Musk has inspired enormous amounts of commentary. He is arguably the greatest industrialist on Earth, a man who has set, and achieved, incomprehensibly heroic goals when the entire world thought him ridiculous, with whole industries rooting for him to go down in flames, amidst setbacks, divorces, and even the death of his first-born son. And he is not worthy of emulation in all aspects of life - I would not recommend taking his approach to relationships, for example. Both of his major ventures came as close to failure as its possible to come before being saved at the last possible second by something like a government loan coming through.
Luck, of course, has played its part in Musk’s success. He is surrounded by legions of bright, hard-working people without which SpaceX and Tesla would still be moonshots existing only in the imagination of an internet millionaire. To be sure, he absolutely did not accomplish all of this single-handedly. Tesla, touted as the first successful American car startup since Chrysler in 1925, has transformed the popular conception of electric vehicles as clunky, ugly little contraptions with no power into status symbols worthy of comparison with any Corvette. SpaceX is the first private company to put a spaceship into orbit, dock with the ISS, and invent reusable rockets. Paypal catapulted banking into the 21st century, becoming the single most popular way of sending and receiving money on the internet.
South-African born entrepreneur Elon Musk has become a living symbol for the kind of fierce drive and staggering ambition that once put footprints on the moon. This real-life Iron Man has entered and revolutionized one long-stagnant industry after another, disregarding established protocols and setting a new standard for superlative quality accomplished at astonishing speed. Though we must not impugn the very real achievements of the modern world, it does seem as though a sense of vitality, a swagger, has been lost. Are Twitter and Angry Birds the pinnacle of this generation’s capacity to innovate, our answer to the Henry Fords and Von Neumanns of the past? Do the Charybdis of apathy and the Scylla of untethered optimism form a boundary through which we can no longer pass?Īt least in a few cases, the answer would seem to be no. Many of their claims can be defended soberly, but the version which tends to make it onto television sounds more like entertainment than analysis. Ebullient to the point of being hard to take seriously, this duo and their ideological kin regale us of with stories of a cybernetic destiny which we just might live long enough to see if we take the requisite hundred pills every day. In contrast are the excessively sunny dispositions of thinkers like Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku. Even science fiction, a genre noteworthy for its belief in the transformative potential of technology, has taken a noticeably dystopian turn.
In the pithy words of Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”. It’s difficult to conceive of a modern equivalent of the Manhattan Project, or find anything to equal the astonishing progress made by an America hell-bent on beating the Russians to the moon. Their reticence was surely amplified when the subprime mortgage crisis sent seismic ripples across the world economy in 2008.īut the trend really extends further back than that. More than one thinker has noted that the fires of innovation which once propelled the world headlong toward the future now seem to be little more than cinders. In recent decades the bursting of the Dotcom bubble seems to have made those investors and founders who survived afraid to pursue bold ideas.
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