Great Men

The Tech Industry Is Patriarchy 2.0

Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, hit bookstores and the publicity campaign for the book is in full swing. Many of the remaining bastions of establishment journalism including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and CNBC published excerpts from the book. Brasher but not any less established New York Magazine published a profile of the author. Isaacson’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, certainly knows how to sell books. It probably helped that Isaacson’s past gigs include editor of Time as well as chair and CEO of CNN. In short, he is a paragon of establishment journalism himself.

Alas, judging by the excerpts and reviews, Isaacson’s book offers little beyond a descriptive account of what Musk said or did over the years. He doesn’t really probe. He doesn’t provide context. He doesn’t analyze. According to Jill Lepore’s review in the New Yorker, Isaacson’s retelling of Musk’s childhood in apartheid South Africa “barely mentions apartheid” and features “certainly no Black people.” Brian Merchant’s review in the Los Angeles Times starts out with taking exception to that literal white-washing, too.

It apparently sets the tone for the rest of the book, with Isaacson just presenting the world according to Musk and various hangers-on. That is not to say that it’s all rainbows and unicorns. Isaacson does register his bewilderment about Musk’s mercurial and abrasive personality. He even calls him an “asshole.” But he doesn’t go deeper. He never questions his own admiration for Musk. Even after all is written and published, a week after book release on Kara Swisher’s podcast for New York, he hedges anything critical with an immediate “but…” followed by a long-winded explanation of Musk’s supposed impact, i.e., greatness. In that same interview, Isaacson states he doesn’t believe that Musk has read the book. So we don’t know whether the book serves Musk, whose hunger for validation appears to be just as insatiable as Trump’s, only Trump conjures up audience sizes where Musk mints startup founder titles.

A Masterclass in Journalistic Malpractice

What is certain, however, is that the book doesn’t serve us, the general public. To illustrate just that, I am going to provide the missing context for the excerpt published by CNBC. It turns out to be a veritable masterclass in journalistic malpractice. If you haven’t read the excerpt, I recommend you do before continuing. It is only 1,500 words or about 12 minutes long. Plus, Isaacson’s decades of journalistic practice weren’t entirely wasted. He sure has a way with words and his pithy prose is easy on the reader.

In case you don’t care to read it yourself, the excerpt concerns itself with something Tesla calls full self-driving capability or FSD. According to Isaacson, the system under development until early this year was rule-based at its core, comprising “hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code to apply these rules to complex situations.” But then OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT inspired Tesla’s engineers to replace that core with a deep neural network. Again according to Isaacson, that effort resulted in a significant improvement of FSD.

A test drive with Musk in the driver’s seat (but hands off the steering wheel) in mid-April 2023 went so well, Musk “started whistling Mozart’s ‘A Little Night Music’ serenade in G major.” By August, Tesla was ready to release FSD 12, the first version to incorporate the new approach, as soon as regulators would approve. Musk showed it off publicly on August 25, 2023 by live-streaming himself driving around the South Bay including past Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s home. As receipts, the excerpt includes two different stills from said livestream, which are curiously grainy and out of focus but Musk and a Tesla’s interior are recognizable nonetheless.

Impressively, Simon & Schuster published the biography only 18 calendar days or 11 work days after Musk’s South Bay drive. It seems unlikely that they were able to cram content revisions, copy edits, planning for marketing campaign, printing, binding, and shipping into two weeks. I figure that much of the book was already printed and they only finished that chapter, or updated it, during those two weeks. Still, that’s nimble for book publishing and minimizes the risk that some major event between editorial deadline and publication steals the book’s thunder. Unlike Isaacson, I didn’t have privileged access to Musk and hence draw on public sources only for this section. Some are informal, like one Reddit comment, but the vast majority are major news organizations such as Reuters and the Times. With one significant exception, a study by Mozilla published in early September, all my source material was published before Isaacson’s editorial deadline. In other words, there really is no good excuse for not covering most of this context as well.

I count five significant omissions and misdirections in the excerpt. Let’s discuss each in turn.

The False Promise of Autonomous Driving

By writing about “self-driving,” “full self-driving,” and “FSD” without further elaboration, Isaacson plays right along with what Capital One, a bank, calls a “disingenuously named suite of advanced driver-assistance features.” As they noted late last year, FSD still has a very long way to go before offering autonomous driving. Furthermore, better driver-assistance features are available from other car makers for much less.

Tesla first introduced driver-assistance (“Autopilot”) in late 2015. The following year, Musk made quite a splash by seemingly announcing that autonomous driving was coming to Tesla’s cars within the year. He has been promising the same, autonomous driving coming to Tesla’s cars within the year, ever since. Alas, Tesla first made a test version of FSD available to select customers only in late 2020. It also began charging $8,000 for this test version. By now, the price has increased to $15,000. Still, that hasn’t deterred 360,000 customers from paying big bucks for testing Tesla’s buggy software—software that controls vehicles, i.e., devices designed to move people at significant speed.

The consequences of doing so are entirely predictable: Earlier this year, a massive leak of internal documents to Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper revealed that Tesla’s cars are prone to sudden de/acceleration, without and with Autopilot and FSD, and that the firm received more than 3,000 complaints about Autopilot and FSD safety. The documents also revealed instructions to Tesla’s employees to never put anything in writing, insisting on oral communication only. This was confirmed by owners of malfunctioning Teslas, like a medical doctor whose car, when they were turning into a parking lot, suddenly accelerated and came to a stop only after hitting two cement bollards in a row. That policy reminds me of another upstanding character with a well-known aversion to putting things in writing. What was his name again? Trusk?

While Isaacson parrots marketing terms without elaboration and stays mum on Tesla’s safety record, he does acknowledge at the end of the excerpt that there still is one remaining regulatory concern. Apparently, FSD, like “95% of humans,” has a tendency to “creep slowly through stop signs, rather than coming to a complete stop.” Aw-shucks, if we keep doing it, then FSD doing it is just fine. It feels like Isaacson only added this disclaimer so he wouldn’t appear too sycophantic without upsetting Musk. In his interview with Swisher, he still was bullish on FSD 12. It almost sounded like he too is now promising that autonomous driving is coming to Tesla’s cars within the year.

Inflated Driving Range

Musk and Tesla relentlessly hyping FSD as capable of autonomous driving for over seven years is problematic, to say the least. It gives the appearance that they are misleading intentionally for their own financial gain. That impression is further strengthened by the obviously misleading name of the feature and the very selective release of information about its technology. When I searched for background material about Tesla’s driver-assistance technology, I noticed that seemingly none of these articles discussed the rule-based core of all but the latest version of FSD. In a way, that wasn’t too surprising, since rule-based systems are not exactly the frontier of AI technology.

At the same time, the large echo chamber of websites apparently run by Tesla fanboys generates an awful amount of noise. Fact is that Tesla, just like other car makers, has been using machine learning models for perception—determining road conditions including the movement of other vehicles, the hyperlocal weather, the presence of construction zones, and so on—and the rule-based system for prediction—deciding how to make the best of these road conditions—until they re-architected the latter starting late last year. Tesla overpromising self-driving features, using a misleading name, and cherrypicking what technical details it hypes to fanboys may point to a larger pattern of misleading customers and investors. But they could also be the result of less malign forces, say, an overexcitable CEO with little to no impulse control.

