Complacent centrists are to blame for Musk
“Musk went through periods when he oscillated between depression, stupor, giddiness and manic energy. He would fall into foul moods that led to almost catatonic trances and depressive paralysis. Then, as if a switch flipped, he would become giddy and replay old Monty Python skits of silly walks and wacky debates, breaking into his stuttering laugh.”
Walter Isaacson’s portrait of Elon Musk in last year’s biography is of a man living on the edge of (and sometimes over the edge of) insanity. A troubled man driven to extremes, who never takes a holiday, couch surfing or sleeping under his desk. And expecting others to do the same.
He is someone quick to deploy to his employees the insults his father once hurled at him, calling them idiots and berating them before firing them. Someone it is almost impossible to say no to, even when what he is asking for is impossible. So people stop telling him things that he needs to hear. This doesn’t sound like the perfect collaborator for a president who employs the slogan “Trump was right about everything”, sometimes in capital letters, echoing the posters in fascist Italy that insisted “Mussolini is always right”.
Donald Trump, too, is given to abruptly terminating professional relationships and then abusing those who once worked for him. Like Musk, he falls in love but his most enduring love affair is with himself. Musk, by contrast, seems like someone who would quite like to split up even with himself if that were physically possible.
So the prospects for a lasting Musk-Trump political partnership do not seem great, even if one assesses it only by observing their personalities and working styles. But I think the prospects are grimmer than that, for reasons that are politically interesting.
As well as being manic and difficult and offensive and spectacularly ignorant about British politics, Musk is something else: brilliant. Visionary, in fact. His professional achievements have been truly impressive and real advances for humanity - commercial reusable rockets, financially viable electric car production, a revolution in satellite provision - have come from him sleeping under his desk.
His political observations seem sometimes to come from another planet and it is probably not a coincidence that one of the things that drives him is the prospect of living on Mars. But he doesn’t merely dream about this, he is working on it and making progress. When he fires people it is not, as it almost always is with Trump, merely about his ego. He does it because he refuses to let his projects fail, since he (with reason) regards them as essential for the survival of human consciousness.
As Isaacson reports: “[Musk had] a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. ‘I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,’ he says. ‘I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy and space travel.’” In pursuit of this vision he relentlessly battles obstacles. He spends hour after hour, day upon day, on the assembly line of his projects, working to speed up processes, getting across the detail, quizzing the people directly responsible. His approach to any step in production that isn’t strictly necessary is always “delete, delete, delete”. Rules are always to be questioned, with the only limits to questioning being the laws of physics.
All three parts of the Musk method are distant from that of Trump. First, Musk’s obsessions are not Trump’s. The Tesla founder wants to save this planet and establish a base on another planet as back-up. Meanwhile, Trump was pulling out of the Paris accord on climate change, a move that prompted Musk to resign from the presidential councils during the last Republican administration.
Second, Musk’s obsession with detail and process is, to say the least, not shared by a president-elect with little interest in detail of any kind. Musk’s sale of all his properties so he could live a simple life in a small house near his production facility could not be more alien to Trump’s style and preoccupations. Musk wants brilliant people - even if they are immigrants, as he is himself. Immigration, like climate change, divides him from the Trump base.
Thirdly, Musk’s impatience with all limitations except those imposed by the laws of physics is not shared by Trump. Because Trump doesn’t make an exception for the laws of physics. He prefers his own reality.
So yes, there are things both men can do for each other, that is for sure. And they are both transactional. But I nonetheless believe their relationship to be doomed. In rather the same way, and for similar reasons, that the relationship between Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson was doomed.
I remember meeting Cummings while he was still in No 10 and he explained, compellingly, what he thought was wrong with the way Britain was governed: our inefficient processes, our hopeless procurement, our poor hiring and management of public servants and the layers of rules and bureaucracy that prevented effective provision of services. I told him I found this all pretty persuasive and a project for government - but why did he think the charismatic, creative but cheerfully chaotic Johnson was the right leader of it? Cummings smiled ruefully. He was out within months.
The projects of the right-wing populists like Nigel Farage and Trump and the techno geeks like Musk and Cummings are not the same. They will not produce durable alliances. This is not only because they have a tendency to think others are fools, although that doesn’t help.
Cummings posits a start-up party to be run by the brightest people who operate at technologies’ cutting edge. Yet his political appeal has always been to people who left full-time education when they finished school. Those who ran this start-up party would have entirely different sensibilities and attitudes to those who voted for it. I don’t see how this can possibly work.
At least part of this is my fault. Or people like me. The reason why people like Musk pair with Trump and people like Cummings pair with Johnson is because Trump and Johnson are disrupters. Their alliance with these unsuitable partners is a cry for help. It is a protest against a centre that has been too complacent and institutions that are falling short. People like Farage and Trump are the beneficiaries of our failure.
A really brave approach to government and public service provision is required, an ambitious determination to stay up at night, going machine by machine down the government assembly line, saying “delete, delete, delete” to every rule that isn’t necessary and to every obstacle to getting the job done.
We need to sleep under our desks until we get it right.
The Times
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