They gather at the altar, eyes glazed in reverence, heads tilted to absorb the orange glow of the self-anointed monarch. He is the sadistic sun god of a kingdom built on grievance and gaudiness, radiating heat with the cruel precision of a Vegas bulb on its last flicker—blazing, garish, and desperate to hold on. They worship not out of love but out of fear: fear of exile, fear of irrelevance, fear that the world has moved on without them. The hopefuls among them—shadows lurking in the colonnades of failed ambition—stand in line for a blessing, a nod, a mention in the Book of Trump, only to find themselves discarded like last season’s reality show castoffs when the moment no longer serves.
The ritual is clear: submission earns a place in the warmth, and defiance invites the cold. They kneel, they grovel, they endure the lashings of humiliation with a masochist’s glee, convinced that suffering in his court is better than wandering alone in the wilderness of truth. His power is illusion, yet they are trapped in the glare, tethered to a mirage of greatness that vanishes with the first hard gust of accountability.
And then there’s Elon Musk—the bucket collector of all failures.
If Trump is the sun, Musk is the scavenger—picking through the wreckage of ideas past, siphoning ambition from fallen empires and discarded geniuses. The richest man in the room but forever the hungriest, he arrives at the feast with hands outstretched, scooping up broken dreams and half-formed revolutions, promising reinvention but delivering repetition. He is the prophet of a digital Wild West, selling snake oil in 280-character doses, heralding the future while stumbling over the present.
Failure is his currency, and he spends it lavishly. The tunnels, the rockets, the cars that almost drive themselves—each a monument to excess, each salvaged from the detritus of minds far greater than his. He collects failures, rebrands them, and feeds them back to the hopeful and the hapless. The faithful see a visionary, a spacefaring messiah; the skeptics see a man frantically patching holes in a ship he’s already set on fire.
And so the kingdom remains—a temple of sado-masochistic loyalty, an empire of recycled failures. The sun god glares, the bucket collector scrambles, and the hopefuls continue to hope, waiting for a redemption that never comes.
Seen the 4 different qualifications for Malignant Narcissism? Sadism is #4.