Starship rockets stand ready at SpaceX’s Starbase facility, located near the South Texas town of Boca Chica. Credit: Shutterstock / luckyluke007

The following is a piece of opinion and analysis.

“You know, I forget how young you are, Mitch, that you think you have to be a prick to get things done, and that you actually think that’s a new idea.” — Robin Williams in Patch Adams

From the inner demons of Charles Foster Kane in 1941’s Citizen Kane to the maniacal obliviousness of Peter Isherwell in 2021’s Don’t Look Up, there’s no shortage of cinematic portrayals of mercurial, out-of-touch tycoons.

But recent Texas transplant Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has entertained us all in recent weeks with plenty of real-life tailspins, many self-inflicted.

“Go fuck yourself,” Musk told advertisers such as Disney, Apple and IBM, who abandoned the ship formerly known as Twitter over concerns about rising antisemitism on the platform. “That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”

Although Musk, who spent $44 billion to buy the social networking site now known as X, has personally relocated much of his industrial empire to the Lone Star State thanks to our reliable corporate welfare, he’s proven to be a foot-shooting scoundrel who can’t even wear a cowboy hat correctly.

After the above rebuke to his former advertisers — broadcast live from late November’s annual DealBook Summit — Fidelity Investments estimated that X had lost more than 70% of its value since Musk’s purchase. British magazine The Economist explained that Musk’s business model is uniquely susceptible to precipitous drops in ad revenue. After all, X’s top 100 clients accounted for nearly three-quarters of U.S. sales in 2022, and half of them have already left the platform.

This has forced Musk to scrape the bottom of the barrel, quite literally. One recent X ad for at-home insemination kits featured video instructions for “stealing semen” from a used condom taken out of the trash can, news site 404 Media reports. Fill in your own juvenile Musk-esque joke-tweet here.

The mad descent followed a scathing report from the nonprofit Media Matters, which reported that X placed ads for major brands alongside “content that touts Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.” Musk has since sued the left-of-center media watchdog in Texas, even though neither X nor the defendant is based here. Clearly, the choice of venue was to avail himself of the state’s corporate-friendly judges, and Attorney General Ken Paxton has since joined the fray, promising an investigation of his own.

So much for freedom of the press.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do, it’s going to kill the company,” Musk conceded after his “GFY” outburst.

Selective commitment

Yet Musk doesn’t blame himself or his abysmally arbitrary stewardship for the X-odus. And one could almost sympathize with his petulant brazenness if his professed commitment to free speech wasn’t so conveniently selective.

The billionaire’s initial response to the boycott, for example, was to suspend the accounts of those endorsing it. Even his own official biographer, Walter Isaacson, called out the self-evident hypocrisy.

“Inside Twitter, Musk asked his team to block posts supporting the advertising pause,” Isaacson told PBS’s Frontline. “One of the things that was very hypocritical in my view is that you had people urging boycotts because they thought Twitter was allowing too much hate speech, and Musk decided he wanted to shut down some of these people who were advocating a boycott. Well,

that goes against free-speech principles. That’s pure political speech.”

Since Musk rage-bought Twitter, more than 80% of censorship requests from speech-repressing governments around the world have been approved, according to self-reported data from the site analyzed by online news site Rest of World. That’s a notable increase over his supposedly censorial predecessors.

“No one from the far left that I’m aware of has been suspended, banned or de-amplified” from X, Musk absurdly claimed during his most recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast.

However, an exposé a year earlier by The Intercept directly contradicted that, finding accounts such as the “Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has distributed anti-authoritarian zines since the mid-1990s” had been permanently banned — likely on the dubious recommendations of far-right propagandist Andy Ngo, who occasionally masquerades as a journalist.

With a surge in online harassment, Anti-Defamation League Vice President Yael Eisenstat accurately appraised the mud pit.

“Musk’s actions to date show that he is not committed to a transparent process where he incorporates the best practices we have learned from civil society,” Eisenstat explained. “Instead, he has emboldened racists, homophobes and antisemites.”

