Elon Musk: genius, fool, or maybe both?

The ability to change one’s mind should never be underestimated. We all make mistakes, take the wrong path, and defend things which at the time seemed defensible only for you to be proven wrong at some later date. It is a crucial part of the scientific method: believe something for only so long as it’s supported by the evidence. When that support is no longer there, change your working hypothesis to one that is supported by the facts. Rinse and repeat and you’re a step closer to enlightenment.

Writing regularly about culture and current affairs means that I’ve gone through that rinse-and-repeat cycle enough times to have worn a few holes in my arguments. I’ve got quite a few things wrong in my time but also, I hope, quite a few right (Trump’s election in 2016, defeat in 2020, and the lack of a red wave back in November). Of all the times my working hypothesis hasn’t been at its best, the standout was not knowing Trump well enough in 2016 when he mocked a disabled journalist, Serge F. Kovaleski. At the time, simply moving his hands a certain way didn’t seem to denote ridicule. We had to give him the benefit of doubt, I thought. Four years later, when he’d never repeated that gesture or anything like it, I knew I’d been wrong. It still annoys me that I’d been so naïve in the first place, but it feels good to confess.

All of which brings me to Elon Musk. I think it reasonable to say that he remains an enigma. Hear him talk about his Raptor 2 engines and, to these non-expert ears at least, he seems to be exactly what he claims to be: an engineer devoted to making humankind a multi-planetary species. There are always cynics who mock and say he’s not quite that. Tesla, they say, is the product of other people’s hard work. Musk just jumped in at the end, threw money at the problem, and leveraged government grants and carbon-offset schemes. Others will point to social media threads from anonymous sources who say that Musk is just a big kid from a family that owned an emerald mine. He inherited lots of money and threw so much of it around that it should be no surprise when some of it stuck to successful projects.

The fact remains, however, that Tesla and SpaceX continue to do what they do, sometimes making ground-breaking leaps towards the future.

But then he has also bought Twitter.

This week it was confirmed that Musk is no longer the richest person on the planet. That title now passes to Bernard Arnault, the French chief executive of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. What caused Musk’s decline is the value of Tesla stock but, in large part, that is intimately linked to the value of Musk himself. He purchased Twitter and rapidly reduced the staff at the same time as promising reforms, not all of which sounded bad, even if some were barely thought through. He launched a subscription model – not itself a bad idea – but in a way that immediately made it possible to buy the authoritative blue ticks for just $8 a month (a very bad idea). It meant that jokers create new accounts that pretended to be official company accounts by subtly changing the capital of “i” (I) to the small letter of “L” (l) in a company name. The way some modern sans-serif fonts work, “Apple” can be made to look just like “AppIe” (hard to spot which is which, isn’t it? The fake was the second.) Add a blue tick and nobody knows the difference. That’s how millions were wiped off the value of Eli Lilly when somebody created a fake blue tick account that tweeted out the announcement that “We are excited to announce insulin is free now”. That mistake was all on Musk whose capacity for joined-up thinking is beginning to look suspect.

He promised greater transparency and then proceeded to act like the emperor, giving his thumbs up or thumbs down when it comes to banned accounts. It was no surprise when the free-speech absolutist (always a dumb position to take) learned that he’s no free-speech absolutist. The anti-Semite Kanye West was welcomed back onto Twitter until he proved himself (guess what!) an anti-Semite and was permanently banned again. Meanwhile, Musk has gone to war against the true criminals out there… The satirists who previously used Twitter to poke fun at the powerful. Now parody accounts need to wear a big dumb label marked “parody” or face suspension (itself problematic given how the best parody works on the cusp of the believable and unbelievable… but that’s another topic for another time).

For want of a better explanation, Musk’s erratic behaviour has started to resemble the mid-life crisis of a man who has too much money, far too much power, and quite possibly not enough real hair on his head. Okay, that last bit is a cheap shot, but not entirely. Musk’s vanity is part of his riddle. He’s given to posturing yet his ego reveals a certain fragility. His capacity to accept criticism appears minute. His daughter recently came out as transgender which Musk has reduced to crass generalisations, blaming her choice on the work of “Marxists”. Politically he has claimed to be neither left nor right but destroyed the viability of the term “centrist” by engaging in far-right conspiracy hoaxes. He loathes a pantomime version of the Left, whilst appears completely at home with a pantomime version of the Right. This week he alienated even more followers by sliding into the anti-vaxxer camp, with a deliberately provocative tweet in which he said that “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”.

We live, of course, in a very binary world. It’s reflected in the whole Twitter ethos. You either follow somebody or you don’t. It’s a toggle: yay or nay. Pure binary. It’s probably not helpful in a climate that replicates those black-and-white judgements in real life. You either cancel somebody completely or we indulge in the most fawning behaviour. Fame is either absent or superabundant and the same is true of money.

I’ve defended Musk and SpaceX several times in the past two years, though taken more objectively, I still think it’s fair to make a distinction between the man and the companies he bought/founded and runs. SpaceX is still working towards the first of what he promises will be many launches of Starship. They continue to innovate at a rapid pace and offer us the possibility of a truly great leap in opening up space for viable commercial activity. Musk, however, has lost credibility. The engineering might still be sound, but Tesla is facing serious problems regarding its claim to be capable of fully autonomous driving. It is the famous Trolly Problem being played out in real life. Human drivers can kill hundreds of thousands of people a year on the road, but none makes the headlines like an incident where the algorithms inside a Tesla go amiss.

It’s also probably too soon to write him off entirely, though it’s not obvious who is around to tell him to grow the hell up. At times it seems like he’s in search of the very thing he cannot buy, which is a high-functioning sense of humour, sparkling wit, and the simple capacity to be funny. Lacking that, he tells Dad jokes and twists himself on culture war spikes, alienating many of the people who previously supported him. The jeering that greeted him when he appeared on stage this week with Dave Chappelle was hardly a surprise. That was at the Chase Center in San Francisco, not the audience who would have been won over by Twitter Musk even if many would have supported Tesla back when they offered people the electric car of the future. Put simply, if he truly wants to own the Libs, he should not expect the Libs to buy his green cars.

Had he a wiser head on his shoulders, he’d realise the trajectory he is currently on, and he’d work hard to alter course. He should take a step back and go back to doing what he is ostensibly good at doing. He should have handed control of Twitter to more experienced hands like he recently did with SpaceX with President and COO, Gwynne Shotwell, taking over the development of Starship.

Musk himself should ultimately decide what he wants to be. It’s time that somebody reminds him that when it comes to being rich, famous, and respected, he can choose only two.

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