Technical Issue
Russian warlord and leader of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov has accused Elon Musk of “remotely disabling” his Tesla Cybertruck. Oh yeah: he owns one of these things. Didn’t you hear?
Kadyrov, who was installed as Chechnya’s leader in 2007 by Russian President Vladimir Putin, first showed off his flashy ride in August. In a video he shared on Telegram, the warlord can be seen tooling around the grounds of his presidential palace in what sure looks like a genuine Cybertruck — except for one small difference: it’s been turned into a technical mounted with a huge machine gun, which Kadyrov brandishes while garbed in outrageous bandoliers like the Bullet Farmer character in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
With it geared up for war, Kadyrov claimed that he’d sent the electric pickup to the frontlines of Ukraine, where it has since been “performing well in combat.”
That is, until it stopped working all of a sudden.
“Now, recently, Musk remotely disabled the Cybertruck,” Kadyrov wrote in a new Telegram post on Thursday, as quoted by Fortune. “That’s not a nice thing for Elon Musk to do. He gives expensive gifts from the bottom of his heart and then remotely switches them off.”
“That’s not manly,” he added. “We had to tow the iron horse. How could you do that, Elon?”
Puzzling Provenance
How Kadyrov got his hands on a Cybertruck is a bit of a mystery. According to the man himself, it was given to him as a gift by Musk, a claim he made in August and has repeated since.
But the Tesla CEO has denied this version of events in offensively-worded terms. Responding last month to a journalist’s tweet criticizing him for supposedly making the gift, Musk wrote, “Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?” Thanks for the clarification, Elon.
Our guess is that he’d deny “remotely disabling” the vehicle, too. If anything, Kadyrov’s Cybertruck probably stopped working because it’s a shoddily built piece of junk best known for breaking down all the time. Apparently, Kadyrov didn’t get that memo.
That being said, the Chechen leader also claims he actually has two more Cybertrucks, both of which are currently tearing it up in Ukraine.
“The remote shutdown did not affect these vehicles. They are operating normally, without any failures,” he said Friday on Telegram, per CNN. “You couldn’t ask for better advertising for the Cybertruck.”
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