For most of us, Thanksgiving is a day where we watch a corny parade and eat a meal with friends and/or family. For Elon Musk, it’s a day where you go onto the social website you bought and tanked so that you can muse about buying Hasbro for Dungeons & Dragons.
Musk’s post doesn’t even come a full calendar day after he announced that he would turn his AI company into a gaming studio to “make games great again.” “How much is Hasbro?” Musk mused on Twitter / X on November 28. Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, the company which makes Dungeons & Dragons. And because the people who control the economy are completely different from most of us who participate in it, Hasbro’s value in the stock market subsequently went up.
How did this happen?
The postulation comes after about a week of back-and-forth exchanges with verified users on X (formerly Twitter), who tend to be Elon Musk’s fans.
On November 22nd, Musk responded to one verified user complaining that Gary Gygax, the founder of Dungeons & Dragons, is “erased and slandered” in the forward to the new book The Making of Dungeons and Dragons. The user attached pictures highlighting the “offending” passages: “It’s an unfortunate fact that women seldom appear in the original D&D, and when they do, they’re usually portrayed disrespectfully. Slavery appears in the original D&D not as a human tragedy that devastated generations over centuries, but as a simple commercial transaction.”
To most readers, an acknowledgement of hurtful portrayals is welcome. Plus, pointing them out is just good practice for something which calls itself a history. But Musk chimed in, appalled—and with notably violent language. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. “What the fuck is wrong with Hasbro and [Wizards of the Coast]?? May they burn in hell.”
Days later, another verified Musk fanboy posted a screenshot from what looks to be Facebook. The screenshot ostensibly depicts how Jason Tondro, the current Dungeons and Dragons Project Lead, responded to Musk’s criticisms. Tondro said the D&D team wrote the forward with “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense at the language of [original D&D]” in mind. Tondro follows up to say it didn’t even occur to him the forward would earn “the ire of the grognards”—ie, older players who constantly complain that older versions of D&D were better. “I consider those people not worth listening to, so I didn’t anticipate their ‘outrage,’ ” Tondro concludes, dropping the proverbial mic.
Of course, the verified X user who found this quote was outraged. “RIP Dungeons & Dragons,” he decries, complaining that the book’s “intended audience is woke.”
And so here we are. The richest man in the world can buy any gigantic corporation he wants, just because he’s mad they released a book with a forward whose ideology he disagrees with. And the stock market will celebrate his whims. It’s worth noting at this point that Hasbro also owns My Little Pony—another brand few would want to see the Elon Musk Version of. Let’s all hope this is merely a whim that will blow over once Musk gets distracted with his actual U.S. government job. Unless it’s better for Elon to purchase Hasbro and get distracted from his actual U.S. government job. What times we live in.
Published: Nov 30, 2024 01:36 am