An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.
His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.
People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.
At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.
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Musk does have a special talent, but the talent is for hype: projecting the kind of overconfidence that gets investors who also have shallow technical understanding to give him money.
That kind of overconfidence •requires• ignorance. Any actual understanding of technical details might give him a dangerous sense of nuance and complexity, which of course would scare away investors looking for an infallible Supergenius Unicorn who can offer huge returns.
He's basically P. T. Barnum.
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One of my students remarked the other day that Musk seemed like a supervillain straight out of a comic book — and I agree. Sort of Lex Luthor but a dumbass.
This piece you gives interesting dimension to that observation: charismatic incompetence can be appealing as a destructive force when people don’t believe the status quo is worth saving.
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And I guess I need to close the obvious-but-needs-stating loop on that:
This nihilistic desire for destruction is how fascism gets in the door.
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This doesn't really close the loop. Most of what people call a "nihilist desire for destruction" is caused by neoliberal policies that actually make life horrible for people and naturally lead to disaffection from the entire social order. When people widely feel that the status quo is not worth saving, it's because the status quo is bad, not because nihilism suddenly made a big comeback.
Paul Cantrell
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
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Cassandrich