Elon Musk and Unreality

Elon Musk has a problem. His $44 billion purchase of Twitter is now too high and he can’t back out, his cars keep blowing up, he has more kids that he doesn’t want and kids who don’t want him, and to top it all off, even his new friends on the right don’t like him. Despite promising to return Donald Trump to his Twitter account and his recent turn against “leftist agendas”, Trump has returned the favor by calling Musk a “bullshit artist” at a recent rally, choosing to promote Trump’s own social media, Truth Social, instead. With burning bridges on both sides and a potentially disastrous pit of legal, financial, and familial despair beneath him, it seems becoming the richest person in human history has only made Musk’s life worse. Elon’s entanglement in the real worlds of finance, politics, and science is complicated by his desire to live in the unreal world of subreddit memes and Twitter culture wars, creating a contradictory persona of cutthroat capitalist and populist meme philosopher.

During his initial rise to national fame, Musk made a clear effort to tie himself to the image of Tony Stark, a self-described “billionaire, philanthropist, playboy”, even including a cameo appearance in Iron Man 2. The comparisons, like any joke, would be tolerable if Musk wasn’t aware of them, but instead he leaned into the image of the tech pioneer who wasn’t afraid of using his dry wit against bureaucrats, corporate suits, politicians, and any haters of his humanity saving vision of a Mars colony. Tony Stark, a fictional character, does straddle the line of real and unreal, throughout his movies he undergoes personal struggles, makes mistakes and learns from them and eventually martyrs himself for the good of mankind, all the while his fictional companies grow and grow until STARK Industries appears to have a monopoly on all Earth defense. Stark is the “virtuous innovator”, a figure who’s growing wealth and power comes through objective benefit to mankind and personal (and public) sacrifice. This is, of course, how any smart capitalist wants to be seen. A figure who expands his wealth through virtuous innovation, only at the expense of personal life. 

Musk’s initial pitch as the capitalist who would popularize electric cars, carry humanity to the stars and fight off needless bureaucracy fits this virtuous innovator mold, and for a while it was working. SpaceX was making genuine breakthroughs, Tesla was shooting to the top of the auto industry, and more and more tech publications began asking Elon for his great ideas for the great problems of the future. 

Then Elon’s own great problems began. In 2018, Musk found himself in the middle of two controversies, the first an SEC lawsuit for tweeting about the finances of Tesla, the other for calling the hero of the Thai cave children rescue a “pedo guy” and “child rapist”. With both controversies framing Musk as an immature attention seeker who uses social media to boost his image, he went to the crowd that loved him the most and booked a spot on Joe Rogan’s podcast later that year. The episode is Rogan’s most-watched to this day. Embraced and emboldened by online fans, Musk doubled down on his meme persona and took it further, wading into the murky pond of online culture war and US politics. 

Anyone who’s spent an hour on the Internet could tell you that what happens there “isn’t real”. There is no resolution to a 200 tweet-long argument with an account named @Mary015478509, giving Reddit gold to a post protesting Net Neutrality doesn’t change the FCC’s mind. But from the perspective of Musk, you can understand how he would mistake the unreality of the Internet for the reality of public support. When finance experts bet on Tesla stock to fall, Musk’s fanboys and his headline grabbing personality kept the company in the news and his stock in the green. When Musk turned against his liberal environment and bravely spoke out about how “pronouns suck”, his fans stood by him even as his wife pleaded for him to stop. For Musk, his financial and social calculations rely, in part, on a fanbase that treats Elon as if he is Tony Stark incarnate, a savior of the future who must be rewarded with material wealth in the present. The problem is this fanbase is likely not as big as Musk thinks it is and its adoration is tied to Musk’s appearance of success. When Tesla stock slips, when multi-billion deals go into court battles, when Elon’s name becomes synonymous with ignorance on one side, tech liberal elitist on the other, and billionaire excess on both, his exploits amount to standard tabloid fare and his fans the morons who read it. Elon has no way to actually deliver on his promises. The Mars colony is a fantasy that hasn’t been talked about in years, the Hyperloop is expensive and nonsensical, and Tesla cars show new issues everyday. Even Musk’s opinions on the culture war are at their heart contradictory, he tweets about the stupidity of transgender identity and pronouns, but names his own son X Æ A-12, he voices support for far-right candidates like Mayra Flores and Ron DeSantis, but then says America’s solutions are found in the middle and talks of starting a “Super Moderate Super PAC”, he makes free-speech his essential tent-pole issue, but accepts funding from the world’s most prolific censor, the Chinese government.

Elon Musk is trying to use the unreality of the Internet to fix or hide his real issues. In these few paragraphs we have barely scratched the surface of Musk and his company’s issues, including but not limited to, union-busting, allegations of workplace racism, or personal sexual impropriety. Musk models himself on Tony Stark, but Stark’s enemies were aliens, robots, and supervillains, not unions, the SEC and women. Elon Musk lives in the real world where real, boring things like contracts, financial obligations and political realities tie him and the people around him to positions they cannot escape. Seeking to use the Internet to escape only heightens the contradictions, and unless he can find a team of scriptwriters to make some edits to his life, Musk will likely become more and more isolated in his own unreality.