Alas, there is no room for such benefit of the doubt in another case: As Reuters revealed in July 2023, Tesla’s cars inflate the remaining driving range. Since discrepancies between actual and cooked numbers become more noticeable at small ranges, Tesla’s cars also shrink the inflationary multiplier. That last bit of deception makes very clear that the range inflation is intentional, even if customers experience it as a car-stopping bug. It gets worse: If a customer noticed that their car’s range prediction was off and called Tesla for support, they were handed off to a dedicated team charged with preventing customers from bringing cars to repair shops. After all, from the perspective of Tesla, there was nothing wrong with the car. Finally, for having the audacity to notice Tesla’s range inflation scam, those same customers were placed on a blocklist. Future calls for support would go straight to voicemail. The customers then had to wait for a callback a couple of days later.

That last bit is amazingly petty, with Tesla having no excuse to act that way. More generally, it sure looks like Tesla is willing to use extralegal means including deception and worse to maximize its own profit potential. Unfortunately, all-important customer safety comes second—at best. Inflating the driving range is bound to result in stranded vehicles, no matter the measures taken to reduce such possibility. That’s a rather serious failing for a company selling cars, which are intended to be an expedient and reliable means for getting from A to B. It all points to one basic truth: Tesla has little respect for its customers and, at times, even treats them with outright contempt.

Controversial Engineering Choice

In the excerpt, Isaacson hints at another technology having profound impact on Tesla’s cars. Each Tesla car nowadays has nine outward-facing cameras and at least one more monitoring the car’s interior. The outward-facing cameras are critical because, unlike other companies working towards autonomous driving, Tesla never installed lidar in their cars and recently stopped installing radar and ultrasonic sensors as well. Hence its cars’ driver-assistance critically depends on those video feeds. There is nothing else.

The wisdom of this decision continues to be highly controversial. Fact is that object-recognition based on video alone is noticeably less accurate. Furthermore, many automated tasks become much harder when only video is available. Tesla’s driver-assistance bears this out: After removing radar and ultrasonics from its cars, the firm restricted some assisted driving features and disabled many parking features altogether. The company promises that their solely video-based replacements will be coming to Tesla’s cars within the year.

Tesla is correct when it contends that multiple kinds of sensors do add hardware costs and significantly increase software complexity. Assuming that Tesla can restore previous functionality for its driver-assistance based on video alone, the critical concern is reliability, especially when compared to other systems that incorporate lidar, radar, and ultrasonics. Since failure to recognize an “obstacle” such as a bicyclist or pedestrian is measured in human injuries and fatalities, the reliability of AI-based perception has tremendous impact on car safety. Meanwhile the safety of Tesla’s cars impacts only everyone sharing streets with them, i.e., all of us.

In this context, Handelsblatt’s revelations about Tesla’s lack of disclosure when it comes to accidents and Reuters revelations about Tesla’s systematic driving range grift don’t instill confidence. Quite the opposite. Hence I cannot but wonder whether the decision to go video-only really was a (maverick) engineering decision or yet another attempt at seeking a financial advantage while ignoring the downsides to others. For the same reason, I cannot but wonder why state and federal regulators allow Tesla to continue selling its driver-assistance features and haven’t forced the company to recall the add-on. Or are they waiting for version 2.0 of Unsafe at Any Speed, to be released in time for the first version’s 60th anniversary in 2025, now with a Tesla Pinto on the cover?!

Car Surveillance

Digital video cameras have another, unavoidable problem: They may just record people. Worse, due to ubiquitous internet access, such recordings may just become accessible by the wrong people. Tesla’s cars easily check all necessary boxes. They have at least 10 cameras built in. They have cellular and WiFi modems built in. They record their geographical position. Tesla’s engineers and its labelling team have access to videos and location data. Previously, also the subcontracted labellers in Africa had access to the videos. In several articles I read while writing this article, Tesla’s response to journalists’ questions was that the firm takes privacy seriously and furthermore anonymizes all location data.

Even if Tesla strips location traces of obviously identifying information, I wouldn’t count on that to make much difference when it comes to privacy. As the New York Times demonstrated in several articles in December 2019, they could easily de-anonymize people whose location traces were included in a commercially available dataset assembled by an ad-tech firm. That way, the Times traced many of the people living in a California town, protestors from picket lines and political rallies, legislative aides to members of Congress, civilian employees at the Department of Defense, military officers, members of the United States’ clandestine services, and through Secret Service agents POTUS himself. For good measure, in February 2021 the Times used a more recent dataset to track down members of the murderous mob trying to stage a coup on January 6, 2021.

The Times’ investigations were conducted as a public service, to encourage critical debate. Two years later, in July 2021, the Washington Post broke news of the first high-profile case of private actors weaponizing commercially available location data to force their political agenda onto others. As a result, the closeted chief administrator of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was forced to resign. In the aftermath, the people responsible for this unparalleled invasion of privacy and despicable campaign of innuendo, which equates homosexuality with child abuse while simultaneously denying it, announced that many more revelations would follow.

Only they didn’t. They instead went into stealth mode. In March 2023, the Post followed up by reporting that a not-for-profit involving some of the same people had spent millions of dollars purchasing location data from gay dating apps and had been outing de-anonymized priests to their bishops. Amazingly for self-described “Christians,” much of the commentary from Catholic observers has been approving. It seems only a question of time until location data will be similarly weaponized against women seeking abortions.

At the same time, there are good reasons not to trust Tesla with such data. First, when the Mozilla Foundation published the results of a privacy review of 25 car makers in September 2023, they concluded that cars were the worst product category they reviewed so far. Every single car maker received their “Privacy Not Included” warning label. Amongst this terrible bunch, Tesla stood out as the worst of the worst, receiving “dings” across all criteria, something only one other product achieved before. Second, as Reuters revealed in April 2023, firm employees including many members of their labelling team have been sharing clips of car videos, often memeified, in both work and private chats. Worse, in interviews with Reuters, several former and current employees said they saw nothing wrong with this fundamentally violative behavior. As the ACLU noted in April, such abuses are all but guaranteed when devices include remote-accessible microphones or cameras.

That is particularly unsettling because Tesla’s cars not only record their surroundings and interior while driving. They also record their surroundings as a preventive measure while sitting idle, i.e., when parked. Many videos shared by employees were actually recorded in this so-called sentry mode, demonstrating that Tesla does not take customers’ privacy seriously. If the firm did, labellers wouldn’t have access to those clips. It’s no surprise then that China has banned Tesla cars from government compounds and Israel has banned sentry mode altogether.

In Europe, Tesla settled two court cases, one in the Netherlands and one in Germany, that alleged that sentry mode was violating GDPR, the EU’s exemplary privacy law. To settle the matters, the firm committed to changing its advertising, educating customers about the implications of sentry mode, and modifying said mode to flash car lights as a sign that people are about to be recorded. Disappointingly, regulators in the Netherlands and Germany concluded that car owners alone are the “data controller” of record. That obviously is the wrong conclusion, since Tesla continues to have access to cars and their videos and, given its record, isn’t exactly credible when it declares not to access just the video files. In either case, Tesla’s cars are uploading gigabytes of data after every drive and the company claims ownership of that data.

