The applecart is upset again.
In a tweet posted last week, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the inventor of Tesla and SpaceX, declared: “Pronouns suck.”
Sans any context, many on Twitter — a.k.a. the applecart — were immediately upset by the executive’s two-word missive, which was assumed to be a slight against chosen pronouns, a cause du jour of the LGBT community.
The tweet even angered Musk’s girlfriend Grimes, with whom he has a son named X AE A-XII.
“I love you, but please turn off ur phone or give me a dall [sic],” she wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.”
Others were quick to taunt Musk for his tweet, too.
Eugene Gu, a medical doctor turned into an obsessive Twitter aficionado, posting tweets critical of President Donald Trump and conservatives throughout the day, immediately assumed Musk’s words were an attack on transgenderism.
“Transgender rights are important in a free and equal society that cares about everyone — from the very rich like you to the most vulnerable like them,” he wrote. “This shouldn’t be in dispute. But cancel culture does suck, which is why we should educate people not futilely try to destroy them.”
Another tweeted, “Pretty disgusting to see from you. What’s so hard about calling someone a pronoun? It literally does absolutely nothing to you to call them it and it’s what they like to be referred as so why not just do it? I genuinely don’t understand why you people don’t like them.”
“You don’t hate pronouns,” posted one more. “You hate having to acknowledge trans rights and existence. Or that people may feel uncomfortable or unsafe or just not like themselves being the gender they were assigned at birth.”
Musk, for his part, is no stranger to controversy; he has no problem upsetting the applecart.
In early July, after rapper Kanye West announced he was running for president of the United States, Musk tweeted: “You have my full support!”
Now the SpaceX founder is trying to convince West to delay his White House bid.
“I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020,” Musk told The New York Times, arguing he wouldn’t want West to be blamed for splitting the black vote between himself and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.