Elon Musk and the Kingdom of Bull
7 min readYou can contact Elon Musk a lot of factors. Agent of chaos. Savvy trader. Obsessive workaholic. But the tech-industry analyst Benedict Evans has a various suggestion. He phone calls Musk a “bullshitter who delivers.” I’d go even even more: Musk exemplifies a new form of bullshitter, one particular we haven’t genuinely seen ahead of. Call it the “bullionaire,” it’s possible: an uncommon purveyor of infantile jackassery, whose unfathomable prosperity makes it doable, and even most likely, that he’ll have out even the most preposterous system.
Musk did not get started an electric-vehicle enterprise, but the 1 he muscled his way into, Tesla, became a person of the most precious businesses on Earth very last July. After in cost, he made the decision that “CEO” was a stupid title and made himself the “Technoking” as a substitute. From that throne, Musk oversaw the manufacture of far less motor vehicles than Ford, a business worth one-16th as substantially (and which Musk when compared to a morgue). Musk also is the CEO of SpaceX, a personal enterprise with an amazing fleet of reusable rockets that land upright just like they acquire off, as in an episode of Jonny Quest. His ability to rule these kinds of an business may well be described partly by the technoking’s assert to have formerly been an alien. Musk turned so worried that superintelligent machines—another form of alien, really—might overtake humanity, he dedicated thousands and thousands to defend versus their increase.
1 day in 2016, Musk bought irritated at traffic. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am likely to construct a tunnel monotonous machine and just begin digging,” he tweeted. “It shall be known as The Boring Corporation.” That would have been a amusing joke if he hadn’t in fact started a corporation by that identify and secured contracts to bore tunnels under genuine U.S. towns, this sort of as Las Vegas and Miami. The tunnels carry—get this—Tesla cars, which develop website traffic jams when adequate of them fill the tunnel (which is actually just an highly-priced road).
The Uninteresting Business also built a flamethrower. Which is not boring, I guess. Searching to pay back for his subterranean-vehicle-tunnel enterprise, Musk remembered that the 1987 Mel Brooks film Spaceballs manufactured a joke about funding its generation by means of income of swag, these kinds of as lunch bins and flamethrowers. So he made flamethrowers—barely lawful, since they “only” ignited a wall of fireplace up to 10 toes. Quickly right after, on Twitter, Musk denied a “rumor” that he planned to manufacture, Uruk-hai-model, a zombie apocalypse to spur demand for explained flamethrowers. All 20,000 units offered out.
When Musk does items, they tend to start off with tweets. In 2018, the similar 12 months he produced flamethrowers, Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to get Tesla non-public at $420 a share (it is a pot reference, if you did not know). The stock was trading at about $360 at the time, generating the doobie-smokin’ rate a considerable high quality. The approach tanked, the inventory dropped 100 points, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated Musk for securities fraud. Sooner or later, he agreed to pay back $20 million, and Tesla by itself had to fork out the exact. Right now, correcting for a 5-for-a person split, TSLA trades at the equivalent of additional than $5,000 a share. The organization is value $1 trillion.
All that prosperity motivated much more deeds, and extra tweets. This yr, Musk decided that he favored tweeting so considerably, he required to purchase 9 per cent of Twitter. So he did, simply because it cost only a couple billion dollars, and he has roughly 270 billion of them. The difficulty is, he was supposed to file a disclosure with the SEC after he handed 5 percent equity in the corporation, and he delayed doing so by a handful of days. The inventory rose by virtually 30 percent when the news got out—which also meant Musk had saved a bunch of dollars by submitting late. Musk was going to be a part of the board, then he wasn’t, then it came out this early morning that he offered to purchase the entire organization for $43 billion in money (once again, he’s acquired a ton of funds).
