Mischief? Amusement? Strategic thinking? Or something far more sinister?
Or is he maybe just the highest profile figure that’s taken Trump’s message it’s OK to be divisive and racist and aggreived and foment violence to heart?
When I was a Director at Yahoo! during the internet boom in the late 90s, I sat next to Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang for about a year, and aside from an incident or two which are not relevant to this story, he seemed like a pretty decent guy.
However, that’s never been the case in the Internet industry as a whole. There have always been insane people all over the place. That kind of goes along with risk-taking. And probably overall it’s been a good thing. Maybe if Yahoo! had turned out to be a little less risk-averse, it would be even more of a giant now in many different areas than it was back then, and not, sadly, exist now in name only. But, having a lot of crazies around with millions to burn also means there’s a whole mess of people who–as the mildest possible example I could think of–will be literally mailing out pieces of their shit to shady labs to find out how to live to 150.
Part of it is they just have so much money, after they get through all the obvious (cars and homes and jets and stuff), they really dont know what to do with it. So they seek out things–usually expensive things–that amuse them.
It’s also easy to write some of them off as just being lucky, and maybe wondering why they had fallen into some luck is what sent them down some unusual paths of discovery. But usually that’s not it at all. Because they are genuinely some of the smartest people I ever met and/or worked with.
I’m not laying this all out as a preface to trying to “explain” Elon Musk. Or apologize for him. And he is in a league of his own. But I know the type. (And you would too if you went back and looked at the HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley”, the biggest joke in it for me was how truly, surprisingly accurate it was.)
But Musk may be doing what he’s doing in large part just because it’s amusing to him. And he can afford it. And he’s not really risking anything, because he has so much. The people who keep talking about how much his personal wealth has plummeted because Tesla’s down because of his politics, and X is down because it was a stupid investment don’t get it. Because they’re thinking about it in terms of them or normal people. Sure, for him maybe it stings, but it doesn’t hurt, especially for someone who obviously loves mischief and thinks he’s really clever and funny. And it seems real important to him for others to believe he’s real clever and funny. (He’s not. Even Trump’s funnier.)
Does Musk see the real damage he’s doing on the ground? Well, perversely, that’s the part that’s perhaps most fun about it; makes it worthwhile. That he’s got a platform that can be used for so much good and he’s instead using it just to piss people off. And manipulate people into turning against each other for not really any good reason.
Think of the James Bond films. The Bond villain was almost always fabulously rich and almost always in it not really because he wants world dominance, but because he finds the quest for world dominance, complete with building all kinds of neat weapons and ways to kill people, to be highly amusing.
It’s not that far off. And that’s what pisses me off: in the early days of the internet we really truly believed it would only be used for good. Yeah, we were naive, but did really believe it. We were knocking down so many walls, how could it be any other way? We believed the voices of good would drown out evil. Not that the voices of evil would have the explicit backing of ownership. Now it seems like running any internet company is a least about spending half your time fighting evil. unless of course, you’re the one providing the evil yourself.
And beyond mischief, Musk’s overall message is really pretty humdrum: that government over-regulates industry. All industry. Which is a battle the Koch brothers (now brother) have been fighting for years.
And this is the point at which I always like to point out not all regulation is over-regulation. When industies have been left on their own to self regulate, they’ve behaved very badly, and crashed the entire economy a whole bunch of times including the Great Depression and Recession of 2008. So is complete deregulation of everything really better? Don’t forget: President Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency because a self regulated industry was responsible for setting a river on fire in Ohio!
So Musk wants to be a little robber barron and have some fun in the process. Let him try. Can’t stop him from trying anyway. He’s not dumb even though he does dumb things to try to be funny. And his is still largely a business focus.
The real guy to watch out for is Peter Thiel, a very astute investor who bought out Musk and brought him into PayPal, and put money very early into Facebook, among other things. Because what amuses Thiel is not just interjecting himself into law and politics, but also social engineering. Listen to him and you realize when he talks about his vision of the future, he’s describing not a Bond movie, but Fallout. He supports Trump not because Trump will deregulate everything, but because he will hasten armageddon. An environment where a choice few govern themselves and give themselves the power to control everything, and run experiments on everybody else and if you don’t like it you’re left out in the wilderness to fend for yourself. Look it up.