Over the past few weeks I have read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk. History has been moving fast lately, and when this book appeared in late in 2023 Isaacson had no idea that Musk would endorse Donald Trump for President, much less that he would receive a mandate to reshape the federal government. In another sense, however, that was fortunate, since the book deals with other more interesting and probably more important aspects of Musk and his career. I learned a great deal and indeed am surprised by my ignorance of various key developments.
Born into an abusive family in South Africa in 1971, Musk appears to be severely autistic , as he freely acknowledges. That may be why he allowed Isaacson to follow him around for weeks at a time and apparently authorized anyone close to him--professionally or personally--to talk to him. Musk sleeps very little, eats irregularly, and ingests huge quantities of Red Bull to keep him going. He has little or no EQ, although he can be very needy himself. He has an extraordinary personal history, recently documented at length in the Wall Street Journal, including at least fourteen children, many of them conceived in vitrio. And like Napoleon as a general and political leader or John D. Rockefeller as an industrialist, he is the most striking example of a new type that has transformed a key sector of society--in his case, the tech-based innovator. And like Rockefeller, probably, he is now the richest man in the world.
Musk has now led three major enterprises, and Isaacson details each of their histories in great detail. The most important, probably, is his rocket company, SpaceX, which now occupies the position in the aerospace industry that NASA used to occupy. Second is the Tesla car company, the world's leading producer of electric vehicles, and third is Twitter, which he acquired just a few years ago and renamed X. While many liberals now argue that Musk depended from the beginning on help from the federal government, Isaacson argues that such help did not become truly significant until after he had built functioning rockets. Based on other sources, I am not sure if Isaacson got this right or not. Interestingly enough, Musk has pursued these interests with the conscious purpose of transforming how and where we live. The goal of Space X is to increase our capacity for space travel sufficiently to allow us to establish colonies on Mars, which he thinks will prolong the survival of the human race. (Oddly, Isaacson gives no indication that Musk has addressed the even greater problem of making it possible for large numbers of human beings to live there.) Tesla was designed to free us from fossil fuels and the threat of climate change, and he acquired Twitter/X, he claims, to protect free speech--the least convincing of these three claims.
Isaacson describes the creation of SpaceX and Tesla in great detail, revealing, it seems to me, what has made Musk a uniquely successful individual. Musk has a remarkably quick mind, and he refuses to accept anything on faith. (I must admit that I have that problem--or is it an asset?--as well.) He was never simply interested in getting a NASA contract, he wanted to make enough rockets quickly and cheaply to support a continuing presence of Mars. That meant, first of all, that rockets had to be re-useable, something that as far as I know the NASA pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s never dreamed of. He has done that: his rockets now return to earth and make soft landings. He achieved this by refusing to take no from an answer from his engineers and insisting that every part and process be re-evaluated to see if it could be simplified and cheapened. Whenever that led to a brief setback, he told his subordinates not to worry: if they did not occasionally try ideas that did not work out and had to be abandoned, they were not being creative enough. Musk often sets seemingly impossible deadlines for his engineers, who at times manage to meet them. Tesla has used the same philosophy. He has also pushed the use of robots, although they have sometimes proven to be unable to do what humans do, and have had to be scaled back. He apparently expects a heavily robotic economy to emerge in which everyone would be given a universal basic incomes--once again without thinking about the social and emotional consequences of such a scheme. Keeping to my usual rule here, I am not welcoming or endorsing all this, simply recognizing that, yes, it is happening. And it is happening because Musk identified the weaknesses of the civilization that we have all inherited.
That civilization was at least as transformative as Musk could ever be in its early stages, from the late 19th century until the late 20th. Industrial manufacturing, new forms of energy, and revolutionary transportation advances completely altered our way of life. Many of their advances, however, became legacies, which institutions kept alive without thinking or, at times, even understanding why. Redundancies accumulated in both production, regulation, and administration. Helped by our own revolution in data processing, Musk and others have begun clearing those redundancies away. And Musk, it seems to me, is very unusual in his emphasis on making manufacturing as cheap as possible. (I do wonder if he has Japanese and South Korean counterparts in this respect--I do not know.) Reading this book, it occurred to me that Musk's approach could also lead to much-needed reforms in higher education, which could use reductions in administrators comparable to the ones he imposed on Twitter, and some reductions in faculty as well. The K-12 educational system might benefit from root and branch re-evaluations as well. Such changes would have to be carried out by people who really cared about education, but the could do a lot of good. And I am not prepared to argue that every bureaucrat in our federal, state and local governments is truly essential, either.
Unfortunately, in my view, these changes are taking place through privatization, of which SpaceX is the most striking example. And SpaceX is so important for the Ukrainian war effort--for which it supplies and maintains essential communications satellites--that Musk himself, according to Isaacson, stopped a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet at one point during the war by turning off key satellites that controlled the drones. Like the industrial revolution, today's changes are creating a new aristocracy, of which he is exhibit A. That is not entirely the fault of Republicans. Barack Obama decided that SpaceX would take over the production of rockets from NASA.
In short interviews in the last few months, Isaacson has suggested that there is a certain logic to Musk's new alliance with Trump, even though he did not predict it in the book. Musk had begun moving rightward on key issues during the 2010s, becoming very anti-woke, partly, according to Isaacson, because of the gender transition of his oldest biological son, from whom he became completely estranged. The book does include one extraordinary story of Musk having dinner with his four oldest sons in April 2022, on the evening after he had bought Twitter. They did not understand this decision, and he tried to explain it. I quote from the book:
"'I think it's important to have a digital public square space that's inclusive and trusted,' he replied. Then, after a pause, he asked, 'How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?'
