, and he said no, that he had "done enough." It's not because he's hurting for cash, of course. His car business is indeed in big trouble but he still has plenty of lucrative government contracts all over the world and remains the richest man in the world. His political contributions equal what you or I would find between the couch cushions. No, he's backing out of politics because his feelings are hurt that people don't love him the way they used to.

Here he is lamenting that people criticize him for making what appeared to be a Nazi salute (after publicly pushing for German voters to elect a neo-Nazi party to run their government) because, after all, he's never harmed a single person:

I would just point out that many thousands of the poorest people in the world who are suffering because he took his chainsaw to the USAID program that was their only lifeline for food and medication, might have something to say about whether he's "harmed" anyone.

Related

Musk has had a very rude awakening about politics, the kind of awakening most of us have sometime in our late teens when we realize that not everyone thinks like we do. He went at politics like a college freshman, assured that he was right, that he knew everything and that everyone except the rankest moron agreed with him. He even bought Twitter so that he could have fun trolling them, secure in the knowledge that he was in the majority. He soon found out that there are millions of people in this country who are not impressed with his adolescent philosophizing.

And apparently, it never occurred to him that mercilessly attacking the left and the center left might impact his car sales, even though they are his customer base. Donald Trump's followers don't even believe in climate change, much less want to drive electric........

© Salon