Who is Elon Musk?

This was a very interesting discussion, but I sensed a divergence of opinion between Tom McTague and Helen Thompson about what the motivational force driving Musk’s actions is. Tom kept bringing up Musk’s actions in the context of the wider technological and geopolitical picture, and Helen repeatedly pulled the focus back to the individual self-interests of Musk, and of the other tech titans. Helen did this in an understated, unstrident way, but there was definitely a sense of a (negative) judgement of Musk as a personality, and of alarm at his behaviour and the consequences for Europe and the UK (in that order). As an analysis it would not have been out of place had it been produced by any number of graun columnists, or someone like Marr or Maitlis or any one of that crowd. The alarm focused on the implications of Europe’s powerlessness in a world where entire stratas of tech (eg satellites) are in the control of Musk, or of other personalities in the US who don’t necessarily share the interests or the worldview of the European technocratic cabal. It is fair enough to be alarmed of course, but what was not explored at all was the unanswerable charge that no one forced Europe into the mess it has got itself into over not having it’s own tech ecosystems – this is entirely of their own choosing and doing. European policymakers have repeatedly, deliberately and consciously made the choices to let all the historical advantages of their massive technological inheritance slide away, and have shown a preference to prioritise the maintenance of very expensive social models, and the projection of their values instead. This is fine at one level, but Europeans, like Helen, then expressing alarm at dependence after having fallen behind through choice, is um, ‘cake’. One more observation: the pop psychology around the trauma of Musk’s upbringing and his bipolar nature etc, was entertaining to a point, but not to be taken too seriously – despite the speculations we don’t really have any means of guessing what is inside Musk’s mind.