"It was a joke. But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids. Maybe even for himself. They were aghast. He reassured them that he was just kidding."
That might have been a tactical family move.
Musk's alliance with Trump, however, raises one huge question that I have not seen addressed. Musk has built up Tesla to take over the world's car market and stop climate change--but Trump has clearly adopted the fossil fuel industry's view that climate change is something that we can live with, and seems to be doing away with the electric vehicle incentives that Biden put in place. At times I wonder whether Musk is about to announced a gasoline-powered Tesla. Only time will tell.
I put down the book convinced that Musk is a world-historical figure like Carnegie or Rockefeller or the inventor of television, whom I cannot even identify. Like them, he will have a very great impact. That does not inspire me, but as I have said before, I am through arguing with history.
6 comments:
What is the definition of an idiot? A: Someone who doesn't read.
Musk does not.
If he did, he would realise that it is impossible for a human to GO to Mars, let alone return.
So why build rockets to do so?
Last, BYD is the greatest EV manufacturer
Not Tesla.
I suggested to Randy Fertel, a published authority on improv in literature and music, who published a multidisciplinary book partially on Trump and improv, to look at connections between jazz, asperger's syndrome, and improv. Have not heard back yet.
All the best
I received Isaacson's book as a gift. Although I thoroughly enjoyed Isaacson's books on Ben Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci, I haven't been able to bring myself to read his book on Elon Musk. I found this review helpful and may break down and read about this troubled but influential individual.
I wrote the passage below many years ago...and said the war with no name had been lost
And then Trump has come along and said essentially, like the close of Casablanca, Victor lazlo says to Rick:
"Welcome back to the fight."
"Some globalist pundits are now talking about what the future holds for their kids, backpedaling fiercely against the global economic and military tsunami they extolled the virtues of for decades, now barreling down on them, and their children, and their childrens' children, and us, and ours.
I am going to spell out a few things that they should have been thinking about for a long long time, since the mid 60s at least.
Has it been wise, if you were worried about the world for your kids, to put off your domestic labor issues, to put government against labor as a class in favor of management, to favor foreign over domestically produced goods, to allow your corporations to offshore jobs, and then factories, and then major investments;
has it been wise to think mainly only in relatively short term profitability, as a criterion, for anything, anything, if you were worried, really worried, about your kids, or their kids?
Let's talk briefly about the issue of labor and unions.
Offshoring capacity, and buying foreign goods and services, not only puts your own domestic work force out of work permanently, but also puts the labor force and capital investments of your new global economy at the political, ideological, economic, ethnic, civilizational, and military command of foreign governments,
which can change, sometimes quite drastically, sometimes to a political stance contrary to your wishes, sometimes almost overnight,
always however, it seems, transforming fairly quickly, say in 20 years nowadays, the lapse of one generation,
from a cheap source of labor or materials into a more expensive, and adversarial, competitor.
That has been the pattern over and over again now for at least 50 years.
How do you 'bust', or for that matter, defend, a foreign labor force, when a foreign regime supports other pressing agendas; like taking over world domination; or dominating its neighbors where you also may have large investments; or dominating your other markets; or dominating your domestic market; or controlling, or taking over your domestic political system, against your own narrow corporate interests, just for a few little examples?
That all kind of starts to sound a great deal worse than would have been simply dealing with domestic management and labor issues in the first place, and trying to keep as much production and consumption as possible domestic, and to build a stronger well integrated domestic economy.
Many other implications beside labor or unions flowed from foreign investment, trade concessions, and offshored production. The process really started before WW II, and accelerated with the Marshall Plan, and then especially with Cold War trade and market concessions.
Most people (I mean mainly intellectuals now; almost no one reads Fukuyama in reality) do not know it, they read things like The End Of History And The Last Man, and follow people like Fukuyama, and actually believe that the US, and its ideology 'won' what it calls the Cold War.
Pundits like Thomas Friedman actually buy this 'Whig Interpretation' (see Butterfield's sense of the term);
and Prestowitz follows Fukuyama and Friedman in Rogue Nation, buying Friedman's foolish pronouncements, and giving a credibility to Fukuyama's bizarre idealogical positions.
Contrary to their rather puerile views, my view is that The War With No Name that has quietly been waged 'by other means' as Clausewitz so aptly had put it ("War is not merely a political
act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of
political relations, a carrying out of the same by other
means") simultaneously with the Cold War, call it 'The War For Picking Winners In The World Of The Future', has now been lost."
Circa 2010
All the best
It sounds to me like Steve Jobs, who drove his workers to perfection and transformed the global economy around his products. Other transformational ideas like neuralink, would have us all with implanted chips to communicate, bypassing smart phones, perhaps making us universal polyglots and able to learn any scientific area instantly by download. There have been numerous crazed American inventors who attempted perpetual motion machines. Cold fusion is an interesting topic. Musk happens to be interested in rockets, which was previously a prohibitively expensive govt. area. Now space flight, satellites, robotics are available to many countries. In old days boys projects in science were to make and demonstrate a small rocket. Musk has just stayed a kid, as it seems. As a yoga practitioner I might humorously wonder if going into a bit of levitation while meditating is really possible or just a myth from India. Some people just keep dreaming, while others get cold and cynical.
Isaacson compares him to Jobs many times.
Post a Comment