Let Us Now Praise Elon Musk

Elon Musk is an astronaut. Elon Musk is a secret father. Elon Musk is (not) buying Twitter.

Anyone who skims the financial press knows that Musk never has business “transactions,” or “negotiations”; he has “missions.” His central mission, as Fortune once put it in a series of love letters, has always been “to preserve his power as the proprietor of the largest pool of industrial wealth still under the absolute control of a single individual.”

Nor does Musk have business “associates”; he has only “adversaries.” When the adversaries “appear to be” threatening his absolute control, Musk “might or might not” take action. It is such phrases as “appear to be” and “might or might not,” peculiar to business reportage involving Musk, that suggest the special mood of a Musk mission.

The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.

“Musk likes Las Vegas,” an acquaintance of Musk’s once explained, “because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich.”

Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted billionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers?

But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illuminate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.

That we have made a hero of Elon Musk tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another.

A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.”

“I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation… Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.”

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I admit, now, that I’ve sought to deceive you.

The paragraphs above are not mine but Joan Didion’s, from her 1967 essay about Howard Hughes in the Saturday Evening Post, later reprinted in Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

Beyond changing “Howard Hughes” to “Elon Musk” and “millionaire” to “billionaire,” Didion’s language is untouched.

Didion continues below (minor modernization mine):

Officially we admire men who exemplify those ideas. We admire the Adlai Stevenson Barack Obama character, the rational man, the enlightened man, the man not dependent upon the potentially psychopathic mode of action. Among rich men, we officially admire Paul Mellon Warren Buffett, a socially responsible inheritor investor in the European mold.

There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of [Elon Musk] without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.

In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, [Elon Musk] remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Didion was “interested,” she wrote, “in the way people react to him.” I share her interest and I plan on exploring it next week. Probably with way less plagiarism.

(In the 55 years since the essay, has the hypothetical writer described by Trilling been found—the bard of the “educated liberal class”? Is it fucking Aaron Sorkin? Question for the group.)

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.