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Elon Musk Trolls the Media With a Clip From 'Spaceballs' (twitter.com) 134

Posted by EditorDavid from the 1-2-3-4-5 dept.
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk is having fun on Twitter, where he's either promoting the new line of $20 "Boring Company" hats or trolling the media. "To preserve the transcendent majesty & specialness of The Boring Company cap, we are capping cap orders at 50,000 caps," Musk tweeted Sunday, adding "Almost there ..." Responding to a user who asked, "Is this really how you're funding the boring company??" Musk answered "Yes."

An hour later he tweeted that "Every 5000th buyer of our boringly boring hat will get a free hat signed by the delivery guy. That special hat delivery will take place deep within the real, but fictional (of course), tunnel we are building under LA while you drive the giant machine blindfolded. This will actually happen."

And then hours later, Musk shared a fresh insight into his thought process. "The *real* money comes from merchandising," he tweeted, adding "I learned it from this documentary," sharing a video titled "merchandising" which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a clip from the 1987 comedy "Spaceballs" starring Mel Brooks.
Ironically, George Lucas had only blessed Mel Brooks' parody of Star Wars with one condition: that no Space Balls action figure merchandise ever be produced.
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Elon Musk Trolls the Media With a Clip From 'Spaceballs' More

Elon Musk Trolls the Media With a Clip From 'Spaceballs'

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  • The Schwartz! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Templer421 ( 4988421 ) on Sunday December 03, 2017 @10:37PM (#55670305)

    Is Strong With This One!

  • Stop talking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Sunday December 03, 2017 @10:40PM (#55670313)

    And build more cars.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Mr. Musk needs to concentrate on his core business and start producing one car every 60 seconds or so, sometimes it seems like he is spread too thin.

      • Re:Stop talking (Score:5, Funny)

        by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday December 03, 2017 @11:23PM (#55670437)

        Since Elon Musk is alone and assembles each and every car in the factory, your comment makes a lot of sense.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          As someone who has worked in the auto industry including plants for 25 years, it is easy for me to see, at any rate, that a chief who is distracted by too many side projects and not giving 110% attention to getting a new assembly line up and running is going to get exactly what he is getting. But you wanted to deflect that argument. Why is that?

          • You're assuming that he's the only one in charge of everything? Surely he has people under him to manage things too.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              I think owners of Tesla cars are getting a little frustrated at the lack of progress on promised features. Maybe he needs to hire more people to manage/engineer things.

              Tesla is selling "full self driving" capability today, for about $3500 on top of the $5000 "enhanced auto-pilot". Self driving will be delivered at some unspecified date via software update. Enhanced auto-pilot doesn't work very well yet. There was an old version, known as AP1, which was better. Newer cars have AP2 hardware, which doesn't eve

          • Re:Stop talking (Score:5, Informative)

            by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Monday December 04, 2017 @09:17AM (#55671561)

            "not giving 110% attention to getting a new assembly line up and running"
            That's the responsibility of Peter Hochholdinger, who oversaw the production of several Audi models in a 20 year career.
            https://www.linkedin.com/in/pe... [linkedin.com]
            Elon's job is to keep the money coming in & he does that very well.

          • I think he's capable of doing more than one thing.

      • Elon's core business is inspiring people to dream of a more exciting future, and trying to bring that future about. Building the Model 3 is one part of this, as is designing electric trucks and hypercars, pushing battery tech forward, working on forgotten areas of solar tech such as the aesthetics of the product, and building and designing even more epic reusable rockets. Oh, and seeing if anything can be done about the inefficiencies of tunnel building for solving transport problems.

        • Elon's core business is inspiring people to dream of a more exciting future

          Thanks, I just threw up over my keyboard.

    • Just two days ago I said Musk drums up publicity while Nissan, BYD, and others build more electric cars. He's the PT Barnum of our age, I said. The Musk fanatics went nuts. Today, this. He's literally claiming he'll finance his new company by selling hats, and trolling the media with Spaceballs clips.

