Elon Musk's Bananas

An extended Note on the controversial trillionaire.

Photo by Mathew Feeney and Wikimedia Commons adapted.

---

This piece is an extended version of a Substack Note I posted yesterday. If you’re new here, please consider subscribing.

---

Unless you’ve been living on Mars, in which case Elon Musk might like a word, you’ve probably heard that the man who gave the world PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX is now a trillionaire. This has predictably annoyed a lot of people, among them the kind who still think his gain must be everybody else’s loss.

Yesterday, the writer Gurwinder pointed to a typical example:

Now, economics is not my strong point, but even I know that Nathalie is talking nonsense in a way that will nevertheless get her audience cheering. Musk, she says, has hoarded all the bananas, and the rest of us won’t get our share – and yet he’s celebrated for it. In other words, he’s an evil man born of an evil system.

Only the economically illiterate could make this claim, resting as it does on the assumption that wealth creation is a zero-sum game – that one person’s wealth is another’s poverty (also known as the fixed pie fallacy). But wealth isn’t a fixed quantity to be divided and distributed. It’s something created. Musk’s billions came from companies he built, not from money he took from other people’s pockets.

It's the trillion figure that has people on the left fainting into their chaise longues. Left-wing commentators are pumping out dozens of articles on Substack alone today, frothing at the news that someone who’s built useful things will also profit by them. The writer Nick Cohen has just published a piece titled “Elon Musk: The trillion-dollar psycho — He has hastened the deaths of millions.” That’s the tone we can expect in the coming days, and Cohen is one of the less crazy ones.

There’s a dreary envy in much of this, of course. It’s not just the money – which, by the way, Nathalie, isn’t sitting in a Bank of America current account nudging him over the threshold for a free toaster. It’s equity, tied up in the companies he’s built. And underneath the envy is resentment that Musk has achieved things that most of his loudest critics couldn’t dream of. None of us can, really. The one thing these “creators” have built, and the least admirable, is audiences around a grudge against people who build actual, useful things. Building audiences isn’t something to be disdained in itself (I hope), since it’s what I’m doing here. But there’s a difference between criticising power and pretending financial gain from those efforts is theft.

There’s a better objection that gets drowned out by all this. It’s that wealth on this scale buys power and influence that’s hard to square with democracy – a project we all supposedly consent to on the understanding that we have a roughly equal say in how things turn out. Zuckerberg is another example of this problem. Here’s a private citizen whose decisions about speech and political content shape public perceptions and, by extension, public life for billions. That’s the thing worth discussing, not the bananas.

For the record, I find Musk insufferable and admirable in roughly equal measure.

The admirable part first. He’s obviously a business genius who has somehow created several multi-billion-dollar companies. I don’t doubt that much of it is driven by a genuine desire for human progress. It takes enormous optimism in humanity to do what Musk does, and optimism is in drastically low supply today. We’re teaching our children that the environment is a ticking time bomb and that another extinction-level event is always around the corner (pandemics, AI, and so on). We could instead teach them that humankind has an extraordinary record of solving problems. “Look at Elon Musk”, teachers might say. “He’s building the rockets that could one day take you to Mars”. But teachers don’t say this because, for most of them, Musk is Dr Evil, the quintessential villain, Trump but with maths skills. Sadly, Musk makes this all too easy to believe, for reasons I’ll get back to.

The insufferable part is the politics – although let me give him his due first. I'm grateful Musk dragged the grooming gangs (and other evils) into the light. Britain's failing institutions thought they'd got away with it until Musk took over Twitter and cast a new spotlight on a crime so extraordinary that Americans, when they finally heard about it, could scarcely believe it was possible. But this is pressure that should have come from Britain's own media (another failing institution), and all of this country's problems today, from the policing of Henry Nowak to freedom of speech, are for Britons to clean up and fix. The more Elon presses on these issues, the easier it is for the governing class to point at him rather than the problems he identifies.

And he makes it far too easy for them. Too often, Musk behaves like a teenager on Twitter/X, one minute posting Grok-generated videos of ethereal young women, the next denouncing a spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”, the next declaring that Sam Harris's brain has “melted into goo”. He tells us he's saving the public square in the same breath he dominates it with his own neuroses, often reposting others who have nothing intelligent to say on issues of great complexity but plenty of appetite for stirring the pot, making it harder for everyone, left and right, to resolve them. So when Musk gets it right, it sounds wrong to many ears, because most people will have picked up a "vibe" via a hostile mainstream media. Now, anything he says about immigration (say) has a vibe problem. If Musk says it, it must be false.

The Nazi salute business is the perfect example. I don’t think Musk is a Nazi, obviously. The most likely explanation is that he made an awkward, overexcited gesture – and we can find clips of AOC and others doing the same thing, as many pointed out at the time. The problem with Musk is that one couldn’t quite suppress the thought that maybe he was trolling; that it really was a salute, not because he’s a Nazi but because he’s addicted to provocation. That’s a problem in someone who has the kind of power and influence Musk now has. I don’t want people like that making Nazi salutes even as a joke, thanks all the same.

If Musk had stuck to rockets, electric cars and satellites, the left would still dislike him, of course. Successful entrepreneurs are always suspicious to those who already think business is immoral on some level. Even if Musk behaved like a sober, thoughtful person on Twitter/X, the purchase itself was unforgivable. For his critics, Musk bought the platform progressives had come to regard as their own, not least because its old algorithm favoured their view of reality. That, in the end, is what they can’t forgive.

So I don’t condemn Musk’s trillion, and I admire the strange genius that could create so many useful things for humanity, from Starlink satellite systems to electric cars that people actually want, and perhaps, one day, a base on Mars. On balance, he’s probably a win for humanity – but it’s a close thing, and all the reckless use of power and influence that gets loaded into the deal is no small matter.

With all that said, I’m considering adding a Trillionaire tier to my Substack, in case he’s interested. For everyone else, the free option remains, and if you’ve read this far, do consider hitting subscribe or upgrading to support this sort of thing.

You might also like:

The Moral Clarity of Sam Harris

J.K. Rowling and the Death of Imagination

Henry Nowak’s Death Shames a Country