Tech bros and cricket dads

One of the revealing things about Elon Musk is that he appears to have absolutely no interest in sport. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but for someone whose entire aim on social media seems to be to have blokey blokes laugh at something he says, just once, it is a bit incongruous. You’d think from his ethos and background he’d like Kallis, Kolbe and Kolisi - well, their initials at least - but no.

Musk did go to the last rugby World Cup final and said seeing the Boks win was “kinda cool”. Promising. But he is, or was, South African and all about good old nationalism, for god’s sake. Saying what Rassie Erasmus has achieved is “kinda cool” is like suggesting Basil D’Oliveira was kinda unlucky.

Recently, though, the AfD-loving owner of X, did comment on a post about cricket. The head of Google, Sundar Pichai, tweeted a clip of Bumrah wryly drawing attention in a press conference to the fact he hold the world record for the most runs in a Test over in response to a question impugning his batting prowess. Musk replied, “Nice”.

And that is the sort of thing he likes. For men like Musk, the joy in life is to, in the parlance of the YouTube debates they all weirdly watch, “own” or “destroy” their opponents with barbs rather than boundaries.

What Musk craves is the vindicating laughter that Bumrah got in that press conference but, although I don’t think he’s someone devoid of humour, he seems to have arrived at a point where any time he attempts wit it backfires more painfully than a Manjrekar suggestion on Indian team selection.

Musk has, though, managed to attain, through his support of and friendship with Trump, a position of vast political and geopolitical power. Fine, his gargantuan achievements in finance and astronomical innovation might also be a factor. But his omnipotent status only seems to make him angrier. He told a Trump supporter to “Fuck yourself in your face” the other day. Dear me, it’s language even Ben Stokes would baulk at.

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of Musk’s co-bros, this week tweeted a diatribe against fairly accepted American culture, railing against sleepovers, prom queens and jocks.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.“

Bit of a poser there for those of us who love both Saurabh Netravalkar and Virat Kohli. I thought this was, however, against a pretty low bar, one of the more thoughtful tech bro posts. But in a sense it almost made it more bonkers. Is it better to be performatively confrontational and end up sounding like a frothing loon or try to be considered but still end up sounding like a frothing loon?

I digress because I’m writing this slightly drunk. But regardless I do think the tech bros would have found the MCG on Friday incredibly confusing. They might dismiss jocks but they also want to revel in jock alpha culture, which as they see it is the culture of triumph. It must be very hard for them to see Sam Konstas, a peroxide jock deity who after owning the Indians, being worshipped by Indian fans as he impersonated Merv Hughes’s stretching regime in front of them. Similarly, an entire nation of Australians willing on the evil hate figure Siraj - boooo - to play out three balls then revelling in vicarious joy at the unadulterated splendour of Nitish Kumar Reddy’s father weeping in joy must have been hard to fathom.

They’re a funny bunch, the tech bros, with vast amounts of global power but perhaps not huge amounts of understanding over the nuances of one of the greatest facets of it, namely sport (feel free to fill in your own jokes about the ICC and BCCI).

There is always a muddy tension between patriotism and advancement. It’s embodied, unknowingly, by the Barmy Army’s fervent adoption of Jerusalem, which in fact, Clive, is a riff on a poem called Milton written by Blake as an anti-industrialism reaction not only to the dark satanic mills it references but a warning against the veneration of those exploiting technology for their own gain in general.

Enough of that pretentious wank from me. But there is an emptiness to Musk despite his huge power and hugely admirable achievements. Maybe one day he will be able to find peace by directing his current anger in a more productive way like normal people: By wondering why Sarfaraz Khan hasn’t played in Australia yet. Cheers!