Star Trek: 10 Things That Made You Cringe
1. Lorca's Role Model
In the Discovery episode The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry, Captain Lorca was trying to encourage Stamets to perfect the spore drive by asking if he wanted to be remembered as one of the great minds of history, or as 'a selfish little man who put the survival of his own ego before the lives of others'. Unfortunately, one of the names he cited as one of the greats was none other than Elon Musk, who actually better embodies the other category of men that Lorca mentioned.
Elon Musk is famous for being the richest person in the world and for hiring and mismanaging intelligent people to take credit for their discoveries. He has definitely funded important research with companies like SpaceX, Neuralink, and Tesla, but is far from the genius visionary that he likes to cosplay as. He spends his free time union-busting and posting outdated memes from 2015, and he certainly hasn't accomplished anything as impressive as the Wright Brothers or Zefram Cochrane, as Lorca claimed.
Elon's been involved in more controversies than we could possibly list here, but, most recently, he bought Twitter and has seemingly been trying to use his position as CEO to influence the American presidential election by endorsing Republicans and claiming that Twitter's censorship of Hunter Biden's nudes (which were posted without his consent and deemed to be against the terms of service) constituted a violation of the First Amendment on behalf of the Democratic Party. Despite these censorship tools being open to both parties (as was stated clearly in the thread of leaked information that Elon shared), this story was used frequently in the following days to promote baseless conspiracy theories about Twitter colluding with the Democrats.
Fortunately, this scene was redeemed a bit when it was revealed that Lorca was a mirror universe imposter. It's a lot more believable to imagine Elon as an important historical figure in that timeline. But still, we have to deal with the fact that Tilly went to Musk Junior High School, which is almost just as cringey, honestly.