The days between Christmas and New Year’s are a listless, liminal time. You can catch up with family, turn your mind into a sunless space with video games and TV, and eat all the leftover food from the holidays. Elon Musk, the richest man who ever lived and the father of at least 12 children, is spending this time going crazy online about visas and publishing an op-ed in a German newspaper.

Where to even begin.

In the days before Christmas, little war broke out among the MAGA faithful and the tech billionaires who helped Trump win the election. The problem is H1-B Visas. You see, immigrant Elon Musk thinks Americans are lazy and entitled. To help it grow, they want to bring in more skilled technology workers on the H1-B Visa.

“A culture that honors Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers ,” DOGE co-chair Ramaswamy wrote in a Tweet on December 26a day when most of us are so full of holiday meat that we can’t move.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over “native” Americans is not because of a natural American IQ deficiency (a lazy and misguided explanation). A key part of this comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers and if…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRAmaswamy) December 26, 2024

Ramaswamy and Musk spent days fighting with their followers on X, the Everything App. Musk was thrown around prohibition and recriminations with the excitement of the days after Christmas, which I believe was interrupted by his time with Path of Exile 2. Sad. A post the day after Christmas summarized what happened The post said Americans are stupid. Musk agreed to this, then withdrew his agreement. He said that the “hateful, unrepentant racists” should be removed from the Republic Party.

Good luck with that.

As Musk defends himself from the trolls he developed on the website he bought for $44 billion, the world Adrian Dittmann also knowsa man many thought would be BE Musk.

Dittmann is a bluecheck X account that likes to defend Musk. Dittmann’s account has has been there since 2021and spent hours going to bat for the embattled billionaire. The pair first appeared together in a space on Twitter back in 2023. they the performance is repeated during the H1-B visa dustup.

The thing is, Dittmann sounds and acts like Elon Musk. The narrative seems to exist only to boost Musk’s ego and defend his various positions. When the two are in the same virtual space, it’s impossible to tell them apart. This led to allegations that Dittmann was an alt-account of Musk’s, something that even the billionaire’s daughter believe

Dittmann’s truth is impossible to know. It’s either Musk running an alt account and promoting himself or it’s some weirdo who loves Musk so much that he does an impression on him, models his behavior on Musk, and spends on holiday to protect him online. Either possibility is too terrifying to contemplate in these strange and wandering days between Christmas and New Year.

Did you know that Germany has an upcoming parliamentary election? Musk knows. The German government is in crisis and the coalition that ruled it is collapsing. At the end of February, the German people will decide the future of the country. Musk wants that future to be a hard-right turn.

The billionaire courted one last controversy before the new year when he published an op-ed in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper endorsing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Musk said Germany was on the brink of an “economic and cultural collapse” and that the AfD was the country’s “last glimmer of hope”.

The AfD is a party that confused on the way in a Nazi-related controversy every few weeks. It would also, presumably, be good for Musk’s business interests overseas. So why did he write the op-ed. Musk’s endorsement of the paper is so scandalous that the editor of Welt am Sonntag resigned in protest.

It’s impossible to know if any of this will come to fruition in February when Germany votes, but it points to Musk trying to flex his political muscle outside the United States. He first endorsed the AfD the day before Christmas. I wonder what he would do if he found out about the hateful, unrepentant racists in the ranks of the AfD.

The richest man in the world goes into 2025 with the same energy he developed in 2024. While the rest of us are enjoying time with our families, one final draft is finished before seeing a Nosferatu matinee, or caught up with old friends, Musk fights with people on the internet. The holidays are hard on some of us. Musk’s solution seems to be to post it.