Let’s be real for a second. There’s something deeply, existentially weird about scrolling through the richest man in the world’s social media feed. It’s not the memes or the politics or the endless self-aggrandizing posts about his companies. It’s the silence between the notes. The AI-generated woman whispering “I will always love you” into the digital void. The deepfake Sydney Sweeney calling you “cringe.” You’re sitting there in the blue light of your phone, and you get this cold feeling that you’re not looking at a person’s timeline, but at the digital ghost of a profoundly lonely algorithm.
So when Joyce Carol Oates—a woman who has spent sixty years writing about the absolute darkest corners of the human soul—decided to point this out, it wasn’t just another celebrity spat. It was a horror novelist recognizing one of her own characters walking around in the real world.
Her take was simple, almost brutal: for all his wealth, Elon Musk seems “totally uneducated, uncultured.” She pointed out the obvious void where normal human joys should be—pets, art, nature, family. She wasn’t just calling him dumb; she was calling him empty. A charge that, frankly, seems to stick when your primary emotional output is recycled memes and AI girlfriends.
Musk’s response was, offcourse, perfectly predictable. He called the 87-year-old literary icon a “liar” who “delights in being mean.” It’s the kind of defense you’d expect from a teenager caught cheating on a test, not from a guy who wants to put chips in our brains. But what did we expect? A nuanced discussion on the role of art in a technocratic society? Give me a break.
This whole episode is more than just an online slap fight. It’s a collision of two Americas, two completely different ways of understanding the world. On one side, you have Oates. This isn’t just some random novelist. This is the woman who wrote Zombie, a book so deeply unsettling about Jeffrey Dahmer’s psyche that you feel like you need a shower after reading it. She wrote “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, a story that weaponizes the quiet dread of a predator’s arrival. Her entire career is built on understanding the complex, grotesque, and often horrifying machinery inside the human head.
Then you have Musk. A man who sees the human head as faulty hardware in need of a Neuralink upgrade. His world is one of outputs, efficiencies, and engineering problems. Emotion, art, culture? Those are bugs in the system, not features. So when Oates looks at him and sees a cultural void, she’s not just being an elitist snob. She's a specialist diagnosing a symptom.
This is the central conflict here. It's like watching a master exorcist try to cast a demon out of a Tesla. The exorcist is chanting in ancient languages about sin and redemption, while the Tesla is just calculating the optimal route to the nearest Supercharger. They are operating on such fundamentally different planes of existence that communication is impossible. Musk can’t process a critique of his soul, only an attack on his public persona. So he calls her a “liar.” What else can he do? Does he even know who she is beyond a verified account with an opinion? Does he care?
The whole thing is a waste of everyone’s time. No, that’s not right—it’s a perfect, depressing snapshot of our terminally online culture. You have the old guard of intellectualism, lobbing critiques from a world of paper and ink, and the new god-king of Silicon Valley, who can’t even be bothered to craft his own insults. His supporters definately jumped in to defend him, calling Oates a jealous relic, while her fans praised her for speaking truth to power. It’s all so tiresome.
But the real horror, the kind Oates would appreciate, isn't the argument itself. It’s the emptiness that started it. The hollow spectacle of a man with infinite resources creating digital puppets to tell him he’s loved. That’s a story darker than anything Oates has ever written, because it’s real. And we’re all just scrolling through it.
Honestly, who cares? This isn't some grand battle for the soul of our culture. It's a sad, pathetic little drama playing out for our distraction. Oates comes off as a bit out of touch, peering down from her literary perch to pass judgment on a world she doesn't fully grasp. And Musk, as always, comes off as a brittle, thin-skinned emperor who’s terrified to admit he’s wearing no clothes. They both look a little foolish. The real loser, as usual, is anyone who wasted more than five minutes thinking about it.
