He is a genius and a lunatic, conspiratorial and visionary and childish — and all those things are probably related.
He is a genius and a lunatic, conspiratorial and visionary and childish — and all those things are probably related.
F ar be it from me to disagree with any one of the assorted Renaissance Men who make up the editorial staff of the New Republic, but I suspect that, in averring late last year that Elon Musk is a “deeply stupid and incompetent person” who “is simply not very good at anything,” staff writer Alex Shephard might have reached just a few feet over his skis. Among the words that Shephard used to describe Musk were “pathetic,” “idiot,” “toddler,” “toxic,” and “moron.” Among the criticisms he offered were that some of SpaceX’s rockets have exploded and that Tesla’s self-driving technology does not yet work perfectly. Among the predictions he made was that it would be a “shock” and a “surprise” if Twitter “exists in a year.” (Shephard has 71 days left for this augury to come true.) His conclusion: Musk “is making the world worse in innumerable ways.”
On Saturday, one of Musk’s companies landed a reusable 223-foot-tall space-rocket backwards on a launch tower.
Since the publication of Shephard’s piece, the hysteria around Musk has only grown worse. It has become de rigueur within the chattering classes to describe Musk as “evil” or as a “villain”; one now hears progressives openly fantasizing about President Biden deporting him; and, in the Guardian this summer, Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, went so far as to demand that the federal government silence Musk’s speech online, terminate all of its contracts with Starlink and SpaceX (one must presume that the astronauts stuck on the ISS were against this suggestion), and, if possible, find a way to put him in prison.
Why? Politics.
Yes, yes, Musk’s critics always present a few fig leaves in support of their complaints. But we can all see what’s happening here. This is about politics and power and the institutional Left’s total inability to accept anyone who is not under its unwavering control. As a pluralist, this offends me for its rank illiberalism. As a human, it offends me for its myopia. And, in this case, it is the myopia that is the worse crime. Elon Musk is a genius. In the space of under 30 years, he has revolutionized online payments, consumer vehicles, satellite internet, and space travel, and he’s working on connecting the human brain to computers. Elon Musk is also a weirdo. He’s socially awkward; he’s capricious; he’s susceptible to conspiracy theories; he’s prone to infidelity; and, yes, he can be embarrassingly childish in public. But you know what? I don’t care. In fact, there is little that I care less about in the known universe. To look at a figure such as Musk and obsess over his political views or his personal flaws or his obvious Asperger’s Syndrome is to miss the point as points have rarely been missed. Not since the Gilded Age has a single entrepreneur yielded so many significant achievements in such a short period of time as has Musk. He said some unpleasant things on the internet? Okay.
That Elon Musk is both a genius and a weirdo is no accident. Indeed, historically, the two have not only tended to go hand in hand, but have been inextricable from one another once joined. Howard Hughes washed his hands until they bled, kept his urine in jars, and spent months at a time sitting naked watching the same movie with a cocktail napkin laid out over his penis. Henry Ford was a vicious antisemite who, in his later years, may have been clinically insane. Nikola Tesla was afraid of circles and had to clean his knife and fork with exactly 18 cleaning towels before eating anything. Pythagoras thought that fava beans contained the souls of the dead and that consuming them was tantamount to cannibalism. And don’t get me started on the inventors of Victorian England. John Napier, the aristocratic British mathematician who discovered logarithms and popularized the use of the decimal point, consented to travel nowhere without at least one spider in a box and believed that his pet rooster was trying to tell him which of his servants was stealing from him.
None of this matters — or, at least, none of it matters as much as what those people actually did. And, if we want what they did — and, in Musk’s case, what they do — we must learn to accept the detritus with far more patience than we do. The word “eccentric” literally means “away from the center” — or “away from what we think of as normal, ordinary.” And here’s the thing: The sort of person who trailblazes in useful and unusual ways is going to be away from the center in almost every aspect of their lives. That does not give them carte blanche. It does not mean that they cannot be criticized or judged. It does mean that, if we try to bash in the rough edges, we’ll likely lose a lot of the genius, too, and it certainly means that we ought to avoid taking such exception to their politics or their awkwardness or even their unpleasant behavior that we pretend that they are useless, world-destroying morons who should be stripped of their contracts, cast out of polite society, and, perhaps, thrown in jail.
Alas, I fear that our culture is trending in the other direction. “That so few now dare to be eccentric,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “marks the chief danger of the time,” for “they are the visionaries who make giant imaginative leaps.” Do we want those leaps? Sure, until those who make them say something that upsets Susan in HR, offends Rachel Maddow, or militates on behalf of a political party that is disdained by the bien–pensant. When that happens, all that happy talk of “diversity” and “creativity” and “self-expression” goes out the window, the better to be replaced by censorious stares, demands for sterile compliance, and a return to credentialized mediocrity.