Needs Musk

To infinity, and beyond.

Hello everyone. I’m not around to write something topical at the moment. So here’s a piece I wrote a while ago about Elon Musk, but never posted because the election came along. I hope you enjoy it.

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‘Come on! Chris is taking everyone for battered sausage and chips!’

It was the early 90s and I had secured my first ever TV job, working on the glorious Big Breakfast.

The captain of our ship was Chris Evans. The tabloids loved to claim he was ‘famous for his ginger hair’ but of course he wasn’t. He was famous for being the most gifted broadcaster of his generation, a mercurial talent who came alive every morning on the nation’s TV screens, and lived life to the full when off them.

Chris was accompanied, on screen and off, by his ever present ‘posse’.  Friends, producers, runners, bookers, musicians, and assorted members of the BB crew.

A charmed inner circle of genuinely lovely people, some of whom I’m delighted and privileged to still know today.

I never became a member of the entourage, and at this point was still very much a new boy, but on this particular day, I’d been invited to tag along.

We formed up in a Mad Max convoy of cars, cabs, and people carriers, with Chris taking the lead in one of his jawdroppingly expensive sports cars, and snaked our way down to Wapping. Home to both Chris’s swanky new warehouse flat, and his favourite chippie.

On arrival, Chris like a carrot topped Christ, feeding the 5000, put in the order:

‘Twelve battered sausage and chips please’.

I put my hand up. ‘Can I have chicken?’ I said. ‘I don’t really like battered sausage.’

Everyone, including Chris turned and stared at me. What was this nonsense? There weren’t options. Chris wanted battered sausage and chips. So everyone was having battered sausage and chips. Simple.

That’s how it worked with The Talent.

So, chastened, I shut T.F. up and ate what I was given. I didn’t really like it. But I have to be honest. It felt good to be hanging out with the King.

The battered sausage incident kept coming back to me as I enjoyed Walter Issacson’s thoroughly readable, and brilliantly entertaining biography of Elon Musk.

Like a celebrity, Musk draws acolytes around him. And just as a top celebrity attracts the best directors, writers and producers, as well as the usual ragtag band of hangers on and family members. So Musk draws into his orbit the world’s most talented engineers, visionaries, technicians and logisticians.

As well as his brother, cousins and of course, his antiquated, but still surprisingly hot, mum.

Why do they come? Well because Musk is Thomas Edison. Nicola Tesla. Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Wernher Von Braun. Alan Turing. And PT Barnum. All rolled into one.

Too much? Maybe, but even amongst the modern giants Musk reigns supreme.

While Steve Jobs reinvented the phone. Jeff Bezos reinvented shopping. And James Dyson reinvented the er…..hand dryer. Musk is reinventing the world.

And even that is not enough. Because if he gets his way, (and Musk usually gets his way) Musk is on a mission to reinvent humanity. To send people to Mars and make us an interplanetary species.

Let’s look at what Musk has done so far. (His list of extraordinary achievements is so long, I had to seriously trim down this section to stop this post becoming far too long.)

He revolutionised the way we get drunk and buy things we don’t need on eBay with Paypal.

Single handedly transformed the electronic vehicle industry, made it aspirational and took it mainstream with Tesla. And despite its recent difficulties Tesla is still worth more than Ford, GM, Stellantis, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW, BYD, Hyundai, and Kia combined.

Made the US, once again, the world leader in space travel. In total there were over two hundred orbital rocket launches worldwide in 2023. Musk’s company Space X was responsible for half of them.

If it wasn’t for Musk’s Starlink internet satellite system, Ukraine would arguably have already lost its war with Russia. This fact alone makes him a global power player at a level usually only associated with nation states.

And then there’s artificial intelligence.

Musk created Open AI (Oh didn’t you know that? Yep. The company behind homework busting Chat GPT was originally one of his.)

And he’s already taking AI to the next level with Neuralink. A company that is linking human brains with computers, physically. A technology which could quite conceivably allow disabled people, even with catastrophic spinal injuries like the late Christopher Reeve, to walk again. 

I can see the glowing BBC headline already. ‘Billionaire Musk poses threat to Paralympics’.

