If Donald Duck were to go on a shooting spree, should the newspaper headlines read “11 DEAD IN GUN RAMPAGE” or “DUCK SHOOTING: DONALD GOES QUACKERS IN DRUG-FUELLED FRENZY”?
This is the essential question that writers face when they are tasked – or task themselves – with writing about Elon Musk. Focus on the action or the consequence, the man or the impact.
I’m halfway through Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, pithily titled Elon Musk. Isaacson, a former CEO of CNN, is a prolific biographer. He has produced major works on Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci, and now the SpaceX and Tesla head honcho, Elon Musk. It is, as many critics, have already noted, a biography that suffers somewhat from a degree of reverence for its subject. “To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes,” Gary Shtenyngart wrote in The Guardian, “is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best.” Kara Swisher, meanwhile, took Isaacson to task on her podcast. “Is this the danger of access journalism,” she asked Isaacson, who spent a couple of years embedded in Musk’s operation, “that you start to like the person?”
I find the seriousness with which Isaacson approaches Musk jarring, but only in the context of our current cultural commentary. The refrain in the book is that Musk is someone who sees the bigger picture, who acts not out of business (or self) interest, but out of a sense of grand mission. To quote Aaron Sorkin’s script for the movie Steve Jobs (itself adapted from Isaacson’s biography of the Apple co-founder) while “musicians play the instruments”, Musk plays the orchestra. This is a sort-of grand idea of Elon Musk, and one that he often inadvertently repudiates with petty bickering and gossipy intrigues.
All the same, while Isaacson’s earnestness is wearing (I doubt that he would contend that he is not a bully, but that seems an accepted price with visionaries) it is also quite a welcome antidote to the generalised snark that surrounds Musk. Because, as the years have gone on, Musk has slipped ever further away from the mainstream media that was his original signal-booster. Fawning profiles in newspapers and magazines, which were a trademark of his early days in Silicon Valley, have been replaced by appearances in increasing fringe venues: Joe Rogan’s podcast, for example, or on the social media site that he bought for billions of dollars and is slowly turning into a personal megaphone. It is the problem of being the world’s richest man, and one of its most famous ones to boot: there is little left to say, and what there is, probably isn’t going to be good PR.
But his alienation from the mainstream media has coincided with something that was less inevitable. He’s pissed most journalists off. Little things like removing the blue tick on accounts of verified Twitter users (who were overwhelmingly not celebrities but, instead, minor league hacks) have been replaced by bigger things. The amplification of alternative thought on X/Twitter has made it a fairly redundant place for journalists or publications to promote their work. That’s not to mention the fact that the transition to a two-tiered system for users (cheapskate free users who have their tweets disadvantaged by the algorithm, and premium users who get more prominent placement in the For You world) forces journalists to part with cash or stop their reliance on Twitter/X as a professional dissemination medium. And so, commentators on Musk have to deal with the fact that their subject is rubbing salt into their open wounds even as they write about him.
This does not make for good critical commentary. Nor does the reliance on personality driven business exceptionalism, which has been à la mode for a couple of decades, since a generation of wildly successful tech CEOs came to the forefront of global power conversations. In point of fact, it’s led to a slightly strange situation where there appears to be a dislocation between the tenor of the conversations about Musk and the material impact of Musk on earth. From most mainstream writing about the South African-born magnate, you would think him a colourful, larger-than-life character like John McAfee, say, or his forebear in space tourism, Richard Branson. Instead, he is someone who holds enormous dual capability power over both the private market and military operations. It is eminently possible that he is the most powerful private citizen the world has ever seen.
And so, even though I’m reading the Isaacson biography and feeling, consistently, like more smoke is being blown up Musk’s arse than a Kongmíng lantern, it also feels refreshing for someone to play the ball, rather than the man.
Another good example of this was Ronan Farrow’s recent profile of Musk in The New Yorker. It got a lot of pick-up in media circles, not least because, unlike with Isaacson, there could be no accusation that Farrow was secretly on Team Musk. But what Farrow managed to do – in a way that I suspect shocked some of the New Yorker’s liberal, spaced out readers – was capture the centrality of Musk, both financially and ideologically, to present-tense geopolitics and future goals like sustainability. The Musk phenomenon, written about like that, is scarier when you take it seriously.
But, of course, I’m slipping into it too. That tendency to look at Musk as a man of ideas, many of which threaten the stability of ordered orthodoxy. For a biographer like Isaacson, this is essential. Ideas are what make a person human, and in a biography they are what fleshes out an otherwise desiccated timeline. The fact of Musk’s productivity obsessions, his mission-oriented work ethic, his goals for humanity becoming a multi-planetary civilisation: these are all hugely relevant to sketching the man. The shading can be done with ideas, but the lines must always be drawn with actions.
