It turned out - because you can't have it all - that the man arrested and subsequently charged in France last week was not Elon. It was his bro-in-arms, Pavel Durov, an Elon-alike who founded the encrypted messaging app Telegram, though for the casual observer it can be hard to tell where Durov ends and Musk begins.
Just as the flattening effect of algorithms means that coffee shops in Brooklyn and Bristol look the same these days, so it is with the bros. Social media algorithms have created a tech-masculine ideal fuelled by the kind of basic strongmen they both seem to admire, chief among them Vladimir Putin.
Musk has form for chatting with Putin on the phone and while Durov claims to have been driven into exile by the Russian government, it's hard to square that with the stream of supportive statements from Russian ministers last week demanding his "rescue". Crucially, although Musk was born in South Africa and Durov in St Petersburg, the language they speak is the same: specious, self-serving lies dressed up as ideology.
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