Meanwhile Tesla is diversifying, using what it has learned from its quest to build self driving cars (which will never be allowed to operate in Britain BTW) to create human shaped robot Optimus. A little clunky now, sure,  Optimus walks like a drunk who’s just crapped his pants on his way to the bookies. But they have made phenomenal progress in just two and half years. 

And who knows what the Boring Company does? No one. But you can be sure that whatever it is, it’s bloody good at it.

So much world changing innovation. So many generational leaps.

Musk is like a slightly sweaty, lard arsed, Tony Stark.

At the forefront of American space technology, AI innovation, and electric car production, you might expect Musk to be feted as a visionary by the (Jill) Biden administration.

To be the undisputed darling of world’s liberal press. The constant subject of fawning Guardian articles, and gushing Netflix documentaries. A favourite of the Trust The Science crowd. The hero of ambo-blocking environmental extremists Just Stop Oil. 

But not a bit of it. They absolutely detest him. For lots of reasons, but let’s start with the biggie.

Why did Musk buy Twitter?

Things have changed since general manager, Tony Wong’s 2012 assertion that Twitter would be ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’.

By 2021 it was becoming just as clear to Musk as it was to the rest of us, that his favourite social media platform had been captured by what he calls ‘the woke mind virus’. And this is important.

Because Musk wants to send humans to Mars.

Only an illiberal would see that statement as a non sequitur.

As Musk notes.

“Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multiplanetary.”

Musk is undoubtedly correct. This battle for free speech, which simply by being here on this platform, we’re all engaged in, is existential.

“This is a battle for the future of civilisation,” he tweeted. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead”.

Up until the moment he bought it, the elites assumed Twitter was ‘their’ social media platform.

Instagram for the influencers. Facebook for the mums. Tik tok for the kids. LinkedIn for the, I dunno to be honest, let’s go with Swingers.

Twitter was their mouthpiece, the way to speak their truth to the powerless.

It had silenced arch villain Trump, and suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, an undoubted act of ‘electoral interference’. And when it came to deciding who, or what to censor, like all other Big Tech companies, it had bent to the will of the FBI and other US government agencies like the CDC.

Musk had vowed to put a stop to all this. And so the knives were out.

Musk’s enemies present themselves as the nice people, the ‘be-kind’, good guys.

But clearly, their moral compass is as broken as a bag of biscuits in a tumble dryer.

They tried targeting Trump with lawfare, and more recently gunfire, while with Musk, they are using Byzantine government regulation as witch-hunt fuel.   

The details are too complex to go into here. But to give you a flavour of the scale of the forces arranged against him, here’s a list of US Government agencies currently investigating Musk and his companies. The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

If you were wondering. The Fish and Wildlife Service are onto Musk because some blue land crabs were hurt during a rocket launch apparently. A heinous crime, because as we all known, Blue Land Crab Lives Matter.

Clearly, as with Trump, the process is the punishment

That’s the US Government, but of course no one enjoys vindictive, petty, and unnecessary regulation like the EU. Which joined the pile on, threatening Twitter/X with multimillion dollar fines for running foul of its authoritarian Digital Services Act. And investigated Musk personally, for alleged anti semitism.

And fair enough. The Europeans have every right to be touchy on the subject of Nazism. Since they, you know, invented it.

Musk is also being targeted by independent busy bodies like finger wagging ‘fact checkers’, regime cheerleaders, Media Matters, NewsGuard and the Campaign Against Digital Hate.

But we all know how Musk has responded to advertiser boycotts and pressure groups. He did the one thing no one ever does.

He told them to go fuck themselves. Literally. And it was glorious.

Of course they hate him for it.

Especially now that the US government is going to have to rely on Space X to rescue the two astronauts trapped, Major Tom like, on the International Space Station.

The original plan, to bring them home on Boeing’s Starliner proved unworkable when the DEI obsessed company’s space craft, just like its planes, kept falling apart.

It’s humiliating for them. And if there’s one thing our narcissistic masters hate, it’s being humbled.

I get the sense that the US government won’t really take the gloves off on its vendetta against Musk until the two astronauts are safely home.

Musk is surely aware of this too. And yet he continues to pledge his company’s assistance.