      • Just two days ago I said Musk drums up publicity while Nissan, BYD, and others build more electric cars.

        And if all the car manufacturers spent half as much effort as Tesla does, Tesla would indeed be very far behind.

  • What's funny... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03, 2017 @10:52PM (#55670355)

    I just ordered one of these hats and you can't pay with PayPal!

  • Leave your nerd card and get out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday December 03, 2017 @11:05PM (#55670393)

    ...sharing a video titled "merchandising" which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a clip from the 1987 comedy "Spaceballs" starring Mel Brooks.

    If you can't tell that from the screenshot alone, you're not a nerd.

    GET OUT.

  • Is it parody ? (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday December 03, 2017 @11:11PM (#55670411) Homepage Journal

    Because the Spaceballs "merchandising" scene always had a ring of truth to it. It's not hard to see how much toy sales drove many of these franchises. From pretty much anything Disney, to Star Wars, to Transformers.

    Also, I love the name of Musk's company. I LOL'd the first time I found out about The Boring Company.

    • Because the Spaceballs "merchandising" scene always had a ring of truth to it. It's not hard to see how much toy sales drove many of these franchises. From pretty much anything Disney, to Star Wars, to Transformers.

      And now, 30 years after Spaceballs, "Star Wars" and "Disney" are one. Now that's what I call visionary.

      Also, I love the name of Musk's company. I LOL'd the first time I found out about The Boring Company.

      I still hold to my claim that he only founded it for the sake of that pun.

    • I love the name of Musk's company. I LOL'd the first time I found out about The Boring Company.

      It all seems a bit like turning up to a new job and seeing that the boss has a "you don't have to be mad to work here...but it helps!" sign on their desk.

  • Spaceballs the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs THE FLAME THROWAH!! ("The kids love this one!")

  • A while back, Elon tweeted something about having a quiet evening with some wine and ambien [cnet.com]. Fortunately, Elon is wealthy enough that someone else is probably driving if he has to go anywhere under this mix. Elon has also commented that he could be bipolar [marketwatch.com].

    So, sometimes one wonders if Elon is just toying with us, or if he's high.

    I think there's one very good thing about this recent spate of announcements and the self-designations that some of them are fake. There was a certain class of young Elon Musk fan (I'm looking at you, Reddit /r/spacex) who didn't believe that Elon Musk lied. No, I'm not kidding. I just figure that all corporate executives lie and that it's part of the job, but not those young fans. But now, Elon seems to be putting out enough consciously conflicting messages that some of them will turn out to be lies, and the fan base can adjust its adoration accordingly.

    I do think he's done a whole lot of great things. And I think you need someone like him to do them.

  • someone needs to learn the meaning of irony! hint there is nothing ironic about the merchandising restriction for action figures as Musk isn't doing them either.
  • Hey Elon, how about an on that completely autonomous coast-to-coast drive you promised by the end of the year? You have less than a month to go! Then again, maybe you should stick to the hat business. Probably the only one you've ever made a profit on.

    • Re:Autonomous demonstration (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Monday December 04, 2017 @03:07AM (#55670939)

      Well, Elon has introduced electric cars to the general market after the big automakers had decided they didn't want to, and he's brought private enterprise into space.

      So what are your accomplishments again?

  • I still want my damn Eagle-5 official Pops model, damn it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )

      I still want my damn Eagle-5 official Pops model, damn it.

      Don't hold your breath -- Mel Brooks had an agreement with George Lucas not to sell any Spaceballs action figures and other tie-in toys, in order to secure Lucas' blessing to make fun of Star Wars. (Didn't hurt that he also hired Industrial Light & Magic to do the special effects)

      "Merchandising, where the real profit is made!"

  • MOICHANDISING!

    Sheesh. How could he get that wrong?

  • This guy just has to fart and the hipster nerds wank themselves silly. I thought /. was better than this. Keep this sort of shit in Wired.

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