A Man Didn

Most of us have been there, either as parents or as a child. You get an ice cream cone on a hot day and shortly after you take that first lick, the scoop topples off the cone and splats to the floor. It sucks, but more often than not there’s no need to cry over spilled ice cream: Either a kind employee at the shop or a sympathetic parent will swoop in and replace the treat because obviously that’s what you do. Mistakes happen, especially when you’re still mastering your fine motor skills and spatial awareness. But when your dad is Nick Huber, a businessman, internet personality, and inveterate clout chaser, well, you’re out of luck.

In a recent viral tweet, Huber shared a picture of his (absolutely adorable) son looking somewhat forlorn on a bench. “This kid saved up all week for an ice cream,” he tweeted. “Spent $5. Dropped it after the 5th lick. I didn’t buy him another one. Life is hard, he took it well.”

What a very weird thing to share with the world. Perhaps it goes without saying that response to this frankly bizarre post — more than 19,000 replies as of press time — was overwhelmingly not positive.

“Life is hard but sometimes it’s great to know when your Dad has your back,” replied @Glenn_Owens17. “You missed something here.” Huber clapped back that he did, in fact, have his small child’s back because, “my job is to make him strong.”

Again, what a normal thing to say. Just… terribly, terribly normal.

“I will venmo you $5 if you get that poor kid a new Ice Cream,” offered @PalmerDesigns_. Huber said that the shop “offered him a freebie and I declined it.” (More on this in a minute.)

“Tough guy crushes his son and then gleefully posts about it on social media with a picture of his disappointed son,” opines @GMatusky. “You need help.”

And… yes. All of that. This is not an OK thing to do to a child. There’s literally a Bluey episode about it and Bandit learns the important lesson that life isn’t fair, but it’s not a parent’s job to be the source of the meaningless unfairness. But what’s especially gross about this is the fact that it seems to have been posted as rage bait.

To be honest, I’m not even convinced this ice cream drop even happened. In another post from the weekend, Huber even admitted that there was no employee who offered a new ice cream as he asserted in his comment to @PalmerDesigns_. (“They never offered,” he wrote. “But it made the tweet better.”) But using your kid’s pain — real or imagined — for clicks to drive people to engage more with your shady business guru persona is… just really yucky.

Since going viral Aug. 2, Huber tweeted out 15 more “gems” (including retweets of his own recent content) having to do with parenting or a combination of business and parenting in an apparent attempt to capitalize on the negative attention he’d received.

It hasn’t really worked. Most garnered a couple hundred likes and replies, which is a proverbial drop in the bucket for an account with several hundred thousand followers. Nowhere near the tens of thousands of people calling him an a-hole for being callous with his child.

So I guess the moral of the story is: Don’t try to capitalize on your kid’s hurt for clout and just give them a goddamn ice cream cone if they drop it.