Remembering Elon Musk
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 186
ROGUES GALLERY DEP'T.
Will the Starving Babies Ever Know Who Starved Them?
THERE ARE MORE villains around than everyone or even anyone can pay attention to. At the No Kings march that began on Times Square, in addition to the main body of signs opposing Donald Trump, I spotted various messages denouncing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as a whole. But Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff for policy—despite his wide-ranging and vigorous efforts to make himself into the embodiment of malevolence in American civic life—only appeared once that I saw, as one head of a Cerberus along with Trump and Noem.
And in all the blocks full of all those hundreds of thousands of sign-wielding people. I don't recall seeing anything about Elon Musk. Even by the first No Kings march, in June, Musk had already set about publicly estranging himself from Donald Trump, posting that Trump was "in the Epstein files." At that time, the idea of the Epstein files was mostly a far-right conspiracist fixation, but by Saturday Jeffrey Epstein was one of the leading topics on the signs at the liberal mass protest, while the far-right Speaker of the House was keeping Congress suspended apparently to avoid a vote on Epstein matters. Trump's long, close relationship with Epstein, which had been one more piece of his known history that he seemed to be able to shrug off with impunity, has apparently, belatedly, become a political liability for him.
Yet there's only so much political liability to go around, and Musk seems to have successfully ejected himself from trouble. He made a big gleeful show of dismembering basic government functions, and he sentenced countless people around the world to sickness, hunger, and death by destroying USAID, for petty and paranoid reasons, and now his name doesn't even get mentioned in the AP's coverage of "starving children screaming for food."
Tesla stock has recovered some $200 a share since it bottomed out in the spring, and it has nearly returned to its post-election, pre-inauguration peak in the $450s. It's not because the company is doing great things; Cybertruck sales are down more than 60 percent year over year and Musk has pivoted to claiming that his essentially vaporware humanoid robots will eventually dominate Tesla's business and also all economic activity on the planet. In September, Oracle owner Larry Ellison briefly overtook Musk as the world's richest person, but Musk is now $105 billion ahead of Ellison on the Bloomberg scoreboard.
Musk is still the same person he was in March and April, or worse. Last month, he gave a speech via video to a rally of more than 100,000 British racists, urging them to fight the "woke mind virus" and demanding that the British government be replaced. The damage he's done in the United States has not been reversed or repaired, either. It's all simply become the way things are. And who ever gets blamed for that?
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, October 19, 2025
★★★★ The cab came and the cab went on blank black asphalt speckled with leaves in the predawn dark. A cat screamed somewhere not far from the open window and the breeze batted at the blinds like the household cat trying to annoy people into waking up again. In the sunshine of the real morning, little yellow leaflets were sifting down. A man wearing a jacket open over a sweater walked a tawny, rangy dog across the avenue—its build making it look like a retriever at first, though some pit bull couldn't be ruled out. The headlight reflectors on an old Volvo glowed silver from the eastern sun. Wind whooshed through the branches and the light had its seasonal sparkle but the afternoon air was warm and damp. The path along the Pool was lined with fallen yellow, and an orange-red curtain of black tupelo hung out over the water. A half-sunken branch above the falls had trapped rafts of green duckweed mixed with red and gold tree leaves. A hawk fairly high overhead looped away and back and away again in a strange, fluttering glide, going slack in the wind and then rowing out of it. The eye, trying to follow, suddenly registered how startlingly fast the low, tranquil-looking puffs of cumulus were speeding past the treetops.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from Buffalo Cookery: A Collection of Choice Recipes Carefully Selected, by St. Luke's Sunday-School Ladies' Auxiliary, Buffalo, Wyoming in 1916 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
CUCUMBER SANDWICHES
Mrs. Patsy Healy
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon scraped onion
1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Dip slices of cucumber in French dressing made after above recipe and lay between buttered rounds of bread cut thin. Sprinkle cucumber with salt.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
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