The final misdirection concerns Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In Isaacson’s telling Musk had been “jokingly challenging” Zuckerberg to hand-to-hand combat. Except the reality is rather more complicated. Musk had challenged Zuckerberg indeed. But Zuckerberg is going through a Muscle Mary phase, posting pictures of himself that wouldn’t look out of place on Grindr, and so he accepted the challenge. For several weeks, Musk was stringing Zuckerberg along, until it became obvious that he was just trolling. It was all pretty elaborate, involving Musk’s entourage, the Zuckerberg Chan Initiative, and even a cabinet member of Italy’s government. In other words, the trolling was uncomfortably close to being sincere, leaving even experienced industry observers guessing. It also impacted many more people than these two unhinged billionaires.

The lowpoint of this charade was the drive around the South Bay that opens the excerpt from Isaacson’s book. But in manifest reality, the drive wasn’t “much smoother and more reliable,” unless, that is, almost running a red light and requiring manual intervention fits your definition of reliable. Then there was the doxing drive-by. Isaacson does not disclose that Musk googled Zuckerberg’s home address on camera and then declared that, since the address was already public, he wasn’t doxing him. Yet in November 2022, Musk shut down the account of a college student tracking the whereabouts of Musk’s private plane. The student used only data that was already public as well. At the same time, the flight data is considerably less sensitive than a person’s home address. It’s hard to get more hypocritical than this.

You wouldn’t know any of the above if you only read Isaacson’s excerpt. Admittedly, my material is a bit more technical, and my perspective is far more critical. I also added another 2,400 words on top of Isaacson’s 1,500, which probably aren’t quite as easy on the reader. But the material also covers a lot of ground: I touch upon AI safety, car safety, engineering trade-offs, privacy, surveillance capitalism, the dangers of religious fundamentalism, and the foibles of billionaires. Maybe excepting the latter, these are important topics of public interest, with considerable impact on our lives.

And then there is Tesla. A significant reason for why I kept working on this article, turning what started out as a comment on a friend’s Facebook post into my own, more substantial Facebook post and then into this even more substantial blog post is that I used the occassion as opportunity for learning more about the car maker. Working through the material was eye-opening, since the firm’s manifest reality and its hype amongst the software engineering set seem to have very little in commom. Tesla not only looks like just another car maker but one that goes to extralegal and unsafe lengths for its own financial gain. The fact that Musk steered the firm down this path shows that his supposed genius largely is of the “very stable” kind and no more.

If that was the extent of Musk’s endeavors, there probably would be no Isaacson biography of Musk. At the same time, Tesla is critical for Musk’s influence because its overpriced stock, which is trading at a P/E ratio of 65.8, down from 190 at the end of 2021, is the very foundation of his obscene wealth. So the firm is well worth our attention. But Musk has been muscling himself into more and more lines of business. In addition to cars, companies that he leads or controls build tunnels, batteries, solar cells, computer implants, space rockets, satellite networks, and advanced AI systems. They also provide launch services into space, voice and data communication across the globe, as well as news and social networking.

That is an impressive portfolio. It certainly necessitates a good hard look at the man himself and how he conducts business. In particular, two more areas stand out: Musk’s influence on the governments of the United States and Ukraine as well as his takeover of Twitter and conversion into X. Since I have already shown Isaacson to be an unreliable narrator, for the next two sections I’ll largely be drawing on other sources, starting with Ronan Farrow.

Elon Musk as Sovereign Threat

Farrow, in his August 21, 2023 profile of Musk for the New Yorker, does take a good hard look at Musk’s considerable influence over US government policy, notably when it comes to energy, military, and space exploration. That influence is due to Tesla, which sells batteries and solar cells in addition to cars, as well as SpaceX, which makes and launches space rockets. Musk founded the company with the goal of colonizing Mars. To finance that vision, the firm focused on offering more and cheaper launch capacity than the established competition, primarily Europe’s Arianespace. By leveraging up-to-date technology and relentlessly persuing ever larger rockets, SpaceX succeeded in just that: By 2018, it had a market share of 65%. In 2023, it largely was the same with 66%. But with 88% of all US launches, SpaceX almost has a total monopoly power over the domestic market, including over NASA.

As SpaceX was able to scale launch capacity, it also was able to leverage some for its own Starlink satellites, which provide voice and data services. By now, over 5,000 satellites literally litter low Earth orbit (LEO). The firm plans to launch another 7,000 of them and to provide voice and data communications everywhere on Earth—with exception of Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela. Since LEO is not geostationary, those countries are not excluded for lack of coverage.

Farrow focuses on Musk’s impact on Ukraine’s fight against the Russian aggressor, where Starlink plays a critical role as the only reliable means for communication amongst Ukrainian soldiers. At the beginning of the invasion, Russian hackers had knocked out much of Ukrainian telecommunications including satellite access, which significantly hampered the country’s ability to defend itself, to say nothing about eventually reclaiming its own territory. Starlink was not yet activated in Ukraine but, in theory, provided an attractive alternative: Its design features many more satellites that cover a much smaller area, making it harder to disrupt communications, and utilize the latest in encryption, making it hard to intercept the content.

Two days into the war in February 2022, the Ukrainian government asked Musk for access to Starlink on Twitter. To his credit, Musk immediately agreed and the first terminals arrived in Ukraine only two days later. By now, several thousand terminals are put to good use in Ukraine, most of which donated by members of the Ukrainian community in Silicon Valley, the United States, and European governments. For the first several months, SpaceX generously covered usage charges as well. But in September 2022, the firm sent a letter to the Pentagon that it is “not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time.” As Farrow observes, SpaceX was recently valued at $150 billion and its CEO at $220 billion. Meanwhile, Ukraine is fighting for its very survival as a country.

Given those riches, surely money can’t be that much of an issue. While Musk denies as much, it does seem that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin got to him. Apparently, the two have fairly regular conversations and, if Putin has a core competency that he finely honed over the more than two decades of his autocratic rule, it’s his ability to keep oligarchs in line. He demonstrated as much to an incredulous Western audience in July 2018, when Trump took the side of this murderous thug over the FBI and the United States’ clandestine services after talking to Putin in private for two hours. That same persuasive power seems to have convinced Musk last year that further support for Ukraine might just start nuclear armageddon. Thereafter, Musk publicly declared that Putin wants peace and that Ukraine must accept the loss of Crimea. Excuse me?

More ominously, both Isaacson and Farrow describe apparently unrelated incidents, during which the Ukrainian military suddenly found itself without Starlink coverage and had to retreat. Devastatingly, that effectively ended an attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet before it even started. Musk didn’t, as Isaacson falsely asserted in the excerpt published by the Post, shut down coverage as those missions were progressing. Musk simply had never enabled coverage in some locations and apparently “forgot” to tell the Ukrainian government about this rather important detail. Meanwhile, the Russian Navy has continued shelling Ukrainian cities and prevented the export of Ukrainian grain, causing hunger worldwide. The episode also features prominently in Elizabeth Lopatto’s sharply critical piece for the Verge, which bemoans that Isaacson’s biography has resulted in “two unreliable narrators.”

