What's fuss about Elon Musk's 'bean' tweet?

Elon Musk tweeted a poem about brothers in conflict and the internet went crazy again

Why’s all the twittering around a Chinese poem? Elon Musk tweeted it.

What’s that about? The poem?

Also. Isn’t it about boiling beans? Boiling beans is just a metaphor. It is really about killing siblings.

What?! How does that work? The poem, called The Quatrain of Seven Steps, was written 1,800 years ago in a novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

They talked differently then? Sort of. With metaphors, you could say things to thin-skinned rulers without offending them. For example, this poem is believed to have been written by the poet Cao Zhi, when his brother and the country’s ruler Cao Pi grew jealous of Cao Zhi. The king wanted the poet to prove his innocence through the writing of a verse while taking seven strides. So, the poet had to convey a message without displeasing the king.

What did his poem say? Therefore the beans. In the poem, the beans are being cooked on a fire fed by beanstalks. So the beans wail to the beanstalk, asking why it must be burnt so mercilessly by its own brother, since they both come from the same root.

So why is Musk tweeting it now? He simply tweeted, “Humankind” and the lines from this poem in Chinese alphabet. There is speculation that he means we should be good to each other, or that one cryptocurrency should not fight another, or that he does not want China to fight Taiwan, or it could be anything.

Did anything happen to set him off? Well the World Food Programme head David Beasley said that a small percentage of his wealth could help 42 million people who could “literally die if we don’t reach them”. Someone then wrongly calculated it has $6 billion to solve hunger in the world, and Musk took off on that… saying he will part with that money that very minute if the WFP head could prove that it will actually end hunger in the world. That’s what happened most recently. So...

Does it matter why he tweeted it? His posts see crazy reactions from the market. When he tweeted about Tesla allowing bitcoin transactions in future, the cryptocurrency value went up by 12%! Then, Shiba Inu was shooting up on speculation that he is investing in it, when Musk tweeted saying he had “none” and the digital currency fell two spots in a global ranking. 

Will he explain himself? He rarely does.