Spencer Pratt’s Deco dreams

In the summer of 2023, not long after buying Twitter and rebranding it as X, Elon Musk posted this message to his followers: “If X is closest to anything, it should, of course, be Art Deco.” A year later he released a prototype for a Tesla Robovan that looked a lot like a Deco toaster on wheels.

In recent weeks, the L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who went to Crossroads with Jonah Hill before becoming a blond villain on the MTV reality show “The Hills,” and last year lost his house to the Palisades fire, has been sprinkling references to Art Deco into the podcast appearances that his campaign is using in lieu of interviews with legacy news outlets. (His press office didn’t respond to requests for comment this week from Punch List.)

First came a conversation with Meghan Daum, for her podcast “Unspeakeasy.” Pratt, sitting in front of an Airstream trailer on his burned-out Palisades lot, told her for the podcast that much of L.A. could be razed to make room for new development aimed at bringing the city “to Dubai levels.”