59
which appears to be the reason the
Biden Administration has lavished
praise on the belated foray into elec-
tric vehicles of companies like General
Motors while ignoring Musk’s contri-
butions. Such slights rankle Musk, for
good reason: an American company
has become the world leader in an in-
dustry vital to the future of the climate,
yet the President appears too beholden
to his political allies to even acknowl-
edge, much less celebrate, its success.
Musk is not a fan of government
regulation, seeing it as bureaucratic
squelching of innovation, and has said
he believes budget deficits are out of
control and worrisome. He has also
signaled opposition to the censorious
“woke” culture that has come to domi-
nate liberal discourse. His explanations
THE LESSON OF
MUSK’S CAREER
IS TO TAKE HIS
AMBITIONS
SERIOUSLY
for the Twitter purchase have centered
on concern for free speech, which reso-
nates with conservatives who believe
they’ve been censored by the platform—
none more so than Trump. All this has
led many on the right to side with Musk.
Before the deal closed, a group of Re-
publican members of Congress sent a
letter to the company’s board, seeming
to threaten a congressional investigation
should it reject Musk’s bid.But the conservatives now cel-
ebrating his Twitter acquisition are
likely mistaken to see him as an ally.
Musk was such a strong supporter of
former President Barack Obama that he
once stood in line for six hours to shake
his hand. After Trump was elected,
Musk agreed to serve on two presiden-
tial advisory councils—the Strategic
and Policy Forum and the Manufactur-
ing Jobs Initiative—but he lasted less
than six months, resigning from both in
June 2017 in protest of the Administra-
tion’s decision to pull out of the Paris
climate accord. (In this, he showed less
patience for Trump’s antics than other
CEOs: the councils were disbanded afew months later, after Charlottesville.)
Musk’s careful neutrality on everything
from Chinese human-rights abuses
to Texas abortion law is an outrage to
those who believe he’s morally obli-
gated to take a stand, but his orienta-
tion on many key public-policy issues
appears broadly progressive.
As his answer to the democracy
question showed, Musk sees himself
transcending the left-right political di-
vide. It’s a view that has fueled his ca-
reer: a rejection of assumptions and
stale binaries and an ability to think
through problems in new ways. The
thing about Musk that critics miss is
that he’s not another businessman mov-
ing money across ledgers. When he
took over Tesla, engineers and investors
had been trying for decades to make
electric cars viable; Musk had the vi-
sion to champion a new type of battery
design and the guts to go all-in when
many doubted it could work. When he
started SpaceX, America had virtually
abandoned the space race it once domi-
nated; Musk taught himself rocketry
and invented a spacecraft from scratch.
Liberals and conservatives may not
agree on much, but virtually everyone
sees that the digital public square is
badly broken. It’s not clear what ideas
Musk will bring to the challenge—in a
statement announcing the purchase,
he proposed “enhancing the product
with new features, making the algo-
rithms open source to increase trust,
defeating the spam bots, and authen-
ticating all humans.” If fixing social
media were easy, someone would have
done it already.
But the lesson of Musk’s career is
to take his ambitions seriously. He’s
rich not because he gamed the system
but because he’s a genius who uses the
incredible force of his will to mobi-
lize resources to pursue his ideas. He’s
devoted himself to tackling what he
views as humanity’s biggest problems,
and he has decided, as he put it re-
cently, that “having a public platform
that is maximally trusted and broadly
inclusive is extremely important to
the future of civilization.” Elon Musk
has picked the next hard problem he
wants to solve. Democracy could de-
pend on whether he succeeds. —With
reporting by Mariah Espada