In the evening when he came over, I'd be in spandex shorts from doing yoga, or most often, just my underwear, boxers or boxer briefs and a tee shirt. That's how I liked to hang out at home and Jordan didn't mind, even asking why I put on more clothes once when he came in and insisting that I be comfortable around him.
Jordan was 6 feet, a couple inches taller than me, with shaggy brown hair, pale white skin, and a toned body. Like many undergrads, he maintained his trim figure by walking everywhere and had long, lean muscles. While his legs were hairy like mine, he didn't have hair on his chest or stomach as I did. I was not quite as in shape (there's not so much walking in grad school!), but had a toned body from 90 minutes of yoga every other day. There was always a flirtatious energy between us, though Jordan never went beyond the typical teasing of a straight guy with a close gay friend. We talked about everything quite openly and our favorite trait of each other was definitely our intellects. He'd grown up very sexually conservative because of his family's beliefs and was just starting to break out of that. Meanwhile, I was experiencing the freedom of a mid-twenties gay man who'd just left his conservative home state for a midwestern liberal college town. I'd asked him to consider a sexual encounter of some kind with me, mainly because we were such close friends (and he was gorgeous), but he always brushed it off. Recently we'd gotten in the habit of watching porn together. It was clear at times as we watched that he was horned up, adjusting himself through his shorts. I was just wearing my undies, so no hiding anything there. One day sitting beside me on the couch, he asked me to get out my MacBook and pull up PornHub. You don't want the undergrowth to make the tree look smaller, right?" The guy in the first thumbnail to come up was shaved completely. In many ways, Elon Musk uses Twitter like the rest of us."Sometime I want you to show me," Jordan requested. He likes to joke around, but isn’t as funny as he thinks he is he overshares and loves memes he occasionally goes too far, and gets himself in trouble he seems to think the platform is unfairly suppressing the views of people with whom he identifies. Thanks to the flattening effects of Twitter, the only real difference between the site’s median user and Musk is about $257 billion and 85.4 million followers. He has more followers than Narendra Modi, the prime minister of the largest democracy on Earth, and fewer than Taylor Swift. No one in the history of the modern world has ever been as wealthy as he is. He also thinks the number 420 is so funny that he seems to have determined the final value of his offer ($54.20 per share) to accommodate its inclusion.
It’s surprising that Musk would stake so much of his wealth on a site that so many of its users profess to hate. According to filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk will personally supply as much as $21 billion in cash to close out the deal, representing about 8 percent of his net worth. If he took that money and set it on fire, he would still be the richest person on the planet. And yet, if you turned the clock back to just 2018, $21 billion would represent 100 percent of Musk’s net worth. The rapid growth of his wealth has coincided with his embrace of the platform as a chaotic communication tool, making the acquisition almost painfully recursive - his billions are tied up with his eccentric persona, and now he is using the billions to wholly own the arena that allows him to bring his unvarnished self to the masses.