Just stop talking, Elon

At least he wasn’t Tweeting about crypto. 

No, but we probably still should take Elon Musk’s Twitter account away from him for a bit. Not because he’s saying anything that’s particularly troublesome — not even in the not-really-that-bad-but-someone-was-offended way that troublesome is defined these days. 

No, we should give Musk a Twitter time-out for his own good. He tends to come off as a little, well, unhinged everytime that he Tweets about something. 

I’m not sure we need to hear every thought that crosses everyone’s mind — not even if they are ridiculously rich, like Musk is.

It kind of undermines your trust in a public figure when they just won’t just up, actually. Makes you wonder just how smart you have to be to become wealthy. 

Anyway, in case you’re curious, what Twitter utterance made headlines yesterday: Musk was frustrated that the latest SpaceX launch was delayed due to a regulatory body decision. 

The Federal Aviation Administration stopped the launch of Falcon 9 (aside: could the name of this rocket be anymore cliched — it sounds like a 6-year old named it after reading comic books all day) just minutes before the scheduled launch because a helicopter was in the “launch zone.”

That caused Musk to rant on Twitter: “An aircraft entered the ‘keep out zone’, which is unreasonably gigantic…There is simply no way that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization without major regulatory reform. The current regulatory system is broken.”

Look, I understand the frustrations that can arise from an overzealous bureaucrat trying to squeeze the fun out of things. No one grows up dreaming of being the guy that has to enforce the rules. However, preventing a rocket from being launched into the side of a helicopter does seem like a reasonable restriction to place upon a private company that’s trying to send people to Mars. 

And, even if it wasn’t, Twitter shaming the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t seem like the most effective way to get that point across. Perhaps some diplomacy would be better here than snark.

As I said off the top, however, at least this Twitter rant isn’t causing people — normal people like you and I — to lose money like his Crypto comments due. His inclination to seemingly not care about that is why it’s difficult to feel too sorry for him now. 

Musk treats his Twitter account like he’s a King making orders to his subjects. There’s no self-awareness to his Tweets. He says what he wants without caring about the impact. 

There’s an old adage that says “actions speak louder than words.” There might have been a time in Musk’s life when he lived by that, but it seems like he’s perhaps forgotten it. It’s time for Musk to show us rather than tell us when it comes to launching things into space, or investing in the crypto space.