Don’t sneer at Elon Musk

I know a man who plans to burn an effigy of Elon Musk on his bonfire on 5 November. Musk will be on a cardboard rocket and it will be hilarious, apparently,to watch him being engulfed by flames, because he’s ridiculous, he and his weird ideas about Mars. The idea that Musk is laughable is one of the few topics on which the progressive left and the old hawkish left agree. Musk isn’t a serious person, they say, and because he’s not serious, he’s dangerous. He shouldn’t be allowed to own Twitter, let alone space rockets.  

There was cautious, grudging approval when Musk donated terminals for his Starlink satellites to Ukraine, followed by great alarm when he speculated about the possibility of a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. Seize his satellites, nationalise Starlink, said the Atlantic’s David Frum.  

Is Elon Musk a less serious person than David Frum? It’s not clear to me that he is. Why is it less sensible to speculate about a way to end the war than it is to trudge on towards some nuclear catastrophe? It’s not as if we can or would want to go to war with Russia. And yes, Musk’s a child on Twitter, but then Twitter’s a playground. What’s the point of being in a bouncy castle if you don’t bounce? Musk goads his enemies and posts memes and daft emojis. Jimmy Kimmel calls him ‘a piece of shit’. Frum wants to take his toys away. So it goes. Everyone’s a teen on Twitter and anyone who seems adult is just acting that way in the hope of applause. I’m not sure my marriage would survive if I read my own husband’s tweets.

Outside the Twittersphere, how is Musk a joke? He survived a brutal childhood in South Africa, escaped to the US and then made a fortune co-founding what became PayPal.