By now, Starlink has entered a formal agreement with the Pentagon and hence Ukraine’s battlefield communications are on a more solid footing again. While clearly the most important episode with the biggest potential downsides, Farrow chronicles several other instances of Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX being unduly confrontational about US law or policy and Biden administration officials going out of their way to pacify him. That also is my impression of past court proceedings, where he was treated with far more deference than anyone less wealthy would have been. Yet just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial registering its outrage about the “harassment of Elon Musk.” That way, the editorial team graphically demonstrated once again that it is completely unencumbered by manifest reality. Their debasement in service of making this world a better place for plutocrats really knows no bounds. How much is Murdoch paying them?

Extremist X Née Twitter

So far, I have covered considerable self-dealing at Tesla at cost of car safety and interference with US policy notably by enabling and simultaneously subverting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Their longterm consequences are far from clear at this point. I can’t but wonder what Tesla’s shortcuts on car safety imply for SpaceX, especially given the company’s plans for manned space travel. Yet we are still not done covering the highlights of Musk’s activities and influence. This third part concerns his takeover of Twitter and conversion into X, favorite hangout of far-right extremists, who joined in the wake of his takeover. They were attracted by Musk’s loud declarations of free-speech absolutism and his promise to reinstate previously banned accounts. They are staying because they can increasingly claim Musk as one of their own.

Musk does indeed leverage his platform on X for plainly political statements, for example, when encouraging people to vote Republican on election day in November 2022. But that also was unusually conventional in its directness and content. More common are cases where Musk engages with off-color posts by his many followers or ends up amplifying bizarre ideas, for example, when supporting the restriction of voting rights to child-bearing parents or when claiming that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a male prostitute instead of a deranged far-right extremist. In other words, Musk’s political influence through X isn’t that of a conventional political activist but more diffuse and even confused. It does lean towards far-right ideas and hence is anything but benign. More generally, it reflects the right’s embrace of conspiratorial and plainly unhinged ideas. In what follows, I’ll first contextualize X under Musk based on personal experience and then provide a high-level overview of his first year as owner of X née Twitter.

My Own Experience

I got a taste of who hangs out on X nowadays in July 2023, when I posted about the striking parallels between an AfD event poster and Nazi propaganda (since deleted):

On the left: A bearded, salaciously grinning man in makeup is about to grab a pale, helpless boy. On the right: A fat man with hook nose, wearing bottle glasses, bowler hat, and heavy coat is handing out candy to a nicely dressed young boy and girl

The @AfD is now openly mimicking Nazi propaganda. The image on the left is for an official party event and says “hands off our children.” The image on the right is from a notorious children’s book published by the Nazi [sic]. The obvious conclusion: Die AfD sind Faschisten!

Like other political parties in Germany, the AfD uses a three-letter acronym. It stands for Alternative für Deutschland or Alternative for Germany. Over the ten years since its founding as a far-right party, the AfD has only moved further and further rightward and by now is openly embracing anti-democratic and neofascist extremism. Despite unusually blunt and public warnings by, amongst others, the director of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the AfD is currently polling at around 20%.

At first, my post saw little engagement. But after it was re-posted a couple of times by Germans, comments started trickling in over several more days. Many of the comments, all posted from accounts opened after Musk’s take-over of Twitter, were not only sympathetic to the AfD but full of antisemitic and homophobic sentiment. They also contained an impressive amount of gaslighting about the democratic process and other parties’ positions. The most extreme comments normalized Naziism and one account threatened me, for good measure in both comment and re-post. Alas, almost all of these comments were phrased carefully to maintain plausible deniability. For instance, the threat, when translated from the German original, reads: “You are scared of the AfD, Robert. And that – IS – ALSO – REEAAL – GOOOD !!! 😁👍” I did report one comment that clearly crossed the line to X. It was deemed acceptable.

The weird part in all this is the fact that my post didn’t even go viral. Far from it. It got only 2,200 impressions, 7 likes, and 4 re-posts, one from the account that threatened me. Yet it also generated more than 40 comments if you follow all threads to their deplorable ends. That is one magnitude more comments than my last viral tweet, which received 50,000 impressions and 400 likes, but triggered hardly any discussion. (That tweet also was reported for being in violation of German law, an allegation that Twitter rightly rejected.) After reading the first few comments, I decided not to engage the comments beyond liking insightful comments by non-extremists. They still are present on X. But for the most part, the comments were a pile-on by far-right extremists from both sides of the Atlantic.

The following comments, made by an American and a German far-right sympathizer, are instructive. Both started by responding to my post, with the German becoming one of the more prolific commenters. Meanwhile, the American only commented twice. His direct, English response to my post read:

Either you get German right wing parties or you become an Islamic fundamentalist state where gays are pushed off mountains and women can't leave the house without a man. I know what I’d choose. But take a look at your second option yourself:

The embedded post includes a clip of two men seemingly interviewing a young Muslim on the street. With little discernible emotion, the young man declares his support for the introduction of Sharia law in Germany, if necessary by force, and killing gay people by throwing them off mountains. If that hits most of the key points of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, then that is very much by design.

Titles embedded in the clip were sufficient for locating its source, a far-right organization led by a known provocateur obsessed with Islam. The group holds rallies across German cities with hard-to-miss incendiary posters about “political Islam” and engages Muslims in the audience with a mix of condescension and leading questions. The goal is to provoke frustrated and over-the-top responses. They then post video recordings of their rallies on YouTube. This particular clip is from a rally at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on October 21, 2022 (annotated in the HTML to disavow the content and prevent browsers from sending a referrer). The conversation with the young man starts at the mark.

Their provocation obviously does not justify the young man’s extremist agenda. But the American’s suggestion to pick and chose between the two sides is utterly preposterous as well. Both Muslim fanatics and fascists are genocidal extremists. No good will come from either group. When faced with a false dilemma like this, the only reasonable choice is refusing to participate and walk away. Ideally, they would destroy each other, but they need each other too much for that. That the American presents this false dilemma as an actual one gives his own extremist agenda away. So does the fact that he knows to share video footage shot by a minor celebrity in Germany’s far-right circles.

It’s no suprise then that he recognized a kindred crank in the German and addressed him thusly (in the original English): Finally, a sane European! Man, glad to see you guys aren’t a lost cause after all, and all the best to you! The German then replied:

Thank you, brother.

Conservative views are on the rise Europe wide actually - many have had enough of societal and political depravation [sic]!

Wish u the best as well!

I find the seamless back-and-forth between the tender embrace of a perceived sympathizer and the (misspelled) dehumanization of perceived enemies disorienting. Tender embrace, dehumanization, tender embrace. Off. On. Off. This selective display of inhuman designs, especially when combined with constant gaslighting about, say, their deeply held concerns for the welfare of gay men and women, is also what makes these comments so insidious and dangerous. People with a less well-honed sense for language and demagoguery fall for this veneer of moderation and respectability—though they also willfully ignore its deeply brown coloring.

I covered this episode in some detail not because it revealed some new lows of incivility or dehumanizing excess. It doesn’t. But the pile-on of far-right comments, with their insidious suggestiveness, in broad daylight on what used to be a mainstream forum by accounts only opened after Musk’s takeover of Twitter seems representative of the transformation from Twitter into X. It plainly gives credence to headlines such as The Guardian’s assertion that “Twitter’s rightwing takeover is complete.” That outcome, however, is no accident. It is the direct result of Musk’s words and deeds. Let’s summarize them.

