Remember That Time Elon Musk Tried to Start a Comedy Website?

There are various plausible explanations for why Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Maybe, blinded by incompetent ego, Musk believes he alone can make Twitter transcend new boundaries. Perhaps his billionaire lifestyle has led him to desire new stimulation, and that comes in the form of owning one of the largest social media companies in the world.

Or possibly, Musk still holds on to his foregone dreams of being seen as funny, which is why he was so tickled to announce “comedy is now legal on Twitter” after buying it.

In March 2018, Musk tweeted “Thud!” and announced his new “intergalactic media empire,” a satire project he was pursuing with former Onion editors Ben Berkley and Cole Bolton.

The idea behind Thud was to bring satire into the real world, creating ambiguity between reality and parody. This involved the creation of distinct websites promoting items like satirical ancestry tracing services and endlessly shooting guns.

The vision was ambitious given how difficult it would be to generate much advertising revenue on largely distributed content, without even a central homepage for fans to stay plugged in. But the challenge only animated Musk’s imperious pioneering spirit. “It’s pretty obvious that comedy is the next frontier after electric vehicles, space exploration, and brain-computer interfaces,” Musk told The Daily Beast. “Don’t know how anyone’s not seeing this.”

The fate of Thud gave a clue as to how Musk would run Twitter, which is to say, not really at all. The Verge reported that Musk hadn’t planned to make much of a profit with Thud, and he didn’t really establish a plan to guide the project’s progress. He mostly just threw money at it. And when he began to worry that the project’s work could harm SpaceX or Tesla’s reputations, he pulled out, selling the company to Berkley and Bolton in January 2019—months before Thud even launched in March.

Thud continued pushing projects out as long as it could before shutting down in May 2019.

Though Thud’s vision may have been overly ambitious, it wasn’t just the fault of Berkley and Bolton. They had an idea, and acted accordingly with the financial backing of Elon Musk. That the company fizzled out had a lot to do with a bored billionaire who throws money wherever his mind wanders next, with little interest in maintaining a sense of accountability with those ventures.

As The Onion itself suggested years ago:

Despite the fact that a University of Virginia student opened fire on his former football teammates over the weekend—the latest in a grim trend of U.S. school shootings—somehow guns are not what Republicans are worried about in schools.

The far-right account Libs of TikTok tweeted a photo Monday of an LGBTQ pride display in a Georgia middle school, along with the fearmongering caption: “Imagine walking into your child’s school and seeing this.”

Social justice activist Matt Bernstein snapped back that there might actually be something a little more frightening.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been at least 115 gun-related incidents that resulted in a minimum of one person dying or being injured at or near schools this year. That includes suicides on campus.

Of those 115 incidents, 12 were mass shootings, which the Gun Violence Archive defines as shootings with at least four victims either injured or killed.

Those mass shootings include the horrific massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas (22 dead, 17 injured); an attack on a graduation ceremony in Hot Springs, Arkansas (one dead, four injured); another on a high school in St. Louis, Missouri (three dead, four injured); and Sunday’s shooting at UVA.

The shooter, a former football player, opened fire on the team as they were returning from a game. Three players were killed and another two students wounded. The shooter was charged Monday with three counts of second-degree murder and three counts of using a handgun in the commission of a felony.

The U.S. has a long history of gun-related violence, but tighter regulations have been slow to materialize. Congress passed a landmark bipartisan gun-control law over the summer, but it has many opponents, including on Capitol Hill.

In a further sign the Republican establishment is souring on Donald Trump, Fox News cut away multiple times from his ill-advised presidential campaign announcement.

Trump announced Tuesday night that he would run for president a third time—a move that goes against the counsel of many of his advisers, former allies, and even the Republican Party at large.

Multiple news outlets chose to limit how much of Trump’s rambling, more-than-hour-long speech they showed, but the biggest shock came when Fox News—typically a Trump stalwart—cut away about halfway through the speech.

The speech began just after Sean Hannity, a longtime Trump confidant who has appeared at several of the former president’s rallies, went on air. After about 40 minutes, Hannity cut away to network commentators.

After about 15 minutes, Hannity switched back to the speech, but Fox eventually cut off Trump’s closing statements in favor of starting host Laura Ingraham’s talk show.

Trump still has allies: Several of the Fox commentators praised his speech, calling it “pitch-perfect” and saying the former president was “in as good a form as you’ve ever seen him,” and Representative Elise Stefanik said last week she would support his presidential run.

But the majority of the GOP—and even the country—seems to be over it.

Trump’s 2020 campaign spokeswoman Sarah Matthews called his announcement “low-energy” and “uninspiring.” Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, who called Trump a “loser” on election night, quipped: “You try being high energy when you’re running for President primarily to try to avoid indictment!”

In fact, the speech was so low-energy that people tried to leave early, but they were blocked by event staffers.

The New York Post, another formerly Trump-loyal outlet, kept its coverage of his speech short and to the point … and off the front page:

The announcement also comes after the midterm elections, which served as another kind of indictment on Trump’s political power: Not only was there no predicted “red wave,” but 34 Trump-backed candidates lost their races.

