Thanks for providing context for the joke.
What makes the joke not work is that cstross is really the autopope, drunkenly mislabeled the antipope. You can clearly see he still provides pontifications.
If Musk is the opposite of the autopope, what does that make him?
> Antipope acquired its name due to a drunken mistake in 1991. ... "What sitename do you want?" ... "I said, "How about autopope.uucp?" ... "Okay." Hic. Burp. And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp .. And of course, it seemed reasonable in 1996 to register antipope.org and hang it off my own server in 1997, when I finally got around to a colocation deal.
> So Antipope is not a significant name; it's just a communications error. You have been warned.