Elon Musk states or does absurd and even silly things, but then those absurd and stupid factors stop up paying off.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a popular write-up about bullshit in the 1980s, which turned a bestselling 2005 e book named On Bullshit. The two bullshitters and liars are striving to get away with a little something. But unlike the liar, who demonstrates an consciousness of and issue for the truth of the matter in order to evade it, Frankfurt argues that bullshitters just do not care about truth at all. As a substitute, a bullshitter strives to accomplish their objectives, whichever these objectives are. For some of them, that quantities to listening to by themselves discuss. For some others, it involves deception or even fraud.
At first blush, the Muskian range appears to be like really diverse. He doesn’t appear like a male who is indifferent to the real truth so considerably as 1 who is passionately devoted to the act of blowing raspberries. He named the styles of Tesla S, 3, X, and Y, a leetspeak rendition of alluring. He made a pot joke about getting the corporation personal. He joked (probably?) about renaming Twitter as “Titter”—you know, like boobs?
But his raspberries serve a different purpose: They fill up a flotilla of demo balloons that, bound together by his prosperity, can raise a dwelling into the sky. Revenue talks, and bullshit floats. That’s how Musk turned a dumb pot gag into a govt investigation into a hundred-billion-dollar payday. It’s how he obtained all of Twitter’s energy consumers to settle for that he was their new overlord this early morning. Musk is indifferent to the truth mainly because he has dominion above it.
Possessing a billionaire bullshitter fills a odd sausage roll of thoughts: awe, jealousy, inspiration, terror, discomfort. Like it or not, Musk really did make electric powered cars and trucks practical and fascinating. He actually did assistance inaugurate a new age of non-public aerospace. He really did make considerably badass flamethrowers that he truly sold and delivered to people who viewed far too a great deal G.I. Joe in the 1980s.
Musk’s schtick is effective because he’s the unusual, unfathomably rich human being who essentially spends very significant amounts of time and cash on random factors. Most billionaires are boring. They hoard wealth and then offload it into a relatives basis for tax added benefits and eternal glory, or they press it into hedge or venture funds. They prevent the spotlight. Some pursue flights of fancy, as the other billionaire-begun room start off-ups display. Others go after Carnegie-model philanthropy, dressing energy in the vestments of generosity.
But Musk seems to goof all-around. He does no matter what the heck he wants, however stupid it may possibly be. In a earth wherever so significantly wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few, that stupidity can be a type of comfort and ease. What would you do if you have been that wealthy? The quantities say: practically nothing exciting. You’d use the dollars to make extra revenue. At the very least Musk is obtaining a excellent time.
But a bullionaire is also terrifying, simply because you just really don’t know what he’s executing upcoming. The anthropologist David Graeber, in his 2018 screed on bullshit jobs, argued that function loses which means when there is a gap in between its pretense and its actuality. For most persons with these types of work opportunities, the hole occurs in the worker’s possess head. Retail outlet greeters or telemarketers could possibly know that their occupation is useless or even actively destructive, but they have to fake that it’s not in purchase to get by means of the day, appease their boss, and make a residing.
In Musk’s scenario, that anxiety is outsourced to all the rest of us. When Musk tweets a joke, it may also be an true strategy that he intends to carry out. He may well not even know whether or not that is the situation, but his preposterous wealth and predilection for threat usually depart the option open. A a great deal-less-massively wealthy but incredibly unusual particular person these as Peter Thiel helps make threats and ideas in mystery. That feels worrisome—what’s he up to? The bullionaire hides ideal out in the open. That feels even even worse. (Vladimir Putin, whose wealth is unknown but has been speculated to exceed $200 billion, is one more, diverse form of bullionaire—one with graver whimsies.)
In this feeling, Musk has released a new tenor to bullshittery, 1 that Harry Frankfurt did not foresee. Most bullshitters can’t near the hole between pretense and truth even if they desired to. Bullshit used to suggest what’s neither correct nor untrue. Now it describes a point out in which anything at all, no make any difference how absurd, has the potential to be true. Simply call your flamethrower man. Obtain a social network. It is no huge deal—unless it is.
