Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer
Timothy Snyder
Sun, 17 September 2023
The Silicon Valley oligarch, perhaps the richest man in the world, extends a hand to his fellow oligarch, the man who has his finger on Russia’s nuclear button. They share a secret about the foolishness of the masses, and take action to save us all from ourselves. Thanks to the two of them, the world is saved from Armageddon.
Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it happened, in a biography of Elon Musk and its press campaign. Although neither Musk nor his biographer can get the story straight, it is true that the multibillionaire CEO of X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) refused to extend the coverage of his Starlink satellite communications for the Ukrainian armed forces last autumn.
Musk did so because Russians (sometimes he says Putin) told him that a Ukrainian attack on part of Ukraine’s own territory (the Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia) would lead to a Russian nuclear response. This was a lie. Ukraine has carried out dozens of operations in Crimea, some of them quite spectacular. It seems absurd to have to write this sentence, but none of them led to nuclear war. The net effect of such operations was de-escalatory, as such attacks reduce Russia’s capability to attack Ukrainian territory.
Russia’s ceaseless nuclear threats are a psychological operation to frighten Ukraine and its allies into surrender
Since we all know this from abundant experience, no one should have gone to press with the claim that Musk prevented nuclear war by stopping a Ukrainian attack on a Russian ship docked in Ukrainian territory. As if to punctuate the point, Ukraine has attacked several Russian ships in the past few days. Russia has retaliated by promising to repair them. The Russians know that they are in a war and that the other side is allowed to fight back.
After 19 months of war, most observers have understood that Russia’s ceaseless nuclear threats are a psychological operation, an attempt to frighten Ukraine and its allies into surrender. The claim that Musk prevented escalation repackages Russian propaganda, and helps it to find a new audience. It provides a platform to Russian lies meant to demoralise.
In fact, Musk’s actions have increased the chances of nuclear war. There is always some risk, which Russia increased by initiating a major conflict. Ukraine then decreased the probability by ignoring Russian nuclear blackmail. If Ukraine had surrendered, then the lesson for the rest of the world would have been clear: you must have nuclear weapons, either to blackmail or to avoid being blackmailed. The Ukrainians took this decision under stress, since if a weapon were detonated it would be on their territory. Musk, who was in no danger of any kind, chose instead to give in to the nuclear blackmail, thereby encouraging more of it.
If anything, Musk’s actions also extended the conventional war. After three major battlefield victories last year, the Ukrainians had a chance to put an end to the Russian occupation by striking south. One problem, to be fair to Musk, was that their western allies had not supplied them with the necessary weapons in time. But without comms, a meaningful advance was impossible. This gave the Russian side time to build the fortifications and lay the mines that make this year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive so much harder. Last week I visited a rehabilitation centre in Kyiv, and spoke to soldiers who had lost limbs.In almost every case, they had been wounded by mines. All of them had comrades killed by mines.
Musk has doubled down, spreading the very Russian propaganda that made him a dupe
Everything Musk thought he was making better, he made worse. Since then, Musk has doubled down, spreading the very Russian propaganda that made him a dupe, and moving closer to a common fascist position with Putin. In a race to the bottom, both men in recent days have been blaming antisemitism on the Jews. It is not going well for Russia on the battlefield, but Musk’s handlers can certainly say that they have done their part.
Perhaps the saddest part of this affair is the celebration of a coward at the expense of people showing physical courage. Ukrainians have absorbed and reversed a full-scale invasion by the world’s largest country at tremendous cost; Musk is a guy who makes a show of not fighting Mark Zuckerberg. In presenting Musk’s psychological vulnerability as wartime glory, the biography invites us into a world where our baseless fears are the truth, and the real courage of others the distraction. The Russians played Musk the same way that social media plays the rest of us, seeking out a personal anxiety, getting us to act on it, then profiting from the cognitive dissonance.
The oligarchs will be cowards, oriented to fantasies of escape to New Zealand or Mars or immortality or whatever, disinvested from the hard choices the rest of us have to make amid the crises they are making worse. Among other awful things, Putin’s war in Ukraine was oligarchical whimsy, based on the fantasy that Ukraine does not exist and its people wish to be Russian. There are things so stupid that you must be a multibillionaire to believe them; but when it all goes wrong, another multibillionaire will offer even more stupid succour, as Musk has done for Putin.
It is hard to think of a more dangerous idea than the one that people like Musk and Putin are heroes saving the rest of us from our own limitations. The plotline about the oligarchical supermen is indeed fictional, but it does real harm in the real world.
