IIf anyone was going to offer up their nocturnal habits to be taken down by the entire internet, it was going to be Elon Musk. Man’s narcissism knows no bounds. Monday (November 28), shared on Twitter a photo of his nightstand, on which sit no fewer than two pistols, four open cans of decaf Coca-Cola, a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, and an ancient gun. Just typical billionaire stuff, I suppose.
What is Musk trying to tell us with this photo? Perhaps he believes that drinking copious amounts of aspartame-laden fizzy drinks is the epitome of an aspirational lifestyle. Maybe he thinks sleeping with a mini arsenal next to his head makes him look tough. After all, what’s harder than having a gun handy in case an imaginary intruder somehow makes it into your fortress of solitude?
Anyway, he’s not fooling anyone. She screams, “Please, I’m so lonely. Pay attention to me.” Well, if attention is what you want…
Here’s why I think Musk’s bedside table is more of a cry for company than a powerful stage of machismo. First, let’s take a closer look at the weapons, which experts say probably aren’t even real. According to the bullet-brained lifestyle brand American Free Range – covering stories that “inspire the American dream” – the black revolver is a simple toy. It appears to be a malfunctioning Diamondback .357 revolver, a “fictional futuristic weapon” that appears in video games. Talk about stupid.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the other ammo on the table is an antique pistol, which Musk should be able to easily afford as the richest man in the world. But no. It appears to be a replica flintlock pistol, usually used as a non-firing display piece, costing less than $100 (£83). As for the box with the display of the first US president during the American Revolutionary War – well, it’s probably a cheap replica too.
However, Musk seems to have at least one genuine weapon to keep him company in his sleep. He seems to have, just by chance, a vajra on his bedside table. A vajra is a small metal club described as the weapon of the Hindu god Indra. Why does Musk have this? Maybe he uses it as a paper press. Or he fiddles with it when he’s bored of burning Twitter to the ground. Whatever the reason, I blame Grimes.
Musk’s sad little collection of bedside tables seems symbolic of a lost and lonely man. Weapons that don’t work. A random antique. An addiction to Coca-Cola. It’s a jumble of confusing objects that don’t even seem to belong to a real person. It’s like he put some weird words into one of those AI image generators and decided it represented him. The only evidence that a real person lives there is the overlapping cup rings on the table surface. In the end! The sign of a true bachelor pad.