And that was before Musk un-suspended conspiracist extraordinaire Alex Jones, who infamously accused Sandy Hook families of faking their own children’s deaths by mass shooting.

So, when Musk contends, as he recently tweeted, that “X is the only platform you can trust for honest information,” it’s difficult not to diagnose this as severe dissociation from reality. He’s reduced the aspirational digital town square to an unhinged billionaire’s cynical vanity project — with bromides about free speech and saving humanity serving as a sanctimonious veneer to justify the hijacking.

And that’s just one of the “like 17 jobs” he’s screwing up.

Explosions in the sky

Last spring, a rocket test flight from Musk’s SpaceX originating in Boca Chica near South Padre Island “obliterated the launch pad’s surface, flung hunks of concrete and metal thousands of yards, sparked fires in a surrounding wildlife refuge and created a plume of pulverized concrete and sand that coated cars and homes more than 6 miles away,” Express-News reporter Brandon Lingle noted in bleakly poetic words.

David Newstead, a biologist with Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries, pulled no punches in the way he described the explosion’s impact to the newspaper: “It’s just reckless and wanton disregard for the wildlife refuge. It’s hard to imagine that this stuff is allowed to continue.”

After another launch exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after liftoff, a coalition of environmental and indigenous groups sued U.S. regulators, alleging the Federal Aviation Administration failed to exercise due diligence. They argued that obscenely wealthy government contractors such as Musk appear to operate under a different set of rules.

And it doesn’t end there. Last month, we learned that SpaceX asked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for permission to dump up to 200,000 gallons of treated waste and sewage daily into a bay near its operations. The Boring Company, another of Musk’s holdings, made similar overtures about jettisoning waste into the Colorado River.

‘Lords and peasants’

Not all of Musk’s abuse is limited to the natural world, though.

The day before Tesla’s unsightly Cybertrucks were set to roll off the lot in Austin, Musk was asked during the DealBook Summit about recent union victories in the auto industry.

“It’s generally not good to have an adversarial relationship between one group of people at the company and another group. I disagree with the idea of unions for a reason that is different than you may expect, which is, I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing,” Musk said. “I think the unions naturally try to create negativity.”

Except peasants couldn’t collectively bargain for better working conditions — likely the reason they remained peasants. Indeed, callous, erratic CEOs like Musk are the primary source of the “negativity” in the offices and factories such as the ones he lords over.

A Reuters investigation in November documented some 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at SpaceX, including “crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death.”

Current and former workers at Tesla also told tech-focused publication The Information about “a pattern of risky incidents at the plant,” including “an explosion in the castings department” and “a worker pinned by a robot.” The Texas Observer uncovered an Austin employee named Antelmo Ramirez, who died due to heat at the factory. The plant failed to report the death to local authorities, according to the Observer.

Meanwhile, Twitter workers laid off in the wake of Musk’s takeover told Business Insider and other publications the company underpaid them on severance compensation they were due.

‘The same parking lot’

In the face of such grievances, Musk at his DealBook Summit pivoted to symbolism to show what a friend he is to workers.

“At General Motors, there’s a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla,” he said. “Everyone parks in the same parking lot.”

Here we should quote Musk back to himself: “What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. What I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil.”

Does he really think the allegedly injured, fired and underpaid workers at the business end of his megalomania would prefer separate parking lots and elevators to not getting ripped-off or maimed on the job?

Little surprise then, that mechanics at Tesla’s workshops in Sweden last month began striking in a bid to force the company to agree to collective bargaining with one of that country’s top unions, according to media reports. Solidarity strikes have also popped up in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Germany.

Unions in Europe, it should be noted, don’t mess around. If you want your firm’s mail delivered and garbage hauled off, it’s advisable to treat workers there with a modicum of respect, not as expendable peasantry.

And now, as if The Onion were writing our history, Musk has filed the paperwork to start his own university in Austin, since this is clearly the type of very stable genius we need instructing the nation’s youth.

