This Article Isn't Really About Elon Musk

Like a couple of other pieces I've written lately, Musk butts in like Where's Waldo or Killroy Was Here on a story about something else.

I seem to write a lot these days about Elon Musk. Last month I noted that even as hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was trying to bar Harvard undergraduates from future employment because he didn’t like what they said about Palestine, Ackman was defending various pretty-straightforwardly-anti-Semitic things Musk said on Twitter/X. Then, at the end of the month, I observed that Elon Musk is the logical end point for a culture trained to prize creativity above every other conceivable virtue, as described in Samuel W. Franklin’s 2023 book, The Cult of Creativity.

Neither of those pieces was really about Musk; the first was about Ackman (now hoist by his own plagiarism petard and threatening, like Samson, to pull the temple that is MIT down on its Philistine faculty) and the second was about Franklin’s really fascinating intellectual/social history of the 1950s and 1960s, which you should read.

My third piece about Musk isn’t really about Musk either. It’s about the conservative war on the administrative state, which Musk has decided to join because he’s tired of getting dinged by the NLRB for unambiguous—nay, exhibitionistic—violations of labor law. In that spirit he’s also bankrolling one of several cases before the Supreme Court this year that would de-legitimize and severely restrict federal regulation. You can read my piece here.