Musk’s Record

If you listened to Musk during the months before his takeover of Twitter in October 2022, he was adamant that the main problem with Twitter was suppression of speech. Declaring himself a “free speech absolutist,” he promised to turn things around. So has he followed through? Over the last year, Musk did reactivate the accounts of Andrew Tate (who was banned for blaming rape victims and is currently being prosecuted in Romania for raping and trafficking women), Donald Trump (banned for attempting a coup), Ye (banned for antisemitic tirades), and Kathy Griffin (banned after Musk’s take-over for making fun of Musk). In response, Tate, Trump, and Ye returned to X. Griffin impolitely declined.

At the same time, Musk shut down the account of a college student tracking the whereabouts of Musk’s private plane. He also shut down the accounts of several reporters including ones working for CNN, the New York Times, Insider, and the Washington Post. After a public outcry and EU warning of sanctions, Musk offered to reinstate acccounts but only under condition that reporters agreed to his demonstrably false version of events. In at least one case, he didn’t even follow through on this Orwellian offer. In India, X has been broadly censoring critics of Modi’s government including a BBC documentary. It also complies with more government requests than Twitter and does so more fully. More recently, X started throttling outgoing links to the New York Times, Substack, and competing social networks.

These actions are clearly inconsistent with free speech absolutism. They are even inconsistent with industry-wide moderation practices. The appeasement of foreign governments might be consistent with financial self-interest. But Musk’s financial self-interest can’t be that strong when his mercurial leadership obviously is the primary force driving big name advertisers other than Apple away. Surprisingly, they prefer not to be associated with the toxicity of a Tate, Trump, Ye, and other far-right personalities Musk restored to the platform. The attendant growth of far-right users, whom Musk keeps goading on, doesn’t help either.

At the same time, all actions are consistent with somebody, who is so rich he feels above most people, who is so insecure he requires constant public praise, who nonetheless is incredibly petty and vindictive, and who self-radicalized on Twitter, turning into a performative far-right troll. In short, Donald Trump. And also Elon Musk, who outdid Trump by buying the platform outright. Given that record, the Nation does seem justified in labelling Musk “a threat to democracy.”

You’d think that’s enough malign impact for a single human being. But there still are two more things to cover in this overview of Musk’s first year heading X née Twitter. To begin with, Musk is not heading the firm anymore. After 57.5% of Twitter’s users (including me) voted in favor of his ouster as CEO in December 2022, he eventually followed through on this particular promise and did hire Linda Yaccarino, until then head of advertising at NBCUniversal, as CEO in May 2023. Meanwhile, he retains the CTO title for himself. (I’m surprised that he hasn’t claimed to be founder of X.) Four months later, she appears to be asserting her control by bringing in her own executive team, most of whom have a background in media, not technology.

But when she publicly parrots Musk’s false claims that X is “based on free expression and freedom of speech,” yet isn’t even aware of his publicly announced plans to charge all users, she doesn’t come across as X’s CEO but a second-rate PR hack. Furthermore, her assertions that almost all advertisers have returned to X and that X is close to profitability plainly strain credulity. For one, Musk vented about X’s precarious financial state less than a month ago and, for good measure, blamed it on the Anti-Defamation League. I doubt most mainstream advertisers want to be associated with such obviously antisemitic trolling. Furthermore, since X’s ad-revenue sharing program effectively finances far-right extremists, it is only a question of time until enterprising journalists detail those monetary flows in a headline-making expose. Since Apple never ceased advertising on X, they might just make a suitable target for this eventuality.

The attempts at restoring corporate normalcy may be re-assuring to some, but I cannot forget scenes from Musk’s “extremely hardcore” first three months. They are seared into my mind, largely for their astounding incompetence and cruelty. There was the spectacle of laying off 75% of employees. Nobody really knew who was layed off and who wasn’t. At best, former employees received an unsigned email informing them of their lot. While the carnage was on-going, Musk and his goons issued and shortly thereafter rescinded many orders that demonstrated a total lack of knowledge about software development and management. Yet they also avoided any and all contact with employees until well after the carnage finally subsided.

Probably the most disturbing episode happened shortly after the culling. Twitter’s head of trust and safety Yoel Roth got along with Musk at first and so stayed with the firm. But when Musk entirely ignored the recommendations made by Roth’s team for safely opening up account validation and just what they had predicted transpired, with more advertisers leaving, Roth resigned. Afterwards, he wrote a rather measured op-ed for the New York Times focusing solely on the staying power of content moderation for platforms dependent on advertising and mobile phone app stores.

Alas, that sufficed for triggering Musk, who drew on the worst of far-right conspiracy theories, Pizzagate and QAnon, and started spreading false claims that Roth had supported pedophilia in his PhD thesis. The resulting harassment of Roth, his family, and his thesis advisors was relentless. After the Daily Mail published their home address, Roth and his family had to flee the house and eventually sell it. In his interview with Kara Swisher, Isaacson is audibly appalled when they discuss this episode. Isaacson emphasizes that Roth and Musk got along well—until Musk turned on him—and that Roth is a decent person, which Swisher confirms. She had already called out Musk when it happened. Roth himself recently described the harrowing consequences in another op-ed for the Times.

This wasn’t even the first time that Musk has weaponized such a grotesque accusation. In 2018, he called a heroic cave diver “pedo guy” on Twitter after the diver had rejected Musk’s attempts to make himself the center of attention during the rescue of Thai children from a cave. Unfortunately, the following year, a jury rejected the diver’s defamation case. Musk clearly learned his lesson and applied it to Roth. Musk demonstrated that same commitment to maximally abusing other humans when, in May 2023, he encouraged other technology firms to follow his example for laying off employees.

These Great Men Are Trying to Murder Us!

At the beginning of the podcast, Swisher and her producer recap reviews of Isaacson’s book and discuss what topics to cover, what questions to ask. When asked by her producer about her own review, Swisher responds with just one word, “boredom.” My first thought while listening was “irrelevant.” But despite his failure of writing an engaging and meaningful Musk biography, Isaacson isn’t unsympathetic. I quite enjoyed listening to him and Swisher spar. It probably helped that they consider each other friends and hence have an easy rapport.

That doesn’t mean Swisher held back with her questions or criticisms. She didn’t. And Isaacson showed little evasion or defensiveness but earnestly engaged her for over an hour, repeatedly and generously acknowledging her past advice to him as on-point and actionable. In short, he comes across as perfectly pleasant and engaging, somebody eminently suitable to inviting for dinner and having deep but also wideranging conversations with.

So why did Isaacson not go further with this biography? Musk’s self-image as techno-messiah and his obscene wealth probably didn’t help. They invite, even demand deference. Isaacson’s long-term position as paragon of establishment journalism probably didn’t help either. Over the years he worked there, Time and CNN weren’t exactly known for their hardhitting interviews and studiously avoided upsetting the rich and powerful too much. Such overly cozy treatment of the rich and powerful also betrays a certain lack of ambition and hence feels by the numbers, or irrelevant and boring.