Voters were already shifting away from Trump before the GOP’s disastrous midterms. A Pew Research poll found that only 60 percent of Republicans and right-leaning independents viewed him favorably, down from 67 percent in the summer of 2021.

Postelection polls show many voters are already setting their sights on a new party leader: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

After laying off half of Twitter’s workers, allowing some of the most crucial ones to resign, and firing yet more staff if they tweeted anything he didn’t like, Elon Musk is now making final cuts for anyone not ready to be “working long hours at high intensity.”

On Wednesday morning, Musk sent an email to Twitter staff offering an ultimatum. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” he began. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

Musk wrote that anyone who does not express their interest in being “part of the new Twitter,” by 5 p.m. E.T. Thursday would receive three months of severance pay.

Even if a worker indicates their will to stay, however, there’s no guarantee that their desire for continued employment will be honored. “Those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway,” Musk wrote, describing how Twitter 2.0 will apparently be much more “engineering-driven.”

The letter comes after a persistent stream of chaos coming from inside Twitter.

According to The New York Times, Musk has directed his team to comb through staff members’ tweets and Slack messages and create lists of people making fun of him. Numerous employees have been fired accordingly. Others were fired after simply pointing out that Musk’s technical understanding of how Twitter works is wrong.

Crucial staff including the chief information security officer and chief compliance officer resigned, leaving individual engineers responsible for Federal Trade Commission compliance.

Ad agencies with clients including Apple and McDonald’s have recommended campaign suspensions, joining a burgeoning list of advertisers fleeing the company.

Amid all this, Musk—a grown man in charge of a $44 billion company—has used his time judiciously. Earlier, he joined the replies of viciously transphobic and racist Twitter account “Libs of Tiktok” to make an ableist joke. He also spent time trolling Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey—who then reminded Musk that both his companies are under FTC and NHTSA scrutiny. Markey serves on Senate subcommittees focused on media, as well as consumer protection and data security.

And that is all just a taste of how Twitter 1.0 has gone under Musk. We can only dream of what Twitter 2.0 will hold!

Against the will of his advisers, many of his party’s officials, and a large chunk of the country, Donald Trump is running for president for a third consecutive time.

“America’s comeback starts right now,” Trump announced Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago. “Two years ago, when I left office, the United States stood ready for its golden age. Our nation was at the pinnacle of power, propserity, and prestige,” he added, without making any mention of his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power, going so far as to lead the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

The announcement comes as the GOP lies in shambles after a disappointing midterm election.

Many Republicans had predicted their party would win up to 55 Senate seats. Fox News’s Power Rankings team predicted the party would secure 236 seats in the House. Instead, the Senate balance is 50–49 in favor of the Democrats, pending Georgia’s runoff; the House balance will only narrowly favor the Republicans, after a series of Democratic upsets.

And a whopping 34 Trump-endorsed candidates lost their elections—many of whom Republicans expected to win.

Since the red wave’s crash, numerous Republicans have indicated a desire to shun a potential third Trump run. Postelection polls already show a massive shift from Trump to DeSantis within the Republican base.

On NBC, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy said, “We’re not a cult. We’re not like, ‘OK, there’s one person who leads our party.’” He went on to say, “Elections are about winning. And so if folks want to look at these election results and decide that’s where you want us to continue to be, then we’re not going to do well.”

On CBS, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said Republicans have many “other important leaders” besides Trump, including Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, and South Carolina’s Tim Scott. Each has been floated as a 2024 contender.

And while some Republicans speak in innuendo, others have been more explicit.

Alabama Representative and former Trump ally Mo Brooks told AL.com, “It would be a bad mistake for the Republicans to have Donald Trump as their nominee in 2024.” 

“Donald Trump has proven himself to be dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude and a lot of other things that alienate so many independents and Republicans,” he added. Brooks endorsed DeSantis, as well as Senators Ted Cruz of Texas or Rand Paul of Kentucky, as possible 2024 alternatives to Trump.

Calling Trump the GOP’s 800-pound-gorilla, outgoing Maryland Governor Larry Hogan unapologetically hammered Trump: “It’s basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race,” Hogan said on CNN. “This should have been a huge red wave.… People who tried to relitigate the 2020 election and focused on conspiracy theories … they were all almost universally rejected.”

Republican strategist Scott Jennings, who has advised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the past, was straightforward, tweeting: “How could you look at these results tonight and conclude Trump has any chance of winning a national election in 2024?”

Republicans also worry Trump’s announcement will hurt Republican Herschel Walker’s runoff bid against Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, by increasing Democratic voter turnout.

As Trump announced his candidacy, his potential rival DeSantis was addressing a closed-door Republican Governors Association meeting with donors. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are still embroiled in a legal mess, under several subpoena orders with regard to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Republicans flopped in the midterms. Kevin McCarthy is barely hanging onto a House majority. Mitch McConnell’s leadership is being threatened. And Trump, who has never won the popular vote, has now entered the race for president for a third time.

Good luck, Republicans.