The Talented Mr. Musk

Since the novel coronavirus was first reported, Tesla stock has more than doubled. In that time, Musk has inhabited all of his many identities. At the beginning of May, he announced he would be getting rid of all his worldly possessions, tweeting he “will own no house.” On June 19, it was reported he had sold his mansion in Bel Air to a Chinese tech billionaire for $29 million. Also in the intervening time, his SpaceX aerospace firm saw a disastrous rocket explosion on a launchpad in Texas and then, a week later, successfully sent American astronauts into orbit for a mission to the International Space Station for the first time since the shuttle program ended in 2011. He won a showdown with California regulators over what he described as the “fascist” lockdown orders stopping Tesla car production. He and his pop star partner had a baby whose name became a big story in the celebrity press, which also turned into a legal fight, and he got into fights with just about everybody on the internet (including his partner’s mother).

We’ve all had an eventful few months. We’ve lived through a period that we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives, and anyone who didn’t live through it will have trouble fully understanding. Elon Musk’s few months also got crazier — but from a much higher baseline of crazy. Toward the beginning of the lockdown, he named his newborn X Æ A-12 Musk, a reference to a Greek letter and a spy plane and an algebra variable. So that child, at least, will probably carry a permanent sense of how weird things were at the moment his father signed his birth certificate. The birth document has been the subject of multiple objections from the state of California, since only the standard 26 letters of the Latin alphabet are allowed in legal names. The legal wrangling is now on its third challenge.

The baby name fiasco is typical Musk, yet still a footnote in the ballad of Elon’s pandemic. What it says about Musk’s image, though, is consistent with what we knew about his character — or should I say characters? It’s easy to forget, now that he’s a pop culture icon we just sort of accept as a fixture of public life, how strange a figure Musk cuts and how many identities he inhabits.

And, much like Mr. Ripley, Musk often appears to get into impossible binds from which he theatrically extracts himself.

First, the many roles he must play. As the CEO of Tesla Inc., he is a factory-owning industrialist as well as environmentalist hero pushing the edge of zero-emissions car technology with the help of green subsidies. Part Henry Ford and part Greta Thunberg. As the CEO of SpaceX, he is both heroically pushing the frontiers of science and space exploration in his absurd “Occupy Mars” T-shirts as well as doing business as a major government military contractor. (One should not forget that the U.S. Air Force is a bigger space program than NASA.) As a pop culture figure, he is just as much a Janus. His more right-wing face can be seen as a regular guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and in his role as executive producer, along with Peter Thiel, of the film adaptation of Thank You for Smoking, the libertarian comedy novel about the perils of regulatory busybodies by Christopher Buckley. This offends those who prefer his more left-wing face as a climate-crusading, red-carpet Hollywood regular who appears alongside Canadian dream-pop indie sensation Grimes, the mother of X Æ A-12.

All of this, you would think, would require delicacy from Elon. He is walking some fine lines. But he does not practice delicacy. And thus our protagonist finds himself in avoidable, no-win situations in which he somehow wins. “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420,” he said in 2018 of his electric car company’s stock. “Funding secured,” he added, bafflingly. This one tweet got him docked $20 million by the FEC, about which he commented, “Worth it.” Of course, 420 is the countercultural number that signifies an affinity for smoking marijuana. Speaking of which: On Rogan’s podcast, which also features a video feed, he was shown smoking a joint. Because this is a federal crime, it almost caused him to lose the security clearance he needs for SpaceX to do its military contracting work and also ended up costing millions on his end and NASA’s.

I repeat: Almost cost him his security clearance.

Also in 2018, Musk baselessly accused a diver trying to save children trapped in a collapsed Thai cave of being a “child rapist” because Musk wanted to use a minisub of his own to resolve the situation. The ensuing defamation suit lasted over a year.

None of this seems to have taught Musk a lesson about steering clear of pointless feuds on the internet while the enterprises he leads are conducting important business. Even where his stunts don’t land him in legal hot water, they ignore the treacherous terrain of corporate virtue-signaling in the age of woke capitalism. At least these accomplishments and managerial responsibilities, you might think, would have captured Musk’s focus. You would be wrong. He also found the time and attention, meanwhile, to beef with the maternal grandmother of his newborn child on Twitter. Grimes’s mother, Sandy Garossino, attacked him for his “MRA bulls—.” (MRA, or “men’s rights activist,” is an online term for people who support reactionary anti-feminist ideas.) This is because he tweeted the advice to “take the red pill,” a reference to a scene in The Matrix that became popular on the alt-right as a metaphor for waking up to the moral and social reality liberals present as being illusory. The president’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, replied, “Taken!” to Musk, and Lilly Wachowski, one of the writers of The Matrix, who is a transgender woman and Trump critic, replied, “F— both of you.”

This politico-culture war on the internet is what Musk was up to during the period when he was waging his high stakes legal battle with Alameda County over the future of his Fremont, California, car factory. Musk’s Tesla won an important standoff with county and state authorities over whether it could reopen production operations early, against work stoppage orders. Musk told the county it had to let him resume building cars, or he’d pull the job-heavy manufacturing hub out of the state and move to Nevada. It was unclear exactly which authority, county or state or both, he would be defying by reopening. Both ended up caving. First, President Trump tweeted support, saying that “California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW. It can be done Fast & Safely!” Alameda County allowed for minimum business operations, but that didn’t satisfy Musk. With workers asked to return to the floor, he tweeted, “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.” The authorities relented, and 18 days after he was asking that only he be arrested, he got a nearly $800 million payout from Tesla according to his performance-based deal with the company, which rewards him for the Tesla share price hitting certain milestones.

Donning his space pioneer/rocketeering military contractor hat, things in Muskworld were also dramatic. First, there was the aforementioned launchpad explosion of a prototype rocket dubbed the Starship. Then, a week later, at the final second before liftoff, weather conditions forced SpaceX to abort a manned mission to launch two NASA veterans into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the end of the shuttle program, which had forced Washington to buy expensive rides to space from the Russians. Two days after that, SpaceX successfully completed the mission. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are aboard the International Space Station now.

Musk leads multiple lives at the same time, and he is always challenging reality to stop him and force him back inside the box. So even for those of us with no affinity for Elon or his crummy electric cars, there is a certain majestic drama to the dizzying, high-wire confidence with which the man operates. There might also be a lesson here about the inhospitableness of our current moment to innovation. It shouldn’t take Elon Musk’s resources and chutzpah to get space exploration moving or boost manufacturing or cut suffocating red tape or challenge successfully a lockdown power grab by our elected representatives. After all, despite appearances to the contrary, there’s only one of him.

Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.