58 Time May 9/May 16, 2022
“It’s easy to complain, but the fact of
the matter is, this is the most prosper-
ous time in human history,” he said.
“Is there really some point in history
where you’d rather be? And by the
way, have you actually read history?
Because it wasn’t great.”
This posture—the head-in-the-
clouds futurist who is too fixated on
his cosmic ambitions to engage with
the grimy minutiae of governance—is
a common affectation for Musk. But
his stunning move to buy Twitter and
take it private has made his views on
politics, society, and human discourse
a matter of urgent concern. The world’s
richest man stands soon to control the
world’s most influential media plat-
form, a venture he claims to have un-
dertaken not for profit but for the good
of society. His non answer to the ques-
tion about the state of American de-
mocracy shows why his politics is so
hard to pin down and his goals are so
widely misunderstood. It also helps ex-
plain why he wanted to buy Twitter.
Many people loathe Musk, who
has cultivated a public persona of
roguish obnoxiousness. On Twitter,
where he has more than 80 million fol-
lowers, he alternates in-joke memes
about sci-fi or computer chips with
silly or provocative utterances, as if he
were a random sh-tposter. His friend
Bill Lee, who claims to have persuaded
Musk to join Twitter in the first place,
told me that Musk became “probably
the most viral social influencer ever”
by accident, not design, and that he
viewed it as a way to let off steam and
connect with people directly.
Musk has often used his platform
in toxic fashion: sliming a heroic cave
diver as a “pedo guy,” grossly mocking
a Senator’s Twitter photo. His tweets
have gotten him in trouble with the
Securities and Exchange Commission,
which sued him for misleading inves-
tors in 2018. But Musk generally does
not concern himself much with other
people’s feelings, as his own brother
Kimbal told me: “He is a savant when
it comes to business, but his gift is not
empathy with people.”
Yet what matters isn’t whether
Musk is a nice person so much as what
he wants with his $44 billion platform.
△
Musk at a Tesla event in
Austin on April 7BUSINESS
And it is in trying to read his motiva-
tions that both left and right seem to
be getting Musk wrong.Many liberals see Musk as a rapa-
cious profiteer whose dealings with
government are aimed at maximizing
his income and evading responsibil-
ity. But Musk’s billions are mostly on
paper, not hoarded offshore, a reflec-
tion of the value investors have as-
signed to Tesla. If he has sometimes
paid little or no federal tax, that’s
mostly because our system taxes in-
come, not wealth. Those who think
Musk ought to be paying more taxes
should blame the tax code, not him, as
the liberal Senators who are trying to
change the system acknowledge. “The
scam is what’s legal here,” Senator
Ron Wyden told me of the proposal he
backs to tax billionaires’ wealth.
Musk seems somewhat uninter-
ested in being rich except as a means
to realizing his ambitions for human-
ity. He has repeatedly driven himself
to near bankruptcy, as when in 2008
he put up his own money to help Tesla
make payroll through a tough stretch.
He sees himself as an engineer and
bristles at being described as an “in-
vestor.” Before his Twitter bid, Tesla
was said to be the only publicly traded
stock he owned.
Another misconception about Musk
is that his companies are bilking the
government. In 2010, Tesla received a
$465 million federal loan, but that was
years after Musk had poured millions
into getting the company launched.
Tax credits for electric vehicles also
contributed to Tesla’s bottom line for
many years. But even if it were true that
Tesla couldn’t have made it without
government help, it’s odd to hear liber-
als criticize the deployment of public
funds to encourage environmental in-
novation. (Such spending was a hall-
mark of Obama Administration policy;
back in 2012, it was Republicans who
painted Tesla as a Solyndra- like boon-
doggle.) SpaceX has also received bil-
lions of government funding in the
form of NASA contracts, though the
company similarly first had to get
off the ground (so to speak) on the
strength of Musk’s will and wallet. And
Musk’s innovations in rocket designhave arguably saved taxpayers billions,
enabling, for example, astronauts to
be ferried to the International Space
Station for a fraction of the exorbitant
price the U.S. previously paid Russia
to do it.
Liberals also take issue with Musk’s
corporate leadership, and critics who
assail his reckless disregard for pub-
lic health and safety have a point. In
2020, Musk defied local public-health
authorities to keep his factories open
as the pandemic raged, putting work-
ers at risk. Musk’s companies have
faced lawsuits over working condi-
tions, including allegations of sexual
harassment and racial abuse. In Feb-
ruary, California’s agency for fair em-
ployment claims alleged that Tesla
tolerated “rampant racism” for years,
allowing pervasive discrimination,
which Tesla denies. Musk isn’t per-
sonally accused of harassing workers,
but he can certainly be blamed for the
workplace climate at his companies.
Tesla has resisted union organizing,