I’m 100% certain Musk has been buying guerilla social media campaigns since at least the early 2010s.

Nobody gave a shit about some random CEO back then. But in certain spaces like reddit, he was talked of like a god.

This is memoryholed but at one point the mods of /r/technology put filters against the flood of Musk spam. When this was revealed, there was a minor brigading of pro Musk content to that subreddit. It’s another in the long history of reddit incidents but nobody seems to remember this one.

That’s when I clued into the patterns of this artificially generated Musk popularity. Why the hell did anyone care about this guy back then? It obviously wasn’t organic content. The guy manufactured himself.

I remember watching the Tesla and SpaceX live streams over the years because of all the hullaballoo. Nobody else watched those. Nobody else cared. I watched and saw nothing special. He’s nothing but another bumbling CEO. Most the time he’d try to sound smart and get smacked down by the actual scientists and engineers from the company who were on the panel.

There’s another guy right now. Jeff Arcuri or whatever. He’s on r/all every single day for the past several years. Who the fuck is Jeff Arcuri, you ask??? Some random comedian. But he’s obviously been buying himself a top spot on reddit. Based on that kind of presence you’d think he’s one of the most legendary comedians in history. Guy isn’t even notable enough to have a Wikipedia page.