I cannot find a single thing about him that’s likable. His ideas are all fucking stupid, and he only got to where he is now through rampant exploitation, disregard for safety in his factories, and stealing the “founder” title from every company he bought. He literally just bought his way to the top, and for some reason people see him as a deity. He isn’t charismatic, like a cult leader, and he gives off the impression that he peaked in middle school. So what about him is so likable to people? I don’t get it, and I probably never will.
i think at least in part its born out of some sort of subconscious desperation about the failures of neoliberalism to provide a positive vision for the future as things noticeably get worse, and the inability of western governments to really do anything big and grand any more. im reminded of a graeber passage about how we have abandoned poetic technologies for bureaucratic technologies (technologies to help with filling out the increasing numbers of forms that increasing technology has brought us, rather than big vision technology), and musk does offer a vision of those poetic technologies again - space travel and electric robot cars and hyperloops - jetsons sort of shit. it might not be thought-out or practical, but i think he primarily sells "optimistic vision" which is something i think people miss and long for. especially with regard to the climate, where society seems to have adopted a "surely some super technology will come along in the nick of time to save us" approach, and governments do absolutely fuck all, having a deus ex machina to come along with his big brain genius and high tech solutions and save us from ourselves and lead us into the techno-utopia is a very appealing fantasy. it was a big wow moment in coal-obsessed australia when he built a giant battery in south australia in record time and for supposedly low cost, it was just such a breath of fresh air that anybody was doing fucking anything, it was hard not to hang on to that tiny little bit of hope even if your brain was screaming at you about it being misguided. of course the media never reported when one of these big batteries caught fire and couldnt be put out for four days as it spewed toxic chemicals into the air, but thats the side you only see when you look more closely, and its easy enough to put out of mind once youre in the cult
graeber from the utopia of rules
I would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies.
By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense are as old as civilization. They could even be said to predate complex machinery. Lewis Mumford used to argue that the first complex machines were actually made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were only able to build the pyramids because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which then allowed them to develop production line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple operations and assigning each to one team of workmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than the lever and inclined plane. Bureaucratic oversight turned armies of peasant farmers into the cogs of a vast machine. Even much later, after actual cogs had been invented, the design of complex machinery was always to some degree an elaboration of principles originally developed to organize people.
Yet still, again and again, we see those machines—whether their moving parts are arms and torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs—being put to work to realize otherwise impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways, and on and on. Certainly, poetic technologies almost invariably have something terrible about them; the poetry is likely to evoke dark satanic mills as much as it does grace or liberation. But the rational, bureaucratic techniques are always in service to some fantastic end.
From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never realized—marked the highwater mark of such poetic technologies. What we have now is the reverse. It’s not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer encouraged. It’s that our fantasies remain free-floating; there’s no longer even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. Meanwhile, in the few areas in which free, imaginative creativity actually is fostered, such as in open-source Internet software development, it is ultimately marshaled in order to create even more, and even more effective, platforms for the filling out of forms. This is what I mean by “bureaucratic technologies”: administrative imperatives have become not the means, but the end of technological development.
Meanwhile, the greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed on this earth has spent the last decades telling its citizens that we simply can no longer contemplate grandiose enterprises, even if—as the current environmental crisis suggests—the fate of the earth depends on it.