They also hate him because he rich. Unfathomably, jawdroppingly, awesomely, rich. With the potential to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Of course the narrative these days is that the rich only become rich off the backs of the poor. As if wealth creation is a zero sum game. Of course it isn’t.

Musk has undoubtedly added more value to the global economy than he has ever taken out of it.

No one is poorer because Musk is in the world. Though arguably, we are all richer because he is.

But of course economics, maths, and wealth creation don’t matter. Musk is rich, and rich people are bad. And since Musk is the richest of all, then it follows that he must also be the baddest.

It’s just common sense.

But are Musk’s defiance of pro censorship autocrats, his mind boggling riches, and his more recent support for arch bogeyman Donald Trump, the only reasons the elites have it in for him?

No.

I think the ruling classes really hate Musk because he’s shown them up for the useless lead swingers, make-weights, grifters, also rans and space wasters they truly are.

Musk has the temerity to demonstrate what, with application, ambition, dedication and determination, humanity can actually achieve.

That there are still dreams to chase, mountains to climb, futures to aspire to. A world, in fact many worlds, still left to conquer (yes conquer!-how disgustingly colonialist!) far beyond the limits of our blinkered, self obsessed, can’t do culture.

He is embarrassing them.

Watch the genuinely thrilling, awe inspiring, and earth shaking launch of the Space X Starship rocket and realise it was not a country that did this. Not NASA, Russia, China, NATO, or the EU (as if).

It was one man, Elon Musk.

Sure, there were countless incredibly talented and dedicated men and women standing behind and beside him. But ultimately this unfathomable, impressive, and complex machine would not exist but for this single, singular man.

Elon Musk, an African let’s not forget, is like a one man Wakanda.

No government on earth has the ambition of Musk. No state has the vision to achieve a third of what he has accomplished. No politician on the planet has the balls to face off their critics the way Musk squares up to his.

He is opposed to everything that is the cornerstone of modern elite power. Rules. Regulation. Saftyism. Inefficency. Cronyism. And groupthink.

You feel that Musk could accomplish more in a weekend than the useless, venal Tories managed in the last fourteen wasted years. And far more than this vindictive, grasping Labour administration will achieve in the next five two.

Imagine for a moment, what Musk could have done with HS2, the small boats crisis, or the NHS.

Look, I know. I might come across as an uncritical Musk fanboy. But I’m really not.

Musk is presented in Isaacson’s book as a troubled, and somewhat tortured soul. If not exactly selfish, certainly self absorbed and inward looking.

A single minded determination to accomplish his every mission is his greatest strength as an entrepreneur, and his greatest weakness as a human being.

When his self professed love of free speech comes up against his need to do business with China, like every other tech billionaire, he will seemingly put his business needs before his principles.

But unlike every other tech bro boss, at least he seems to genuinely care about free speech some of the time.

Musk also embodies some of the less attractive traits you often find among members of the celebrity class.

He cares about humanity as a whole, (his ‘audience’), but often struggles connecting with people on an individual level. And like several celebrities I’ve met, he sometimes finds it convenient to hide behind his own ‘specialness’, in Musk’s case a self diagnosed label of ‘autism’, to justify being an arsehole.

Nope. You are not ‘special’, you’re just being a dick.

I’m not asking anyone to like Musk. But our planet is surely better off with him on it.

Ultimately, you need to ask yourself a question, whose side would you rather be on? Elon Musk’s, or his enemies?

But remember, don’t phone, it’s just for fun.

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Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

I wrote the bulk of this article earlier in the year, but then there was so much new stuff to write about I never got around to posting it.

So now I’m super busy on other things and I haven’t got time to write something topical, I thought it would be worth updating and putting it out there.

I hope you agree.

I don’t expect this article to do great numbers. So a ‘like’ would help the Substack algorithm find and promote it.

As ever, I’d ask you to subscribe if you haven’t already. There’s a paid option or my Buy Me Coffee button if you’d prefer. 👆🏻

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If you liked this post, then maybe you’d like this one below, which I wrote after visiting an exhibition on the moon landings, and how it seems that humanity has lost much of its ambition. It’s one of my favourite articles. And it’s quite short!

That’s it. As ever all the best

LSO