Recently, I realized that my dislike of Elon Musk was interfering with my ability to acknowledge his significant accomplishment. That bothered me. I have spent much of my life working with exceptional people such as Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Ken Olsen, Bill Gates. I thought I capable of separating my feelings about a person from my judgment of their work.
I managed that with Steve Jobs. I met Steve when he was 25 and I was 35, and knew him in various capacities until he died. I never liked him, but I always admired him. My personal feelings did not prevent me from recognizing what he accomplished. The same thing was true of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.
With Musk, I have found that separation more difficult. Probably it has more to do with his personality which I find very disturbing.
The visionary autocrat
I have never met Musk, although I know people who know him well. For instance, he would often sleep on the sofa of a close friend of mine.
During the second half of the 1990s, when PayPal was an important internet company, I was leading much of Intel Capital’s investment activity, with a particular focus on residential broadband and the emergence of the internet as a new medium. Others on my staff were closer to the entrepreneurs building online commerce and payments. Of the people associated with PayPal, Max Levchin was the one I knew personally.
I left Intel and Palo Alto in 1999 to concentrate on international internet development. Looking back, I wish I had gotten to know more of that group. They went on to exercise extraordinary influence over technology and now, increasingly, politics.
Musk belongs in the company of the great industrialists. Tesla helped make electric vehicles desirable and pushed the automobile industry to take them seriously. SpaceX demonstrated what a privately led organization could accomplish in a field long dominated by governments and their established contractors. He helped start Open AI and continues to have a major role in AI with Grok.
Neither of these achievements belongs to Musk alone. Thousands of engineers, managers, factory workers, and others made them possible. But assembling those organizations, attracting capital, choosing ambitious goals, and persisting through the possibility of failure are substantial accomplishments in themselves.
Having spent decades evaluating technologies and the people behind them, I know how difficult it is to turn an ambitious idea into a functioning business. Musk has done that repeatedly.
Like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, he fits what I think of as the visionary autocrat: someone with an unusually strong sense of what should exist and an equally strong determination to make other people build it.
The question is what happens when that approach extends beyond a company and crosses into politics.
The attraction of the alpha male
Years ago, I spent two days in Rwanda visiting with the silverback gorillas. Watching the silverbacks and the behavior of the animals around them, I found myself thinking about human authority. We share almost 99% of our genome with other primates so there is a lot to learn by observing their behavior, I think.
But the comparison has limits. Primates have different social arrangements, and human societies are far more complicated. We cannot explain modern politics simply by pointing to our evolutionary relatives but nor should we ignore them.
Still, the experience left me with a question: how much of our attraction to powerful leaders comes from an old desire to have someone strong protect us and impose order?
In human society, strength takes many forms. It can mean physical force, but it can also mean intelligence, wealth, confidence, the ability to organize others, or the ability to tell a story that people want to believe. Over our evolution and particularly after the development of language, intellectual strength has overtaken physical strength.
Musk is clearly a complex person with tremendous drive and a great tolerance for risk. His achievements make his confidence persuasive and to some extent this feeds on itself. When someone has accomplished things that others considered impossible, it becomes easier for them to believe that he may also have answers to questions far beyond his original expertise. And at some point, they themselves start to believe that as well.
That is where admiration can become dangerous. Success can encourage both the successful person and his followers to stop recognizing the limits of his judgment.
Trying to understand Musk
To examine my own reaction, I began listening to interviews with Musk and discussions about him. An Ezra Klein interview with Quinn Slobodian led me to Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff.
The book helped me think about Musk as more than an unusual individual. It examines the broader worldview he represents and the relationship between technological ambition, private wealth, and political power.
I do not have to accept every argument in the book to find its central question important: what kind of society emerges when people who control powerful technologies also expect to determine how the rest of us should live?
My own experiences in South Africa gave that question a particular resonance.
South Africa and the experience of hierarchy
Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971 a year after my first son was born. I first visited South Africa in 1974, when I was living in Israel and had established a medical computer business based on work I had done at the Thoraxcenter in Rotterdam.
For someone who had participated in civil rights protests, going to apartheid South Africa was an uncomfortable decision. I justified it to myself by arguing that medical technology could benefit everyone. I also insisted on being able to visit hospitals serving black patients and brought some equipment as a personal donation.
I fell in love with the country’s beauty and returned many times. Much later, I discovered that I had family in Cape Town.
But the memory most relevant to this discussion is a small one.
While staying in someone’s home in Johannesburg, a young Black servant brought tea to my room every morning at seven. I tried to engage her in conversation. She seemed surprised that I would want to talk with her. Eventually, I learned that she had to leave her village at about four in the morning to arrive in time to bring me that tea.
