What to Think about Elon Musk

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

 

Ayn Rand is one of those rare writers who has been almost as unlucky in her enemies as she’s been in her friends. There are many worthwhile criticisms to make of her thinking and her writing — I still think Atlas Shrugged is a better novel than The Grapes of Wrath, though mostly because The Grapes of Wrath is a terrible slog of a novel — but, the times being what they are, one mostly hears the dumb complaints.

 

(I’ll get to Elon Musk in a bit.)

 

One particularly dumb line of “Har! Har! Hypocrisy!” criticism directed at Rand is the fact that she, a committed enemy of the welfare state, collected Social Security in her old age. Rand naturally anticipated such criticism, and wrote that she thought of her Social Security checks as “restitution” — she opposed Social Security when the state was taking her money, and she opposed Social Security when the state was sending her a check. If it had been up to her, there wouldn’t have been any Social Security at all — but there was Social Security, so why shouldn’t she take back some of what was taken from her?

 

(Rand, the great apostle of capitalism, apparently was not very good with money, but she sold truckloads of books and presumably paid a lot of taxes over the course of her career.)

 

One sometimes hears similar lines of criticism deployed against libertarian-ish businessmen such as Charles Koch. Koch is at the center of a small galaxy of policy and advocacy organizations, many of which are dedicated to opposing various kinds of federal intervention in private businesses. But some Koch-affiliated companies collect various subsidies. (Some of these appear to be outright subsidies, some of them are simply the result of government policies that Koch’s political enemies wish were different. But, arguendo, let’s call them all subsidies.) Koch opposes subsidies and other forms of crony capitalism, and he advocates a very free market. He has, as it turns out, mostly lost that fight, and there are subsidies available to a whole range of businesses from soybean farmers to Starbucks. Does the fact that Charles Koch opposes such policies in principle oblige him to forgo the benefits associated with them? Does his political thinking — which very much puts him in the minority — necessitate that his business units put themselves at a special economic disadvantage vis-à-vis their competitors?

 

I don’t think so. In this much, at least, I’m with Ayn Rand: Uncle Stupid is in my pocket every day, and I’ll claw back whatever I can when the opportunity presents itself. If you vote against something and lose, that does not require you to behave as though you had won and ignore reality.

 

Which brings us, by a circuitous route, to Elon Musk, the puckish African-American entrepreneur who is at this moment the wealthiest man walking the Earth and who is about to become the proud new owner of . . . an embarrassing, grotesque, vicious, money-losing social-media company that he has for some unfathomable reason agreed to pay $44 billion for. I half suspect that Elon Musk’s campaign to acquire Twitter was something like Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: part publicity stunt, part vanity project, part fit of pique that he never really intended to go through with but couldn’t walk away from once he was in the ring. Congratulations, boss: You’ve just spent $44 billion to buy a company that lost $221 million last year, doesn’t have a viable business model, and seems to be staffed exclusively by people who hate you. For that kind of money, you could have bought a real company, like Kimberly-Clark ($2.6 billion in profit last year and growing), and for a few bucks more you could have bought Ford ($18 billion in profit in 2021), which might be of some use to a carmaker. Hell, you could have bought Dogecoin — twice.

 

That said, I don’t suppose Elon Musk needs my business advice. And, besides, he has made it clear that he doesn’t think about Twitter as a business proposition, anyway. He says he isn’t interested in the economics of the company, but in its social and cultural position.

 

Conservatives run hot and cold on Musk. One common criticism levied at him is the one addressed above: that many of his business interests — not just Tesla — have thrived on government subsidies, incentives, and contracts. The tax incentives the U.S. government offers for electric vehicles are not the result of Musk’s lobbying, and he has in fact been critical of them at times. For one thing, they are a bigger help to other electric-car makers than they are to Tesla: That $12,500 tax rebate is 46 percent of a Nissan Leaf but only 6.5 percent of a loaded Model X. And, besides, because of the way the tax credits are structured, Tesla buyers have not been eligible to receive rebates for some time now. Neither have GM buyers, both firms having crossed the critical 200,000-sales mark. Musk has opposed moves in California that would make solar power for homeowners less financially attractive than it has been — Musk has solar-power interests, and while the California situation is more complicated than a straightforward subsidy, it is fair to say that Musk has a financial interest in play.

 

Musk sometimes talks like a techno-libertarian, particularly on the issue of free speech, but his admittedly incoherent public political statements have been in the main, though by no means exclusively, progressive in the most conventional and ordinary sense. He supported Andrew Yang in 2020 and cares a lot about climate change; he also thinks a lot of the tell-me-your-pronouns stuff is silly, thinks the Covid-19 lockdowns in California were excessive, and isn’t keen on punitive taxes directed at . . . him and Jeff Bezos, mostly. He prefers consumption taxes to income taxes and supports estate taxes on the grounds that — here’s that famous human touch of his — the “probability of progeny being equally excellent at capital allocation is not high.” He sounds Swiss on the subject of direct democracy and hand-on-heart when it comes to “the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth” and the “greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been.”

 

And he likes to get high with Joe Rogan. So he is a little bit all over the map.

 

But he is not Charles Koch — not by a damned sight — and has not put himself forward as a champion of laissez-faire economics. He did not lobby those subsidies into existence, though of course he took account of them in his business plans — as any competent business executive would.

 

He calls himself an “absolutist” on free speech, and you can almost smell the Absolut from here. When Vladimir Putin’s atavistic cabal invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Musk resisted calls to block Russian state media from using his satellites. So he means to run a very liberal regime at Twitter.

 

I have my doubts that Elon Musk will be able to produce a good version of Twitter, because a good version of Twitter would not be Twitter, just as a hammer that you can’t bang your thumb with isn’t a hammer. It is fun to watch the progressive meltdown about the possibility that Twitter soon will be run by someone who actually believes in free speech. But if I have learned anything from the political developments of the past several years, it is that my enemies’ enemies are not necessarily my friends. Conservatives who think he is going to rescue the public square from the pious fanatics who have appointed themselves its roving mutaween are going to be terribly disappointed. Elon Musk is an enormously intelligent, emotionally immature, charmingly eccentric man who has $264 billion or so with which to amuse himself and, at times, to amuse the rest of us, too. Even the SEC must occasionally allow a secret smile at his antics.

 

But the problem with Twitter is not who owns it, and it never has been. The problem with Twitter is that mankind is a fallen creature in need of a redeemer, a creature that now has the technological capacity to demonstrate its fallenness 6,000 times per second.