My sum of it all: His haters are either knaves or fools. Either dishonest (disinformation) or ignorant (misinformation). Disinformation is false info that’s deliberately out out there because you don’t like the person. Misinformation is spread by ignorance. You near something bad about a person you hate; you’re happy to spread it because it harms the person you hate.
Like Brivael Le Pogam (below) I also read and listened to lots by and about Musk. Even more than Brivael I think.
Even before Musk was hated by the Left today, I was reading about him.
Four books so far. Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX…. by Ashlee Vance. Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. The Book of Elon, by Eric Jorgenson.
None of these books is a hagiography. None is by an Elon fan-boy. The Twitter one is downright hostile.
The best of that lot, imo, is the one by Walter Isaacson. He followed Elon everywhere, every day for two years. He’s written a terrific bio, so elegant written it’s a real page turner.
Then there’s Elon on social media. Multiple long-foe, interviews with people like Alex Fridman and Joe Rogan.
From all of this I get a feel for Elon Musk and what drives him. As Brivael says below, right upmtehre, perhaps at the top, there’s Freedom. Also: he tries to contribute to the flourishing of humanity. “I’m a big fan of humanity”, he says. And “to keep alight the fragile flame of human consciousness”.
So, no, I’m don’t buy any of the nonsense that’s spread by people who used to love him when he was (or so they thought), on “their side”, but made a big move to support another party, another candidate for president. That alone sent them out of their minds. Yet Elon didn’t change. His values, his aims, didn’t change. His commitment to his companies, his commitment to help progress humanity, didn’t change.
Anyway, on to Brivael Le Pogam’s thoughts in this. Which, by the way, had it not been for the X platform I would never have known of this man writing in his native French. A man who seems widely read in all the major French philosophers.
Many left-wing figures, in the US as in Europe, label Musk as far-right. Some even go so far as the word "Nazi."
I did the opposite of the accusation: read before judging. Two biographies. Dozens of hours of interviews and documentaries. Zero ounces of racism detected.
What I found was a constant obsession with freedom: buying Twitter in the name of free speech, reinstating banned accounts, publishing the Twitter Files, opening up the algorithm's code, open-sourcing Grok, freeing Tesla's patents in 2014, reactivating Starlink for Iranians cut off from the net during the protests and for Ukraine, repeatedly refusing state censorship requests.
Now, let's do the thought experiment that his accusers never do. Imagine Musk really is evil.
This man owns a satellite network that covers the planet, meaning near-total surveillance capability. He owns the world's most influential digital public square. He owns the first fortune in history to reach 1,000 billion, since SpaceX's IPO on June 12. No individual has ever concentrated so many levers of power.
A truly malevolent Musk, with all that in his hands, wouldn't tolerate for a second being called a Nazi 24/7 on his own platform. He would ban. He would surveil. He would crush. We'd already be living in 1984.
But look at reality: the accounts that accuse him of Nazism still tweet. Every day. Without hindrance. On his network. With his algorithm. The totalitarian dystopia they're attributing to him is disproved by the absence of the gulag.
That's the turnaround. 1984—the control of speech, mass surveillance, the public designation of heretics—that's not his project. It's the fantasy of those who accuse him. The accusation always describes the accuser.
This is Girard in its pure form: we designate a scapegoat to avoid seeing the mechanism we ourselves carry. The one who screams "Nazi" often quietly dreams, in silence, of the power to ban, to file, to silence.
The man who would have all the means to build 1984 is precisely the one who lets his worst detractors speak. Ask yourself who, in this story, really dreams of the telescreen.
