Deeply Uncool 53-Year-Old Man Thinks Saying Slur Will Make Him Cool

Elon Musk used a slur for disabled people against an X user who accused him of spreading disinformation, days after saying he wanted to use the platform to spread "positivity."

By Kylie Cheung  |  January 7, 2025 | 12:14pm
Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue Latest
Deeply Uncool 53-Year-Old Man Thinks Saying Slur Will Make Him Cool

Elon Musk—Donald Trump’s self-appointed “First Buddy”—continues to reach new heights of “divorced man.” On Monday, when a Finnish graduate student rightly accused him of “rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history” via tweet, Musk replied, “F u retard.”

The comment, ironically, came just days after Musk called for Twitter users to spread more “positivity” on the platform and announced that the website’s algorithm will soon suppress content that’s deemed to spread negativity, whatever that means. Over the last few weeks, the father of 12 seems to have become taken with the r-word: The Daily Beast reported that Musk has “used the term or a variant of it 15 times” between Dec. 20 and Monday. 

Through a cursory search of Musk’s tweets, it looks like he started using the slur on Twitter mid-way through last year. In April, Musk used it in response to a post of a screenshot in which entrepreneur and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz predicted Musk would go to jail. He continued to use it throughout the fall, and over the holidays, the 53-year-old used the slur a handful of times in a matter of days.

Musk’s embrace of the slur comes at a time when it’s seemingly making a comeback among some swaths of teens, young adults, and a whole lot of people desperate to perform edginess. More so than spearheading the word’s reintroduction into the mainstream, or at least the mainstream right-wing, as some outlets have suggested, Musk seems to have clocked the word’s resurgence and is trying to latch onto it to impress terminally online, “anti-woke” teens. Hopefully, seeing a deeply uncool 53-year-old man who spends his days stitched at the hip to a 78-year-old fascist using this slur will make make people question their own use of it.

Where Musk now seems to see a slur that dehumanizes people with disabilities as fair game, he recognizes at least one perfectly normal word as a “slur.” In 2023, Musk, the estranged father of a young trans woman, repeatedly characterized “cis”—a Latin prefix—as a slur. Some Twitter users have reported being forced by the platform to take down posts that refer to others (or themselves) as “cis” or “cisgender.” The throughline in Musk’s simultaneous use of the r-word and shadow-ban on “cis” seems to be his childish desire to “trigger” liberals, though all he’s really achieving is wedging himself deeper into a far-right bubble, removed from reality.

And, as some have pointed out, Musk’s use of the r-word arguably holds especially sinister connotations, since his obsession with reproduction (particularly his own) arguably veers on eugenics. Billionaires and high-power tech entrepreneurs like Musk have become increasingly open about seeing themselves as uniquely, genetically gifted, and Musk’s apparent new love of an ableist slur suggests he’d rather some people but not others help fix the declining birth rate he so loves to fearmonger about.

Back in 2021, Musk used his stint hosting Saturday Night Live! to share his asperger’s disease in a move that was praised by some disability advocates. Flash forward to Dec. 20, when Musk replied to a clip of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on MSNBC, “What a retard.”

 
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