But more than anything, Isaacson himself is deeply invested in great men. He has been writing biographies about them for the last 30 years. Before Musk, he covered Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jennifer Doudna. Between Jobs and da Vinci, he also wrote a collection of biographical sketches of 57 men and 3 women he considers critical for the “digital revolution.”

This isn’t nearly the same league as claiming that “none of them [women] was articulate enough on this intellectual level,” as Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner did last month. But 6∕7 and 57∕60 still is an awful lot of men in all their gory greatness. That makes me suspect that Isaacson might just be afraid of what he would find if he dug deeper. He just seems beholden to a world where great men (like maybe him a little) achieve great feats (like maybe he does a little) and are widely recognized for their greatness (like maybe he wants to be a little, especially since he’s 71 years old).

Then again, that really could be me projecting. I’m definitely not great and my life’s work, especially of late, is entirely lacking in impact. However, I have also been close enough to the centers of financial and technological might to witness the devastating human toll great men and, increasingly, great women exact on society. I was there when Goldman Sachs facilitated a deal that put good money on the eventuality of Venezuela’s government serving foreign bond holders before the needs of its own starving population. I was there when Facebook fanned the flames of antisemitic prejudice by astroturfing anti-Soros editorials and when it ignored its own facilitation of genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar. I have seen the systemic forces that prevent either organization to do more than marginally better. Facebook even managed to facilitate another genocide, this time in Ethiopia.

One episode from my five years at Goldman is particularly instructive here: During my last year at the firm, I was tasked with improving a trade control, i.e., the combination of automated mechanism and human procedure intended to ensure that no transaction runs counter firm policy, industry regulation, or sovereign law. After some initial conversations with stakeholders, I was very much concerned about the long-term effectiveness of supervisors manually reviewing weekly emails with lists of a dozen or more transactions. That concern barely scratched the surface, but it already was too much for everyone else. After not even two weeks on the project, I was reassigned to a different one that kept me busy writing software against well-defined technical requirements.

It took me until well after I left the firm to realize my mistake: I had taken my remit literally and tried to actually improve a trade control that had failed for two years without anyone noticing. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My actual remit was to provide the illusion of due diligence and some ostentatious action that didn’t change anything substantial but would allow the responsible parties, technology management and Internal Audit, to check off the necessary boxes and hence have plausible deniability. No less, no more.

That is just what Isaacson delivered with his biography of Musk, an illusion of due diligence, which has no chance to really change anything about the status quo. Given the substantial ground that left uncovered, Isaacson’s failure is a first-rate tragedy that leaves even the chorus weeping. So please do not waste your money on this book. It is irrelevant. It is an abject failure of journalism that, warts and all, ends up as yet another ode to greatness, where none is to be had.

Let’s be clear: The future of humanity is not in space including Mars. There is no planet B. The sooner we accept this basic truth, the better our chances for surviving this century. One small but critical step along that path is to finally, truly, emphatically “put a stake in the ‘great man‘ biography” (quoting the title of Brian Merchant’s review).

At this point, the angry, pitchfork-wielding part of me would love nothing more than to drive Mr Pointy into Musk just where most people have a heart. Alas, I’m no Buffy and dispensing monsters just doesn’t work like that in manifest reality. Nonetheless, this article is an exorcism of sorts. I’ve been been growing tired of Musk’s Trumpian omnipresence for a while now. So my sincere hope is that, by comprehensively covering him this once, his hold over my attention will significantly diminish. It worked when I wrote about Trump. So why not for Musk?

For this exorcism to work, I need to make the case that Musk is a monster indeed and not the genius inventor so many tech bros believe he is. I already suggested one possible answer by repeatedly pointing to parallels between Musk and Trump. The ability to insert himself into almost any situation and to make it about himself, the frequent use of pithy posts on X née Twitter, the apparent sympathies for far-right ideology and ideologues, a public persona that blends mercurial, vindictive, and plain nuts, the insatiable hunger for external validation, and the utter contempt for other humans. It all strongly reminds of Trump.

Farrow even got two other great men who previously worked with Musk to attest to Musk’s boundless narcissism. First, former PayPal COO and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman described Musk as having an attitude “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ” Second, Sam Altman, CEO of Open­AI, which was co-founded and funded by Musk, stated that “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.” However, Altman’s quote already hints at Musk being strictly more than Trump. At least, I can’t imagine Trump giving any thought to the future of the world. More importantly, where Trump’s businesses are largely forgettable, Musk has made his mark on electric cars and space rockets. That’s a meaningful difference.

Another possible explanation are the many and extreme ways Musk and his firms try to maximize their own economic advantage. For Tesla alone, there are its range grift, its insistence on only using video cameras despite an industry-wide consensus to the contrary, its exorbitant pricing of what really is an immature beta feature, and its complete lack of respect for customer privacy. Out of these, the driving range grift is obviously unacceptable. But the bet on video will have the most impact in the long run—with failure is measured in human injuries and deaths.

While I cannot and will not exclude the possibility that this is a maverick engineering choice, financial self-interest and disregard for others can explain the choice just as well. This summer’s implosion of the Titan submersible off the coast of Newfoundland serves as graphic reminder for the potential downsides of such maverick engineering choices and the lack of a safety-first culture. Furthermore, Tesla’s record raises uncomfortable questions about SpaceX and its safety culture. All of this is deeply concerning and much of it is deserving of regulatory, legal, and possibly criminal intervention. At the same time, Musk isn’t the only one with this psychopathic need for out-doing everyone else, no matter the consequences. For instance, Zuckerberg demonstrably lied in Congressional testimony and his firm has been inflating advertising metrics for its own benefits. In short, self-enrichment über Alles doesn’t turn Musk into a uniquely monstrous oligarch either.

My mention of Zuckerberg, however, does point us into the right direction. Musk like the before-mentioned Altman, Hoffman, and Zuckerberg are all founders. Like Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Musk also runs one of the bigger corporations in technology. Admittedly, the title of founder doesn’t currently have the cachet it had just a few years ago. The toxic excesses of Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann certainly contributed. Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia and Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann stepping down just when economic conditions get tough didn’t help. Neither is Zuckerberg keeping his CEO and President of the Board titles only thanks to some funny business with vote allocation—with a majority of shareholders that aren’t Zuckerberg voting to strip him of at least one title in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

But unfortunately Zuckerberg and the rest of the founders and industry titans are not going away. After all, they dominate the technology industry. They also are mostly straight, mostly White, mostly American, all filthy rich (albeit at different levels of filth), and all men, great men. That is consistent with the extreme gender bias of the industry and nicely captured by the term “tech bro.” It also reflects the prevailing reward system, which reserves most of the spoils from success for investors and startup founders, with some smaller fraction going to early employees.

Successful founders often go on to become venture capitalists or VCs, who are responsible for selecting the next generation of candidates for becoming great men. That way, startups led by men and funded by venture capital become self-selecting and self-replicating, with great men producing great men. Apparently, an industry obsessed with disruption managed to disrupt biological procreation as well.

