You can’t hand out communion crackers in the morning and then twerk for tips at night. You can’t sell salvation and sleep in sin, not unless you want to be the talk of the prayer request chain, ask me how I know.
Tesla didn’t just sell cars, it sold a sort of salvation for climate change. WordPress didn’t just build websites, it promised freedom and open source. And behind those promises were Musk and Mullenweg.
These weren’t just brands, they were belief systems. When your identity becomes your brand, your behavior becomes its message. Because the real product was never the car or the code. That’s what made it different from most brands. Most brands don’t ask for your soul, they ask for your wallet. These communities weren’t built on convenience. They were built on conviction.
Take toilet paper—
You don’t believe in Charmin. You don’t build your identity around it. You just need it to keep your hand clean whilst you wipe your ass. That’s it. That’s the arrangement. (I will say, however, after spending some time at Cloudfest here in Germany, I’ve come to deeply respect that contract. Because over here, the toilet paper feels a bit like 80 grit sandpaper. It exfoliates your soul.)
Elon Musk built and profited off Tesla with liberal energy. Then he went and cozied up with Donald Trump and mocked pronouns. The climate crusader turned against his own congregation.
Meanwhile, Matt Mullenweg—the open web poster child—stepped into the role of police officer. He called one of the biggest WordPress hosts a “cancer,” took away their access, and leaned into locking the doors to the commons. It felt like overlord energy in an ecosystem meant to be leaderless.
Leaders can evolve. They should. But change without communication isn’t growth, it’s ghosting.
Maybe the question isn’t why did they change, but why we believed they wouldn’t change? Did we mistake charisma for character? Did we need the illusion, or disillusion? Maybe we wanted to believe. Needed to.
It’s not just them we’re grieving. It’s the part of ourselves that believed. Like a child who’s just learned that Santa isn’t real. That’s the heartbreak, isn’t it? Not just that the story wasn’t true, But that we wanted it to be.
Once upon a time, we believed.
Not because they were who we thought they were,
But because we needed the world to have heroes and hope.
This isn’t a tragedy.
It’s just the end of the bedtime story.
UNSCRIPTED 