And I always think that when it comes to Elon Musk, the actions tend to be a lot simpler, a lot closer to the norm. Tesla, for example, is, at its heart, a very traditional car manufacturer. The idea of the electric car has been around for a long time, a lot longer than Tesla. Tesla invented little other than a way of making electric cars sexy, nudging customers into making a previously niche consumer choice part of the accepted mainstream. SpaceX, meanwhile, has revolutionised the private space market, focusing on the cost-per-pound of launching satellites into orbit. But they too have worked backwards from pre-existing technology, and were not the first private company in the launch business. Like Tesla, SpaceX has just done it better.
And then there’s Twitter… The fact that we seem to be bearing witness to the slow motion desecration of Twitter has caused many people to look at Musk like an unhinged toddler. It’s totally legitimate, in my opinion, to see his actions in that light. He may simply not care. The money spent on Twitter is fairly irrelevant, if projections for Tesla and SpaceX are met. It might just be a weird plaything for the world’s richest man, like how Roman Abramovich ran Chelsea or Jeff Bezos runs the Washington Post.
I suspect that’s not the truth, mainly because it’s clear that Musk has expended a lot of energy on Twitter since its acquisition. It has forced him to redirect personal capital away from the operations of Tesla and SpaceX. But again, it’s important to talk about actions rather than ideas. What has materially changed at Twitter? Most obviously, there has been a switch of the revenue system away from advertising and towards subscription, which is a totally sane response to current market conditions. There has also been a serious fat-trimming exercise, which has involved Twitter’s workforce being reduced to a bare-bones operation.
This has come with a commensurate demolition of the site’s content moderation. Musk’s ideas-based projections suggest this is a free speech issue, but I think an actions-based assumption would be that it’s a staffing shortage. There is little to suggest that Twitter/X is becoming more or less tolerant of specific examples of hate speech – but there’s a lot to suggest that it’s becoming less capable of human analysis of them.
When we write about Elon Musk, we are often writing about an idea of the internet and technology. The sense that we have lost control, that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. As much as anything, this is because, in the world of Big Tech, we (the people) have lost control. If Elon Musk wants to stick Twitter behind a paywall, he can. If he wants to shutter it and redirect the domain to a video of Rick Astley singing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, he can. The fact that professionally and socially, many of our structures were predicated on the continued existence of Twitter does not mean that its existence is a human right. And this can feel hugely disempowering.
The othering of Elon Musk is not the problem. But turning him into either messiah or caricature has the necessary effect of skewing the discussion away from the boots-on-the-ground impact of his ownership of Tesla-SpaceX-Twitter. Farrow’s profile of Musk puts, front and centre, the use of Starlink (Musk’s satellite internet constellation) in Russia’s war with Ukraine. The effect is to remind readers, from the off, that there are dangerously important ideas at stake here. Start from the dead bodies and end with the smoking gun in the hand of Donald Duck.
How we write about Elon Musk says a lot about the direction of progress, or, more accurately, the directionless nature of technological pioneerism. Tesla employs some 125,000 odd people, SpaceX almost 10,000 and Twitter around 1,300. That’s a lot of people guessing the weight of a cow*. And yet, when we write about Elon Musk, we write about a man with almost boundless power and fathomless idiosyncrasies. It makes the tailspin that the world seems to be in seem more rational if we believe that there is a madman at the wheel. But in the end, Musk’s business and innovation dealings have proved over and over that he is a man who knows how to shoot straight for the mainstream, how to optimise rather than invent, and how to shift the dial of public perception.
He is, in short, a lot more ordinary than either his fans or his detractors would like to admit.
*One of my favourite statistical experiments to use as a metaphor is guessing the weight of a cow. In 2015, NPR’s Planet Money podcast posted a photograph of a cow and surveyed its listeners on how much they guessed the cow would weigh. Naturally, their guesses were all over the place and people largely did very badly. But the average of all the guesses came out at just 68 pounds (or 5%) off the actual weight of the cow. A sub-section of the respondents, who were labelled “cow experts” due to their familiarity with our bovine cousins, averaged out at being 83 pounds (or 6%) off. Which means that the averaged guess of 17,000 respondents was better than the averaged guess of a group of experts. I think this is a good illustration both of how difficult it is to guess the weight of a cow, and also how a large enough group of empowered respondents will ultimately end up at a plausible solution to most tasks.
BELOW THE LINE FOR PAID SUBS: A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT AGATHA CHRISTIE AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Future Proof to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.