Given this extreme bias towards (a certain kind of) men, I am going to call this system, tongue only slightly in cheek, Patriarchy 2.0. Compared to the original, v2 did manage some improvements. Its focus on merit does make it more permeable and hence open to arbitrary comers—as long as they are men. It also is more accepting of sexual and ethnic minorities, with Altman and Cook both openly gay, Nadella and Pichai both openly Indian. At the same time, v2 also adds even more shortcomings. Notably, the focus on merit becomes a powerful excuse for not addressing structural problems and hence entrenches both chauvinistic bias and extreme income inequality. The cult of the founder, with its borderline religious qualities, serves to further ossify this grotesquely unrepresentative system.

Elon Musk not only stands amongst the great men of this industry but is the by far most extreme. He is not only White but was born and raised in apartheid South Africa, i.e., white supremacist dystopia. He isn’t just straight but exceedingly virile, having fathered eleven children so far. He is richer than anyone else on Earth. He not only founded several companies (some of them only in his imagination) but claims the most concurrent CEO and CTO titles. Finally, he is not only the most abrasive but outright cruelest amongst the bunch. In that, he easily surpasses Kalanick’s and Neumann’s toxicity, not that it makes any difference for his control over his conglomerate of firms. Those are some impressive outliers even when compared to his outlying peers. That seems positively monstrous to me.

Given the technology industry’s focus on merit, it seems only fair that we evaluate the overall merit of Patriarchy 2.0 and its great men. In the interest of bringing this article to its conclusion, I am going to limit myself to three, relatively coarse but critical criteria only, value added to our lives, the industry’s relevance to meeting the needs of society, and the overall legitimacy of its great men. For each of these criteria, I’ll provide a narrative summary and then score industry performance on the Pitchfork scale from 0.0 to 10.0. On the site, scores around 7.0 are fairly typical, i.e., middling. Perfect 10.0 are far and few between. The same holds for 0.0.

Value-Add

The technology industry has certainly been exceedingly disruptive, fundamentally changing how we read news or books, listen to music, watch movies, shop, pay bills, find dates, communicate, and so on. As computing technology has become ubiquitous, network and platform effects have deeply entrenched the biggest players, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Typically, two or three of them control a segment of the market. For instance, Apple and Microsoft own desktop operating systems, while Apple and Google own handheld operating systems. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft dominate cloud services. Meta controls much of social networking but shares online advertising with Google.

Overall, the record of the big five is distinctly mixed. Microsoft seems the most benign and undistinguished of late. Though its $13 billion investment into OpenAI suggests that it was just hibernating and badly wants to dominate in AI. By comparison, Amazon and Apple have a more clearly problematic record. Notably, the price for Amazon’s famed customer friendliness are warehouses that are so ruthlessly optimized they have made workers entirely disposable and churn through them at frightening rates. The firm projects it will run out of people to hire for its warehouses in 2024.

Meanwhile, Apple has taken price gouging to new extremes. The 16 GB upgrade for its latest laptops costs $400. However, the most expensive module of equal capacity I could find for a PC is $27. Yet Apple charges 15× as much. It doesn’t end there. Apple justifies its exclusive stranglehold over its iOS app store as a necessity for security and privacy. But its app review lacks transparency, is often arbitrary, and obviously designed to maximizing the reach of its usurious 30% cut on transactions. Yet as the Post put it two years ago, the app store also “is teeming with scams.”

It only gets worse: Google and Meta innovated alright. Their business model, surveillance capitalism, is predicated on aggressively collecting and analyzing data about us and to then precision-target ads on us. The result has been a complete erosion of our privacy. Much of the web is now littered with ads, which may creepily follow from site to site. It never is a good idea to model one’s business on East Germany’s Stasi, which ruthlessly surveilled that country’s citizens the old-fashioned way, with human informants, lots of informants, one informant per 6.5 citizens. Not only does such surveillance invite governmental abuse, it enables financial fraud and other forms of extortion, as illustrated by the aforementioned case of the gay Catholic priest. But such considerations haven’t stopped Google, Meta, and many other firms from embracing surveillance capitalism. Amazon does it. Apple does it. Instacart, a grocer, does it. The Western branch of the Chinese Communist Party aka TikTok does it. In short, the “enshittification” of the technology industry has reached levels that would put the Augean stables to shame.

There are huge variations in value-add, so giving one letter grade to the industry seems fundamentally unfair. Instead I score Google and Meta separately for their pioneering embrace of surveillance capitalism. It is suitably ironic that said innovation largely was the responsibility of a, drum roll, woman. Sheryl Sandberg nurtured the advertising team at Google into existence and then went onto Facebook, where she outdid herself many times over including by serving as Brain to Mr Zuckerberg’s Pinky. How’s that for moral clarity: Silicon Valley’s chauvinistic leadership and reward system is deeply problematic, but a female executive can also have pernicious global impact.

Value-Add: Google and Meta 0.9; Industry 6.9

Relevance

When it comes to the defining challenge of our times, climate change, the technology industry is missing in action. In fact, the industry seems to only obsess about technologies that excell at energy consumption. For many years, tech bros’ crypto mania consumed obscene amounts of energy, for example, besting the Netherlands for energy consumption in 2021. Now that the bubble has popped and most players have gone bankrupt, one hopes that electricity consumption collapsed at least as much as asset prices. There also might be important lessons about risk management, controls, and compliance when trading speculative digital assets. But nah…. The industry has long moved onto the next big thing, AI, and training machine learning models requires large amounts of electricity. For instance, GPT-3 consumed as much energy during training as 120 US households do during an entire year—and US households have a voracious appetite for energy when compared to the rest of the world.

While some parts of the industry are doing their best to accelerate climate change, others seem a tad less insane and focus on improving sustainability—or at least the parts of sustainability that do not interfere with a firm’s profit. In other words, they would rather virtue-signal about sustainability than make the hard choices to make products that plainly last longer. For instance, just last month, Apple made a big splash and a terrible comedy sketch about its sustainability efforts, introducing its first carbon-neutral product, a watch, and phasing out leather for its CO2 emissions. That’s nice, but also major gaslighting because the firm didn’t change much about how it pushes people towards buying new devices as often as possible. Almost all of the firm’s devices have few if any replacable parts, with components generally soldered or glued down. As a result, they are very hard to repair and impossible to upgrade or extend. On top of that, the firm’s liberal use of planned obsolescence leaves people with unsupported devices far too soon. For example, the just released macOS 14.0 drops support for four-year-old laptops.

There is one big-ish firm, however, that might just make a real difference, Tesla. Not only has it been selling their own battery-operated cars. But that has also encouraged the car industry to follow in its footsteps. Alas, I wrote “might” for two good reasons: First, Tesla changes nothing about our dependence on individual transport when what’s really needed are more communitarian options, such as trains. Second, whatever reduction in CO2 emissions Tesla achieves, SpaceX counteracts by emitting not only CO2 but also soot and by damaging Earth’s critical ozone layer. At the same time, SpaceX also launches satellites monitoring the impact from climate change. In short, before acknowledging Tesla, I’d like to see a comprehensive accounting of SpaceX’s impact.

As to the rest of the industry, it sure looks like they place more emphasis on short-term profits than on the long-term survival of human civilization. There is a small and influential cottage industry of doomsayers within the industry. But they are mostly concerned about abstract, future risks, such as AGI going SkyNet (i.e., that an AI capable of independent reasoning will exterminate humanity), and somehow just can’t acknowledge climate change as the all-overriding threat it really is. Then again, they also have some rather strange ideas about humanity’s future. Notably, they take for granted that all of us will be somehow digitized and live happily after in a computer simulation. Ok, “rather strange” is too mild. Batshit crazy is more like it.

