The Dude, The Billionaire, and the myth that won't abide

Elon Musk, The Big Lebowski, and the infinite loop of idolatry

In The Big Lebowski, there's a moment when the titular fraud—a wealthy blowhard in a wheelchair—tries to intimidate The Dude with empty grandeur. "I'll send the limo at noon," he barks, flanked by sycophants. But by the film's end, his empire is exposed as a Potemkin village: no money, no morals, just the brittle theater of self-importance. The Coen Brothers, as always, were ahead of the curve.

Twenty-five years later, we're still watching the same story. Only now, it's a live stream. Elon Musk is The Big Lebowski for the algorithmic age: a man whose myth isn't just told, but perpetually remixed by the collective id of the internet. The limo never arrives. The grift never ends. And we, the audience, keep hitting refresh.

The Big Lebowski was a parable about the absurdity of worshipping hollow authority. Musk is its sequel—a fractal satire where the fraud isn't a character, but a cultural condition. Like Lebowski in his mansion, performing wealth and importance while his assistant Brandt nervously nods along, Musk holds court on Twitter, decreeing Mars colonies and AI apocalypses while his digital courtiers amplify every pronouncement. Both understand the same truth: authority isn't about having power, but performing it. The bigger the spectacle, the fewer questions asked. The difference? The Coens gave their fraud a third act. We gave ours a platform.

Where The Dude saw through Lebowski's act—shrugging, drinking his White Russian, going bowling—we've become willing participants in Musk's theater. We're not just the audience; we're the supporting cast, retweeting his tantrums, debating his motives, grafting our anxieties onto his persona. He's become a perfect Rorschach test for our cultural moment: to some, he's the last hope for innovation in a stagnating world; to others, a harbinger of techno-apocalypse; to many, a libertarian folk hero promising digital salvation. The answer to who Musk really is becomes irrelevant because he functions as our collective hallucination—a character far stranger than any the Coens could have written because we're all constantly writing him. From Tesla's production numbers to Twitter's "free speech" proclamations, each venture becomes less a business than a plot twist in an endless series where the audience doubles as the writers' room.

This isn't just serialized fiction; it's participatory theater. Every quote tweet, every debate about his latest acquisition or outburst, every media cycle sparked by a midnight post—they're all scenes in an endless play where we've forgotten we're actors. Like Brandt nodding along in Lebowski's study, we've become complicit in our own deception. The myth regenerates like open-source code, each fork creating new narratives, new controversies, new reasons to stay engaged.

The Big Lebowski's lies collapsed in two hours because that's how stories used to end. But Musk's myth, sustained by algorithmic feeds and our own bottomless appetite for content, has no final act. When Walter screamed "You're killing your father, Larry!" at a bewildered high school student, it was absurd theater masking empty threats. Today's empty threats come in quote tweets and threads about civilization-scale risk, each one a performance we can't stop watching. We're all Walter now, shouting at the screen, convinced our next tweet will crack the case.

Next time Musk appears at a far-right gathering or makes another questionable gesture that sets social media ablaze, ask yourself: Are we really The Dude—clear-eyed observers of this absurd spectacle—or have we become Brandt, so caught up in the performance that we've forgotten it's all just a show? The rug that "really tied the room together" isn't just pissed on anymore; it's been weaponized into culture war content, each new controversy algorithmically amplified until we can't look away.

And we keep watching.