As a writer with an interest in observing the lurid symptoms of terminal-stage capitalism, I feel strangely grateful for the omnipresence of Elon Musk in our culture. It seems to me that we can learn a lot about our world and its various afflictions by simply observing its richest living person. Look at this man, who has more money than anyone else on the planet, and who is therefore, by the crudest of material metrics, the most successful person alive. What sort of case does he present for this system that has elevated him to a position of maximal eminence?
Last week, Musk appeared onstage at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the first of two recent failed attempts on the former president’s life, and of perhaps the most iconic moment of his political career: that extraordinary photograph of a bleeding Trump, his fist raised in defiance while an American flag fluttered behind him. Musk’s presence as a guest speaker, however, gave rise to iconic images of an entirely different kind.
In the immediate aftermath of the rally, the internet was flooded with photos of Musk onstage, being incredibly weird and awkward. In one, he is jumping up and down behind Trump, his arms flung upward in a gesture of jubilant veneration, his face a mask of terrible ecstasy. The photo captures him mid-leap, looking for all the world as though being finally raptured up to Mars. Another image depicts him, having just delivered his (extremely boring and repetitive) speech, shaking Trump’s hand; he appears to be literally bowing before him, his Maga-capped head bent, his eyes peering upward in cringing supplication.
What strikes me about these images is the extent to which they illustrate the perverse nature of Musk’s public persona, as the world’s richest man. With his massively lucrative government contracts, his political influence, his ownership and control of a major social media site, Musk is nothing if not a symbol of plutocracy. But the whole idea of plutocracy is that it’s the politicians who are supposed to be the obsequious lackeys of the billionaires, not the other way around. What’s the point in being the richest man in the world if you’re going to abase yourself before a politician? I’m by no means a fan of plutocracy, but it’s always a shame to see a thing done so poorly. You certainly wouldn’t see Rupert Murdoch bowing and scraping in front of Trump. John D Rockerfeller was not, presumably, in the habit of jumping up and down behind his preferred political candidates like the world’s most off-putting children’s television presenter. As with so many other things he exemplifies, Musk makes being a billionaire plutocrat look profoundly uncool, even downright abject.
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One reason to be grateful for his insistent visibility is that his presence is itself a refutation of the myth of meritocracy that undergirds capitalism. I’m not talking here about the fact that his family was wealthy, his father having made pretty serious money in the emerald business in South Africa in the 1980s; kids from well-off families don’t routinely go on to become the richest person in the world. I am talking here about his palpably unremarkable mind. There’s an expression that I often think of when I consider Musk – as we all now are obliged to consider him, on a more or less-daily basis: “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” It’s a very American question, or put-down, in its direct equation of intellect and wealth. Musk seems to me to demand an inversion of the question: “If he’s so rich, how come he ain’t smart?”
[ To look at this photograph of Trump is to glimpse the darkness and chaos to comeOpens in new window ]
To be clear, I don’t think Musk is stupid, at least not in the normal sense; he obviously has a prodigious talent for making money, and that takes a particular kind of cleverness. He’s managed, too, to convince an awful lot of people that he will save humanity from extinction by building autonomous human settlements on Mars. I can tell you right now he won’t be doing anything of the sort, but that’s not to detract from the remarkable feat of salesmanship he pulled off in getting so many people to believe he could. But he’s very obviously no great genius either. Musk’s gaze seems, these days at least, to be only fleetingly addressed to the stars, his eyes being mostly directed downward at his phone. In a recent New York Times article about his disastrous ownership of Twitter/X, there’s a startling story about Musk attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Murdoch, and ignoring the game in order to agitatedly check his phone the entire time. Both he and Joe Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles, but despite Biden’s lower follower count, the president’s post had done far bigger numbers. Musk was, apparently, livid, and demanded that his engineers find out why his post was underperforming; eventually he left the game early to fly to San Francisco, where he summoned dozens of employees to the company’s HQ to meet him on a Sunday night to discuss tweaking the algorithm to push his Super Bowl tweet into the feeds of people who didn’t follow him.
There are people out there – I have met some of them, and they’re not all insane – who will look you dead in the eye and tell you that this is a man who is going to change the course of human history by building a human settlement on Mars. Let’s please just all take a moment to come together, regardless of our ideological priors, and acknowledge how funny this is.
In the couple of years since Musk took over Twitter, we have come to see much more clearly what kind of person he is – not just politically, but existentially. This is not the kind of man who changes the course of human destiny. The other day, he posted an announcement about an adjustment to a new (and typically pointless) function allowing the use of bold font in posts, removing it from users’ main timeline. “You will have to click on post details to see anything in bold,” he announced. “My eyes are bleeding.” Musk is famously desperate to be considered funny, and famously is not. But I laughed a good deal at this post, because it laid bare the glorious, cosmic comedy of his character. He is the richest person on the planet, and the focus of a quasi-messianic cult, whose adherents believe that he will save humanity by building a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars. But he will die, on Earth, as he was born: a forum moderator to the marrow of his bones.
[ No, Elon Musk will not be a trillionaire by 2027Opens in new window ]
And if, in the end, he does one great thing with his time on this tired and damaged old planet, which he is so desperate to leave, it will be no less great an achievement for its being unintentional: the final destruction of the myth of capitalist meritocracy.