Elon Musk puts on his “deep thinker” face at a technology conference last year in Paris. (That’s France, not Texas.) Credit: Shutterstock / Frederic Legrand – COMEO

Enlightened aristocracy

Fair to say, the billionaire class isn’t sending us their best. Yet these are the people who rule us. Like it or not, we’re heavily invested in their competence, probity and success. Musk’s three civilizational goals — to get humanity to Mars, globally switch to sustainable energy and make artificial intelligence safe — are all laudable and necessary.

“Starlink was instrumental in halting the Russian advance” in Ukraine, Musk said at the DealBook Summit. However, in a special report on the threats posed by Chinese militarism, The Economist noted that it remains unclear whether the billionaire would allow Taiwan to use Starlink if China were to invade. Reportedly, half of active satellites currently in orbit belong to Musk.

“Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply,” as historian Jill Lepore summed it up for The New Yorker.

To ask an urgent question: why should any one unaccountable individual have all this power?

“The amazing thing about someone like Elon Musk is not only that he can get wealthy, but he wants more wealth, and the more wealth he gets, the more he wants, and this is a typical kind of example of this pathological propensity,” Marxist scholar David Harvey opined.

With all due respect to Harvey, the trouble isn’t the psychology of greed, but the incentive structure of plutocracy. No matter how magnanimous the billionaire class is, they can’t free us or themselves from a system that reduces everything worthwhile to a cutthroat competition for dominance. We don’t need to install just the right set of virtuous technocratic elites; we need to rid ourselves of our reliance on technocratic elitism altogether, in favor of democratic, egalitarian models of conversation and decision-making.

One gets the inkling Musk himself must sense this imperative. For example, he hated that Microsoft founder Bill Gates shorted Tesla’s stock.

“How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” Musk asked Isaacson. “It’s pure hypocrisy.”

Actually, that’s pure market capitalism.

Musk has also alleged that the Securities and Exchange Commission is in the pocket of hedge funds, said it’s a “straight-up lie” that “AI isn’t trained on copyrighted material” and accused every business — except his, of course — of seeking to retain proprietary control and stifling innovation. But surely he’s noticed countless societally beneficial projects go belly-up due to their failure to turn a profit.

Is it really meritocracy Musk is after or a Gattaca-like enlightened aristocracy?

Lacanian psychoanalyst Alenka Zupančič delved deeply into the relevant philosophical question in her 2008 book The Odd One In: On Comedy.

“The problem is not simply that success and efficiency have become the supreme values of our late capitalist society — as we often hear from critics of this society,” she wrote. “There is nothing particularly new in this; social promotion of success has existed since time immemorial. The problem is, rather, that success is becoming almost a biological notion, and thus the foundation of a genuine racism of successfulness. The poorest and the most miserable are no longer perceived as a socio-economic class, but almost as a race of their own, as a special form of life.”

And, by contrast, the winners on top are lionized as somehow genetically superhuman.

“We are thus witnessing a massive and forceful naturalization of economic, political, and other social differences, and this naturalization is itself a politico-ideological process par excellence,” Zupančič continued. “The contemporary discourse which likes to promote and glorify the gesture of distancing oneself from all Ideologies — because they are necessarily totalitarian or utopian — strives to promote its own reality as completely non-ideological. Our present socio-economic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.”

How many confidently wrong fanboys who worship Musk fancy themselves as common-sense pragmatists who “do their own research” while the rest of us greenhorns are blinded by wishful ideology and naive emotion?

Heightening the contradictions, Musk also has a soft spot for visionary science fiction like Star Trek. At the same time, he’s described what he called “the woke mind virus” as a “civilizational threat” that’s merely “communism rebranded.”

What’s more “woke” than Star Trek? The original series aired TV’s first interracial kiss, and the subsequent movies imagined a peaceful, united Earth without money. And don’t we have Soviet cosmonauts to thank for double-dog daring the United States into space to begin with?

Our becoming a multi-planetary species and preserving a habitable environment for next generations shouldn’t have to wait on the whims and caprices of economic royalty.

However little Musk may care about his personal fortune or however much wealth he ends up amassing, the future he’s striving for — one where entitled pricks like himself call the shots while everyone else waits on pins and needles — remains morally bankrupt.

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