Elon Musk’s temptation meme, explained

If you ever needed proof that money doesn’t equal smarts, then there’s no better example than Elon Musk.

The rich-kid turned investor often masquerades as an engineer, a coder, and a political analyst. Yet, when you look at his behavior, it’s clear he’s just a nepo baby with more clout than he deserves.

The man who bought Twitter (and turned it into X, a hotbed of Nazi propaganda where people who share child sex abuse images are allowed to continue to post) is now rumored to have set his sights on a new media target: MSNBC.

Musk, who has styled himself a free speech absolutist despite tripling the number of account suspensions on his site, shared a meme earlier today in which he joked about buying the liberal-leaning network.

The Tesla owner did so by utilizing a famous meme which has been called “temptation.” The image shows a figure with his hands clasped and eyes closed in prayer, while a scantily clad woman flashes in front of him.

This isn’t the first time Musk has used the meme, doing so around two years ago, when he joked about Donald Trump potentially rejoining his site. The meme, unsurprisingly, tends to attract leering edgelords, sexist bores, and Boomer-adjacent divorced dads amongst its enthusiasts.

MSNBC‘s future has been up for debate recently as its parent company, Comcast, is set to spin off a number of its cable channels. The network is home to several liberal-leaning hosts, most notably Rachel Maddow.

Jokes about Musk purchasing the network began with Donald Trump Jr., who posted about it on Musk’s social media platform.

While these posts appear to be tongue-in-cheek, there’s no doubt that Musk might go in for the network. He first joked about buying Twitter back in 2017, eventually going through with the deal last year. Since he purchased the social media network, its value has fallen by 71%, as both advertisers and users flee from increasingly extreme right-wing content.

However, buying media companies isn’t really about the profit for men like Musk and Jeff Bezos, the latter of whom bought The Washington Post back in 2013, and has used the once-revered paper, home to Woodward and Bernstein, to push his own agenda. Musk has a notoriously thin skin, too, so it makes sense he would want to try and silence even more of his critics.

Musk, who has become increasingly partisan in recent years, is also known for his inability to engage with opposing views. He is also known for throwing tantrums when things don’t go his way, and is not above restricting the flow of information if it’s something he disagrees with.

For now, the prospect of Musk buying MSNBC seems as jokey as the meme he used to float the idea. Yet, in the clown show that is American politics, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.