• Timothy Snyder is the Richard C Levin Professor of History at Yale University
Opinion
For Elon Musk, the personal is political – but his march to the right affects us all
Lloyd Green
Sun, 17 September 2023
Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
The personal is political. The phrase was popularized by 1960s second-wave feminism but it sums up Elon Musk’s ideological journey. Once a “fundraiser and fanboy for Barack Obama”, to quote his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the sometime world’s richest man now plays thin-skinned, anti-woke warrior – a self-professed free-speech purist who in fact is anything but.
Related: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development
His rebranding of Twitter to X having proved a disaster, he flirts with antisemites for fun and lost profits. He threatens the Anti-Defamation League with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. The ADL never suggested the name “X”. That was a long-term fetish, now a clear own-goal.
Like the building of Rome, Musk’s march to the right did not take only one day. A series of events lie behind it. Musk is a modern Wizard of Oz. Like the man behind the curtain, he is needy. According to Isaacson, outright rejection – and gender transition – by one of Musk’s children played an outsized role in his change. So did Covid restrictions and a slap from the Biden White House.
In March 2020, as Covid descended, Musk became enraged when China and California mandated lockdowns that threatened Tesla, his electric car company, and thus his balance sheet.
“My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” he wrote in an intra-company email.
But Musk jumped the gun. Moloch would take his cut. In the US, Covid has killed 1.14 million. American life expectancy is among the lowest in the industrialized west. Thailand does better than Florida, New York and Iowa. For their part, Ohio, South Carolina and Missouri, all Republican-run, trail Thailand. Bangladesh outperforms Mississippi. Overall, the US is behind Colombia and Croatia. Under Covid, Trump-voting counties became killing fields.
But in May 2020, amid a controversy with local government in California, Musk tweeted, “take the red pill”. It was a reference to The Matrix, in which Neo, the character played by Keanu Reeves, elects to take the “red pill” and thereby confront reality, instead of downing the “blue pill” to wake happily in bed. Ivanka Trump, of all people, was quick to second Musk: “Taken!”
Musk’s confrontation with California would not be the last time he was stymied or dissed by those in elected office. In summer 2021, the Biden administration stupidly declined to invite him to a White House summit on electric vehicles – because Tesla was not unionized.
“We, of course, welcome the efforts of all automakers who recognize the potential of an electric vehicle future and support efforts that will help reach the president’s goal. And certainly, Tesla is one of those companies,” Biden’s press secretary said, adding: “Today, it’s the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers and the UAW president who will stand with President Biden.” Two years later, the UAW has gone on strike. At midnight on Thursday, 13,000 workers left the assembly lines at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
For all of his talk of freedom, Musk sidles up to China. This week, he claimed the relationship between Taiwan and China was analogous to that between Hawaii and the US. Taiwan is “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China”, Musk said. Such comments dovetail with Chinese talking points. He made no reference to US interests. He is a free agent. It’s not just about Russia and Ukraine.
Musk’s tumultuous personal life has also pressed on the scales. In December 2021, he began to rail against the “woke mind virus”. If the malady were left unchecked, he said, “civilization will never become interplanetary”. Musk apparently loves humanity. People, however, are a different story.
According to Isaacson, the outburst was triggered in part by rejection and gender transition. In 2022, one of his children changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, telling a court: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She also embraced radical economics.
“I’ve made many overtures,” Musk tells Isaacson. “But she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” His hurt is palpable.
James Birchall, Musk’s office manager, says: “He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won’t speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus.”
Contradictions litter Musk’s worldview. Take the experiences of Bari Weiss, the professional contrarian and former New York Times writer. In late 2022, she was one of the conduits for the Twitter Files, fed to receptive reporters by Musk in an attempt to show Twitter’s bias against Trump and the US right. On 12 December, Weiss delivered her last reports. Four days later, she criticized Musk’s decision to suspend a group of journalists, for purportedly violating anti-doxxing policies.
Related: Benjamin Netanyahu expected to meet Elon Musk to discuss antisemitism on X
“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” Weiss charged. She also pressed Musk over China, to his dismay. He grudgingly acknowledged, she told Isaacson, that because of Tesla’s investments, “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China.
“China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, has two sides.”
“Weiss was disturbed,” Isaacson writes.
Musk is disdainful of Donald Trump, whom he sees as a conman. This May, on X, Musk hosted a campaign roll-out for another would-be strongman: Ron DeSantis. A glitch-filled disaster, it portended what followed. The Florida governor continues to slide in the polls, Vivek Ramaswamy nipping at his heels.
Musk remains a force. On Monday, he is slated to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted rightwing prime minister of Israel who will be in New York for the United Nations general assembly. Like Musk, Netanyahu is not a favorite of the Biden White House. Misery loves company.
