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Elon Musk doesn’t care if you hate him

The X owner sees the world as a giant computer game, with politics as his plaything.

Simon Evans

Simon Evans
Columnist

Topics Politics UK USA

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The industrialist, iconoclast and thorn in the side of the Labour government, Elon Musk, unveiled a new facet to his talents on Thursday morning. He penned a long and remarkably successful pastiche of fellow tech-bro billionaire Paul Graham, who had mocked Musk’s relentless interventions into British politics.

Graham, the UK-born founder of Y Combinator, claimed Musk had damaged his ‘personal brand’ in Britain, and revealed how little he knows of ‘ordinary British people’. In turn, Musk mocked Graham’s own detachment from the vox populi, through his extreme wealth and landed-gentry lifestyle. Musk suggested that Graham gets his insights from conversations with his butler, his artisanal baker and his falconer (who ‘despite his modest profession, holds two advanced degrees in medieval history’). I am not ashamed to say I LOLed or LMAOed, even.

Still, Graham’s criticisms are reasonable. Indeed, YouGov polling suggests that Musk is even less popular among Brits than flailing prime minister Keir Starmer and former EDL leader Tommy Robinson (though not, to be fair, among Conservative or Reform voters). Graham’s suggestion that Brits regard Musk less as a white knight and free-speech champion, and more as ‘an evil villain from a Batman comic’, is not implausible.

Still, while Musk has been widely derided by the British political class and the media for his tweeting on the grooming-gangs scandal, I for one am grateful that he has thrust this issue back into the national spotlight. Whatever methods, fair or foul, have been resorted to, what matters surely is that this issue is being discussed. If that includes subjecting certain politicians like Starmer and Jess Phillips to intemperate language, then so be it. Although clearly others disagree.

Whether Musk’s onslaught on an elected government has degraded his ‘personal brand’, as Graham claims, is difficult to tell. A glance at his actual brand, as measured by the Tesla share price, doesn’t help. Tesla shares are insanely volatile. Up nine per cent in the past five days at the time of writing. Down seven per cent in the past month. Up 67 per cent in the past six months. And so on.

Musk was also right to hit back that polls themselves have all kinds of hidden biases – whether through the phrasing of the question, the availability heuristic or the selection criteria for those polled.

So, Graham might be right or he might be wrong about the impact of Musk’s interventions on his reputation. The more important point is surely that Musk really does not care. And it’s this attitude that seems to have characterised Musk’s reign at X – a reign that is becoming ever more unprecedented and intriguing.

Not since the days of Citizen Kane has anyone had so much power through media, let alone seemed to enjoy it so much. Alongside the bold commercial strategies, Musk is also at once more thoughtful, more engaged with philosophical hypotheticals and hyper-spatial speculations than Orson Welles’s tycoon – or indeed than William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate on which his character was infamously based. Yet at the same time, he’s much more given to adolescent vulgarity, impulsivity and shitposting, a tendency which might reflect the sort of surprising aggregation of genius and profanity depicted in Amadeus.

The death of Musk’s reputation and good fortune has been as repeatedly exaggerated as anything Mark Twain ever had to put up with. Indeed, Twain himself would probably have enjoyed Musk’s recent satire of Graham. Those urging Musk to display more caution in his language remind me of those who called on Donald Trump in early 2016 to rein in the ‘career ending’ buffoonery. I think the smart money backs them both still.

One of the first things that Musk became associated with in his rise to fame, other than mere wealth and influence, was his endorsement of the ‘simulation hypothesis’. This is the theory that we all live in a gigantic computer game, and it was first articulated by Nick Bostrom in 2003. Musk first started speaking about it at least as early as 2016, and most famously on the world’s biggest podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, in 2018.

Of course reality might well all be a computer-generated dream, and the concrete outside of a multi-story car park may well be created by a vast CPU somewhere. But the impact of it on your soft tissues should you be foolish enough to test this theory from the eighth floor will be simulated very persuasively, at least to a third party. Yet if anyone possesses the devil-may-care indifference to ‘reality’ that the hypothesis invites, it is surely Musk.

Some have tried to characterise his plain-speaking attitude and disregard for public opinion as ‘autistic’. I am not so sure. I think he has internalised the implications of the Bostrom Speculation.

Musk’s conviction that he can walk on water reminds me of another simulation – the one created in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for Zaphod Beeblebrox to live in to keep him safe. The simulation protects Beeblebrox from the massive truth bomb delivered by the Total Perspective Vortex, a torture and execution device that reveals to your brain the sheer scale of your insignificance in the universe, and thus annihilates your soul. Beeblebrox emerges from the simulation not only unharmed, but actively ego-boosted. We are unlikely to meet another man who has so fully incorporated Beeblebrox’s self-belief into his daily routine as the X owner.

‘Argue for your limitations, and, sure enough, they’re yours’, wrote Richard Bach. For Elon Musk, the reverse seems to be an equally workable hypothesis.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.

Picture from: YouTube.

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