The thing is: All the big corporations have a pretty detailed picture of all the suffering climate change will bring to us over the next twenty years. While I worked for Meta, I got my hands on a study the firm commissioned from a climate consultancy. They evaluated the risks from climate change for all of Meta’s locations, including engineering offices, data centers, and sales offices (plus strangely a number of locations in China even though Meta’s social networks are blocked there) along six axes. They are heat stress, water stress, floods, cyclones, sea level rise, and wildfires. The consultancy conveniently color coded the background of the per-location risk scores, forming a gradient from green meaning no extra risk to red meaning extreme risk.

The only consistent green on the pages with the risk scores is for non-coastal locations having no risk from sea level rise. The vast majority of scores are at least yellow, with dark orange and red gradations dominating the report. I was so depressed the day after reading this report I simply couldn’t get out of bed. The fact that Meta still allows Republicans to spread their insidious lies denying climate change just shows how much of a psychopath and loser Zuckerberg is. Utterly pathetic!

I can only think of only one industry that is even worse than the technology industry, namely the oil and gas industry. Since Tesla is exceptional, it gets its own score. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry’s lack of relevance is just unacceptable. Fail!

Relevance: Tesla 8.4; Industry 3.3

Legitimacy

For evaluating the legitimacy of the technology industry’s great men, I am going to focus on Elon Musk. He simultaneously serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX as well as CTO of SpaceX and X. He clearly makes time for his incessant trolling on X. He also has a rather active sex life, with multiple partners, and appears to have a drug habit. I am not mentioning the latter two to shame Musk. Furthermore, I find Farrow’s speculation about ketamine as possbile explanation for Musk’s behavior reductive and not helpful. If the drug helps him unwind, then good for him. My point is much simpler: All of these things take time, significant time.

That makes any notion that Musk is single-handedly responsible for designing and building electric cars, space rockets, tunnel boring machines, brain computer interfaces, artificial intelligence systems, satellite communication systems, and so on utterly laughable. The guy obviously hasn’t even participated in a code review in twenty years. Instead of Musk, almost all of the work at all these companies is the work of countless engineers who apparently have a higher tolerance for abuse than I will ever have.

But once we acknowledge that the actual work is almost exclusively performed by legions of other people, then our hero worship of Musk and all the other tech bros is entirely misplaced. Furthermore, an economic system that that awards these great men far more than everyone else isn’t just deeply unjust but utterly exploitative. There also is the question of how to account for the industry’s negative externalities. Close to a million Rohingya continue to live in squalor in this planet’s densest settlement, the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh. They are the survivors of the first genocide facilitated by Facebook. If Zuckerberg and other Meta employees had to pay reparations, as they should, their wealth might just be gone.

When Heracles cleaned the Augean stables in a day by redirecting two rivers, arguably a clever solution to an impossible challenge, he nonetheless failed the challenge because he didn’t do the work himself. He also failed the challenge of slaying the nine-headed Hydra of Lerna. Not because he didn’t slay her. He sure did. He failed because he had his nephew Iolaus help him. Yet Silicon Valley’s great men have achieved much lesser feats only with help of thousands upon thousands of anonymous engineers. Yet they demand to be treated like Heracles. That’s not how it worked in Ancient times.

That’s not how it should work today. To begin with, Heracles successfully completed ten other challenges and thus possibly deserved the adoration. But if you read the story of his challenges or labors, the one thing that sticks out is that he is nothing but a mass-murderer who, to atone for killing wife and children, goes out and kills and kills and kills. That surely is not the way to make amends for anything. The lesson couldn’t be clearer: These great men are trying to murder us. Ok, I wrote that last sentence tongue firmly in cheek. But given that the technology industry’s leaders are mostly white, mostly straight, mostly American, filthy rich men, with a history of ethically dubious behavior to maximize their riches, what are the chances that they will build AI systems that are aligned with the needs of all of us?

I’d say, that’s a big fat zero!

That also is our final score for the legitimacy of these great men. It accounts for their astounding egotism and sleaze, with additional points subtracted for delusional claims of actual greatness where none is to be had. In their illegitimacy, they also are all the same. No one deserves a separate score because no-one meets basic standards of decency.

Legitimacy: Industry 0.0

To recap, the technology industry is middling at best when it comes to creating value for others. With possible exception of Tesla, the industry also fails to meet the defining challenge of our times. Its leaders suffer from a complete lack of legitimacy, claiming contributions they had only cursory involvement in. Clearly, Patriarchy 2.0 isn’t any better than the original version. Hence the industry’s great men are wholly deserving of our disdain and disgust. They also are in urgent need of disruption and disintermediation.

Truth be told, Silicon Valley’s great men don’t even make for good anti-heroes. They are too bland, too boring, too devoid of the qualities that make humans human. In a pinch, Elon Musk is the only one who might qualify. But when you watch him trolling on X, it’s impossible to escape the impression that he is plainly pathetic and just a major asshole. In calling him just that, Isaacson got one thing really right. Kudos for putting it in print!

It’s not just the megalomania, which really isn’t backed by any discernable achievement but having too much money. It’s not just the sleazy and extralegal business practices. It’s not just the amateurish meddling in US foreign policy. It’s not just the far-right trolling and the cosplaying with fascism lite. It is fundamentally about humans and their dignity. If you can’t respect that, you shouldn’t have power over other people. It’s as simple as that. Yet the great men of the technology industry have an abysmal record when it comes to respecting others’ humanity.

Just like Zuckerberg is complicit in two genocides and Bezos thought it acceptable to use up (often Black and Brown) warehouse workers, Musk disposes of people at will. A couple of days ago, the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla because “Black workers at the Tesla plant in Fremont have routinely been subjected to racist slurs and graffiti, including swastikas and nooses.” So far, five women who used to work at SpaceX, have come forward describing pervasive sexual harassment. Then there is the flight attendant who detailed how Musk exposed himself to her before propositioning her.

If you read through this article and still harbor a tech bro crush on Elon Musk, it’s time to do the work and rid yourself of this false idol. I’ve assembled a reasonable overview of his record. You know all you need to know. The bottom line is that he’s just another racist, chauvinistic, and abusive man. So stop with the hero worship and start living your own story. Sure, you probably won’t get as close to omnipotence as Musk and you will miss out on all that oligarchic cosplay. But when somebody treats other humans as disposable, they are the worst kind of monster. More importantly, anyone can be a greedy, misanthropic creep. That’s no achievement at all. Doing right by other humans is far harder and far more rewarding. So give it a try. It just might grow on you! (And yeah, you can still troll on X, but please keep it to once or twice a month.)

If you are a woman who has the misfortune to work in this industry and were nodding along for most of this last section but thinking “I knew that years ago,” my sincere apologies. Occasionally, I’m a little slow catching on. Usually, I’m much better. I’m also looking for a new opportunity to build technology that focuses on creating human value for all of us. If you need a clever engineer to help with that, hit me up!

Liber scriptus proferetur, in quo totum continetur, unde Elon judicetur.