Elon Musk spent his Christmas break raging online and in a German newspaper

The days between Christmas and New Year are an apathetic, liminal period. You can catch up with family, turn your mind into a sunless space with video games and television, and eat all the food left over from the holidays. Elon Musk, the richest man who ever lived and the father of at least 12 children, is spending this time raging online about visas and publishing an article in a German newspaper.

Where do I even begin.

In the days before Christmas, a little war broke out among the MAGA faithful and the tech billionaires who helped Trump win the election. The problem was with H1-B visas. You see, immigrant Elon Musk thinks Americans are lazy and rightly so. To help it prosper, they want to attract more highly skilled technical workers on H1-B visas.

“A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World, or Zack and Slater over Scratch in Saved by the Bell, or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in Family Matters, will not produce the best engineers,” DOGE co – Chairman Ramaswamy tweeted on December 26one day most of us are so full of holiday meat we can’t move.

The reason leading tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over “native” Americans is not an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy and misguided explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions call for tough answers and if…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024

Ramaswamy and Musk then spent a few days battling their followers on X, the Everything app. Musk pounced bans and mutual accusations happily in the days after Christmas which I guess interrupted his time with Path of Exile 2. Sad. Posting the day after Christmas summarized what had happened The post said Americans were stupid. Musk agreed to this, then deleted his consent. He said that “hateful, unrepentant racists” should be removed from the Republican Party.

Good luck with that.

As Musk defended himself against the trolls he had nurtured on the website he bought for $44 billion, the world I also learned about Adrian Dittmana man many believed could be musk.

Dittmann is a bluecheck X account that likes to defend Musk. Dittman’s account has exists since 2021and spent much of that time fighting for the embattled billionaire. The couple first appeared together in a Twitter space in 2023. They repeat the performance during the expiration of the H1-B visa.

The thing is, Dittman sounds and acts exactly like Elon Musk. The account appears to exist solely to inflate Musk’s ego and defend his various positions. When they are both in the same virtual space, it is impossible to tell them apart. This led to claims that Dittman was an alternate account of Musk, something that even daughter of an estranged billionaire believes

The truth about Dittman is impossible to know. It’s either Musk running an alternate account and getting high, or he’s a weirdo who loves Musk so much that he does an impression of him, models his behavior after Musk, and spends the holiday defending him online. Both possibilities are too terrifying to contemplate in these strange and wandering days between Christmas and New Years.

Did you know that parliamentary elections are coming up in Germany? Musk knows. Germany’s government is in crisis and the coalition that ruled it has collapsed. At the end of February, the Germans will decide the future of the country. Musk would like that future to be a hard right turn.

The billionaire sparked another controversy before the New Year when he published an op-ed in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper supporting the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Musk said Germany was on the brink of “economic and cultural collapse” and that the AfD was the “last glimmer of hope” for the country.

AfD is a party that making my way in a Controversy related to the Nazis every few weeks. It would probably also be good for Musk’s business interests abroad. That’s why he wrote the article. Musk’s endorsement of the newspaper was so outrageous that the editor of Welt am Sonntag resigned in protest.

It’s impossible to know whether any of this will matter in February, when Germany votes, but it points to Musk trying to flex his political muscle outside the United States. He first endorsed the AfD on the day before Christmas. I wonder what he will do when he learns about the hateful, unrepentant racists in the ranks of the AfD.

The richest man in the world entered 2025. with the same energy he had cultivated in 2024. While the rest of us were enjoying time with our families, we finished one last draft before we saw Nosferatu matinee or catching up with old friends, Musk battled with people on the Internet. The holidays are hard for some of us. Musk’s solution seems to be to publish through it.