Her three-hour journey was part of the machinery of someone else’s comfortable morning.
What struck me was how little attention the white people around me appeared to give to the lives of the Black people whose work sustained their households. It was as if they did not even see them.
I cannot know what lessons Musk absorbed from growing up in that society. Sharing a country does not mean sharing the same experience or drawing the same conclusions. But I wonder how growing up amid such an explicit hierarchy affected his understanding of power, service, and the people entitled to make decisions.
Humanity and individual humans
The tension I find most troubling in Musk is the distance between his concern for humanity’s future and his apparent willingness to disregard particular people in the present.
He speaks about enormous goals: making life multiplanetary, developing sustainable energy, and addressing the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. These are serious subjects.
Yet accounts of his treatment of employees and people close to him, alongside some of his own public behavior, can suggest that individual dignity matters much less to him than the mission.
He seems to care about humanity more than he cares about humans.
That is my interpretation of his conduct. I do not know what he feels privately, and I would not claim that he is incapable of empathy although I have my doubts. But we can judge how someone treats people without pretending to understand everything happening inside his mind.
I also recognize a difficulty here. Leadership sometimes requires decisions that hurt individuals while benefiting a larger group. Empathy does not automatically tell us how to resolve those conflicts. A leader who cannot tolerate causing anyone distress may be unable to make necessary decisions.
But the opposite danger is at least as serious. Once someone believes his mission is essential to civilization, almost any harm can become justifiable. There is always a larger goal, a more distant future, or a greater number of hypothetical beneficiaries.
From accomplishment to a sense of destiny
Musk showed technical ability and initiative as a child, teaching himself programming and selling a computer game. Whether that makes him a child prodigy is less important to me than what happens when early ability is followed by extraordinary adult success.
I know something about the gift and burden of feeling different because of one’s abilities. It can create confidence, but also isolation. It does not necessarily produce wisdom about other people. Fortunately, my mother thought me compassion.
I wonder whether Musk’s repeated successes have encouraged him to see himself as indispensable: someone whose judgment must prevail because humanity’s future depends on it.
I cannot know whether that is how he understands himself. But parts of his public rhetoric invite that interpretation.
There is a considerable difference between believing you can build a better car or rocket and believing you are entitled to decide what is best for civilization. The first belief can be tested against engineering and commercial results. The second requires a kind of authority that business success alone cannot confer.
The “woke mind virus”
Musk’s use of the phrase “woke mind virus” is revealing.
He uses it to describe progressive ideas that he believes encourage ideological conformity, suppress disagreement, and distort thinking about race, gender, and identity.
There are legitimate questions to ask about intolerance and conformity in progressive institutions, just as there are in conservative ones. No political movement has a monopoly on independent thinking or on the suppression of it.
But describing a collection of ideas as a virus changes the argument. People who disagree become carriers of an infection. Their reasons no longer need to be considered on their merits.
For Musk, the subject also has a personal dimension. He has linked it publicly to his estrangement from his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. She has disputed his account of their relationship and her treatment. I do not think an outsider can resolve that family conflict, and I would not use it as a complete explanation of his politics.
What interests me is the larger pattern: disagreement becomes a threat to civilization, and combating it becomes a mission.
That framing leaves little room for compromise. If you believe you are saving humanity from an infection, listening to your opponents can begin to look like weakness.
Is Musk dangerous?
I think he is.
My concern is the combination of his abilities, wealth, influence, and apparent certainty that he knows what the future requires. I am so glad that the recent elections in the USA turned against his candidates and goals.
Wealth can give someone the ability to act on a scale that would otherwise require public agreement. Control over important technologies can make governments and societies dependent on decisions made inside private organizations. A large communications platform can give its owner an exceptional role in shaping public debate.
These forms of power deserve scrutiny regardless of who holds them.
Running a company does not prepare someone automatically to govern a society. Employees may be expected to carry out a chief executive’s decisions. Citizens are entitled to challenge the decisions that shape their lives.
My effort to give Musk credit has not made me comfortable with him. It has made my concern more specific. I can admire what he has helped build and still question the authority he appears to claim from those achievements.
Perhaps the lesson of the alpha male is as much about the followers as the leader. We want someone capable to solve difficult problems. We may become so impressed by what that person can do that we stop asking what he should be allowed to decide for everyone else.
I began this journey because I wanted to acknowledge Musk’s accomplishments more fairly. I believe I can now do that.
I still do not want to live in a world where admiration for an exceptional individual becomes permission for him to rule.
Musk is just 55 years old as we are about to enter the most rapid evolution of human culture ever. I am sure he will play a significant role and I hope it will be a positive one but fear it will not.
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