Dear Elon,
I must declare my love for you. I appreciate this may be distressing — I am, after all, a 58-year-old writer and biologically male; while you are a mere slip of a 48-year-old, also biologically male, and, as far as I know, like me, heterosexual in your orientation. Moreover, both of us are already, so to speak, spoken for. Listen, I don’t know for sure yet whether it’s going to work out between us physically — so Grimes needn’t get antsy — but let me state for the record: should you decide to enter into a liaison with me, I’m happy to sign a comprehensive pre-nuptial agreement; one that will deny me any access to both your billions, and your bollocks.
No, I see our union being consummated in the cloud, in the form of a Möbius strip of our respective psyches reconfigured as machine code, or possibly in space, as your phallic rocket smoothly docks with my vaginal space station; at any rate, nowhere as prosaic as beneath a duvet. For you are a visionary, and although I’m of an age and income level when I require (and am able to afford) the services of Specsavers rather more than SpaceX, I like to think I’m one too.
From a young age, Elon Baby, you saw the future, both at a personal level and a political one. You moved from your native South Africa to the United States via Canada, because you believed in “God’s own country”, even if you didn’t in God. As a precocious physics student, you’d already grasped that the world’s finite resources were being so rapidly degraded that the future for humankind must lie in space, and it’s to that vacuous end you have dedicated your entire working life.
But before I get to that magnum opus, let me say that my admiration for what you have done — although vast — is itself dwarfed by the passion aroused in me by your name alone. Yes! Elon and Musk are both words to conjure with — so producing semantic sleights of hand. When I hear “Elon” I think of elongation — obviously of the male member in tumescence, but also of your rockets. You began with the Falcon 1, which was a mere 69ft tall, and in May of this year, you successfully launched a mission that, for the first time in 20 years, delivered American astronauts in an American rocket, from American soil to the International Space Station. Moreover, this Falcon 9 rocket is, at 230ft, almost four times the length of the first — that’s what we call elongating.
And the pun doesn’t stop there, because when I think of Elon I also automatically consider your astonishing élan: this man who isn’t content to merely bestride the worlds of rocketry, electric-powered vehicles, mass transit systems and artificial intelligence, but who also makes duff computerised music in his backroom, just like any other all-American boy. (Or all-Canadian girl for that matter.) It’s actually the lyrics of “Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe” that really speak to me:
“Don’t doubt your vibe, because it’s true / Don’t doubt your vibe because it’s you…”
Has, I wonder, any poet better expressed the human condition?
Lying on my miserable duvet, I can’t help imagining what it would be like to be dancing to this extraordinary track with Elon himself: to be enfolded simultaneously in the arms of the creator and the sounds he’s created. Mm… musky, I’d imagine: a profoundly sweaty and masculine aroma tickling my nostrils, as, jiggling and wiggling, I stared into Elon’s puckish features.
True, I don’t want to be discriminatory, but while I’ve had crushes on other wildly egotistic tech billionaires with ambitions to transcend humanity’s mortality and embodiment, I could never look good on a red carpet hanging off Jeff Bezos’s arm (5ft 7ins), or for that matter Mark Zuckerberg’s (also 5ft 7ins). No, only a strapping six-foot-oner such as you, Elon, can properly complement all six-foot-four etiolated inches of me. I like to think it’s this partial elongation of my body, as compared to yours, that might attract you to me.
There’s this, and there’s also another key physical attribute I share with your revolutionary rocket systems. Unlike many middle-aged men, who have bits fall off them all the time whenever they do so much as rise from a couch — let alone ascend into low Earth orbit — I’m capable of getting up, going to the loo, having a piss, and then returning to my original launch pad entirely intact! Yes, that’s right — no hair, teeth or prostate gland will be jettisoned during a mission of this kind, let alone a hugely expensive rocket first-stage.
Listen, Elon, I know you’re not looking for a cheap date, you’re better than that: you’re looking for a cheap way to colonise space, a cheap way to replicate the human mind, a cheap way to bore tunnels and a cheap way to influence the American political process. I also know you’re taken already, and I respect that. But I ask you, is there anything Grimes can do for you that I can’t? OK, granted, this year she did bear you another child to add to the five you already have, but such wetware replication looks increasingly dated. The two of you have named this little boy X Æ A-12 for all sorts of reasons that seem bogus, ridiculous or far-fetched to me. Whereas if we’d had a child together, there’s a combination of first and surname readily available that could express both your egotism and your achievements rather better: Will Self Mk II.
And that takes us, rather neatly, to your magnificent electrically-powered cars. Listen, I’m not so shallow that I’m only attracted to a guy if he owns a flashy electrically-powered-car company but it just so happens that you do; and moreover that company happens to be Tesla, which manufactures the coolest, sexiest, most ethical cars in the world! In recent years, Elon, you’ve taken to speaking of being “red-pilled”, a reference to the film, The Matrix, in which the protagonist, Neo, takes a red pill and thereby becomes aware that the world as it’s commonly perceived is but an illusion. The real world Neo finds himself in is a colossal power plant, in which human minds are linked up in series — rather like computers in a server farm — to generate energy.
Well, if I had you in my boudoir, Elon my love, I’d give you a red pill of my own — one that would enable you to see that your entire self-aggrandising project is a complete and utter illusion: humans are never going to colonise other star systems, or create artificial consciousness, or even build self-driving Teslas for that matter. No, all those Tesla cars, far from helping to save the planet, are only accelerating its destruction since it’s impossible to build them without expending vast amounts of fossil-fuel-generated energy, and using up more and more of Earth’s dwindling supplies of rare metals. When you’ve popped my red pill, Elon, you’ll see that all those middle-aged male minds are linked up to Teslas purely in order to generate money for you, nothing else.
OK, granted, such a red-pilling could no doubt result in a terrible debacle on the musky launch pad, but luckily I also have little blue pills to hand, and when it comes to elongation, they almost never fail. I know I said I didn’t fancy you physically — but guess what: I was lying.
With sincere and passionate affection,
Will.
This story is taken from the September/October issue of Esquire, on-sale now.
