“What happened? What changed? I don’t think Musk and Trump were simply radicalized on social media like the average Rust Belt uncle. I think these periods of their lives also accelerated and intensified their descents into fiction, their respective evolutions into living-breathing avatar and character. In those years, both men, already shielded by their immense wealth, already rewarded for decades of bombastic risk-taking in move-fast-break-things Silicon Valley and greed-is-good New York, grew even more uninhibited, impulsive, and brash. It was almost as if they were beginning to feel—and, in some sense, be—free of the fundamental quality that distinguishes reality from fiction: consequence.”

– Gideon Jacobs

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