For Elon Musk, the personal is political – but his march to the right affects us all
Lloyd Green
Sun, 17 September 2023
Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
The personal is political. The phrase was popularized by 1960s second-wave feminism but it sums up Elon Musk’s ideological journey. Once a “fundraiser and fanboy for Barack Obama”, to quote his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the sometime world’s richest man now plays thin-skinned, anti-woke warrior – a self-professed free-speech purist who in fact is anything but.
Related: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development
His rebranding of Twitter to X having proved a disaster, he flirts with antisemites for fun and lost profits. He threatens the Anti-Defamation League with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. The ADL never suggested the name “X”. That was a long-term fetish, now a clear own-goal.
Like the building of Rome, Musk’s march to the right did not take only one day. A series of events lie behind it. Musk is a modern Wizard of Oz. Like the man behind the curtain, he is needy. According to Isaacson, outright rejection – and gender transition – by one of Musk’s children played an outsized role in his change. So did Covid restrictions and a slap from the Biden White House.
In March 2020, as Covid descended, Musk became enraged when China and California mandated lockdowns that threatened Tesla, his electric car company, and thus his balance sheet.
“My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” he wrote in an intra-company email.
But Musk jumped the gun. Moloch would take his cut. In the US, Covid has killed 1.14 million. American life expectancy is among the lowest in the industrialized west. Thailand does better than Florida, New York and Iowa. For their part, Ohio, South Carolina and Missouri, all Republican-run, trail Thailand. Bangladesh outperforms Mississippi. Overall, the US is behind Colombia and Croatia. Under Covid, Trump-voting counties became killing fields.
But in May 2020, amid a controversy with local government in California, Musk tweeted, “take the red pill”. It was a reference to The Matrix, in which Neo, the character played by Keanu Reeves, elects to take the “red pill” and thereby confront reality, instead of downing the “blue pill” to wake happily in bed. Ivanka Trump, of all people, was quick to second Musk: “Taken!”
Musk’s confrontation with California would not be the last time he was stymied or dissed by those in elected office. In summer 2021, the Biden administration stupidly declined to invite him to a White House summit on electric vehicles – because Tesla was not unionized.
“We, of course, welcome the efforts of all automakers who recognize the potential of an electric vehicle future and support efforts that will help reach the president’s goal. And certainly, Tesla is one of those companies,” Biden’s press secretary said, adding: “Today, it’s the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers and the UAW president who will stand with President Biden.” Two years later, the UAW has gone on strike. At midnight on Thursday, 13,000 workers left the assembly lines at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
For all of his talk of freedom, Musk sidles up to China. This week, he claimed the relationship between Taiwan and China was analogous to that between Hawaii and the US. Taiwan is “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China”, Musk said. Such comments dovetail with Chinese talking points. He made no reference to US interests. He is a free agent. It’s not just about Russia and Ukraine.
Musk’s tumultuous personal life has also pressed on the scales. In December 2021, he began to rail against the “woke mind virus”. If the malady were left unchecked, he said, “civilization will never become interplanetary”. Musk apparently loves humanity. People, however, are a different story.
According to Isaacson, the outburst was triggered in part by rejection and gender transition. In 2022, one of his children changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, telling a court: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She also embraced radical economics.
“I’ve made many overtures,” Musk tells Isaacson. “But she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” His hurt is palpable.
James Birchall, Musk’s office manager, says: “He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won’t speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus.”
Contradictions litter Musk’s worldview. Take the experiences of Bari Weiss, the professional contrarian and former New York Times writer. In late 2022, she was one of the conduits for the Twitter Files, fed to receptive reporters by Musk in an attempt to show Twitter’s bias against Trump and the US right. On 12 December, Weiss delivered her last reports. Four days later, she criticized Musk’s decision to suspend a group of journalists, for purportedly violating anti-doxxing policies.
Related: Benjamin Netanyahu expected to meet Elon Musk to discuss antisemitism on X
“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” Weiss charged. She also pressed Musk over China, to his dismay. He grudgingly acknowledged, she told Isaacson, that because of Tesla’s investments, “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China.
“China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, has two sides.”
“Weiss was disturbed,” Isaacson writes.
Musk is disdainful of Donald Trump, whom he sees as a conman. This May, on X, Musk hosted a campaign roll-out for another would-be strongman: Ron DeSantis. A glitch-filled disaster, it portended what followed. The Florida governor continues to slide in the polls, Vivek Ramaswamy nipping at his heels.
Musk remains a force. On Monday, he is slated to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted rightwing prime minister of Israel who will be in New York for the United Nations general assembly. Like Musk, Netanyahu is not a favorite of the Biden White House. Misery loves company.
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