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‘That’s Musk’s entire career right there’: Elon Musk’s exploding Starship launches explosion of Twitter memes

Is it a metaphor?

 

David Covucci

Tech

Posted on Apr 20, 2023

Today, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched the largest rocket ever.

Then, it exploded.

One might think that would be bad, or cause for concern, but among the Twitter folks who cheer almost everything Musk, they uniformly applauded.

“Watching @elonmusk Starship explode feels a lot like the creator journey. Pour in time. Get zero ‘results’. But you’re getting valuable data in exchange. Early on this is the trade. But eventually the data will lead to your breakthrough. We’re playing a long-term game,” wrote one.

“BREAKING: @SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the largest & most powerful rocket ever, successfully lifted off! Stage separation didn’t work, but getting this far is an amazing success in and of itself. Congrats SpaceX team!” said another person who identifies as a Tesla investor.

The company itself played it off with a laugh, noting that the main goal for today’s launch was merely getting off the ground.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” SpaceX posted.

Other users on the platform though, who don’t view Musk as keenly as some of his most ardent supporters, took the explosion, which occurred on the day Musk plans to finally, once and for all, institute his blue check removal, as a metaphor.

“I watched some random feed of the starship launch and people started clapping when it blew up (it was not supposed to blow up) and that’s musk’s entire career right there,” one person tweeted.

Others shared images of Musk grimly looking on from the launch center.

Still others enjoyed a laugh about how the was portrayed online by some outlets, especially by the New York Times.

“SpaceX’s Starship rocket launched but fell short of its most ambitious goals when it exploded minutes into its flight,” the paper tweeted.

“NY Times writing about Space x like they are cops who just murdered someone,” joked one user.

Musk, for his part, shared videos and images from the launch, and called it an “exciting test.”

“Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” he wrote.

The timeline assuredly is just as excited as him for it as well.

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*First Published: Apr 20, 2023, 10:12 am CDT