There’s not a lot of wailing in grief this week for Elon Musk, who loses $100-billion-plus in stock value as Stop Wall Streeters spray paint his show room windows; and as some investors call for his removal at the company Tesla’s helm. What’s a prototype man of the future to do? Who cares?
I’d venture that most Americans have seen enough of him, and even President Donald Trump seems tired of Musk’s presence. Mike Meyers hilarious parody of this Nerd for All Seasons has knocked him from his very high horse.
But let’s flash back. It was just a few years ago that Musk was a paradigm of modern engineering, conqueror of the realms of electric cars and rocket propulsion. He was set to implant helpful silicon chips in needy craniums, and to bore a vacuum sealed tunnel all the way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
The breadth of his engineering ambition is astounding. But the road has been rocky since he took on the task of social engineering with the purchase of large-scale media platform Twitter. And the road gets rockier.
Musk threw himself — and his investors — into the political arena, armed with bags of money, as well as a scrum-influenced, process-oriented ‘Engineering-first’ methodology that sometimes resembles a Jedi starfighter tailspin. Clues to what led him off-path are found in his DNA, as described by technology historian Jill Lepore in last week’s New York Times.
Lepore makes the convincing argument that Musk is following the course of his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a 1930s Canadian political figure in the technocracy movement, which saw the era’s technology as a harbinger of something like Utopia, but that required a new organization of society, one that might put a class of engineers atop that society’s ladder.
Like American Eugenicists and Italian Futurists, the Technocracy followers embraced imagined technology principles. These were meant to refresh the organization of society and economies. Such groups were a feature of the early 20th Century. The bad news is key tenets of these and other Utopian efforts left plenty of room for old-fashioned racism and autocracy.
Lepore cites proposals by leading technocrats back in the day to replace democratically elected officials and civil servants with scientists and engineers. For this columnist, this readily pre-conjures Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) undertaking.
Musk’s Grandpa Haldeman was heavily involved in lecturing and pamphleteering the technology bible, going on to lead the Social Credit Party of Saskatchewan, which, beginning in 1935, avowed absolute economic security for the individual. That bears some resemblance to FDR’s New Deal programs but, as Lepore asserts, the New Deal proved relatively effective on the political front, while Technocracy movement did not gain footing.
Haldeman was no overarching success. As that party’s fortunes dwindled in the late 1940s, he headed to South Africa to capitalize on Afrikaners’ unwelcome birthing of apartheid in 1949.
One can conjecture that Musk may have conscious or unconscious interest in succeeding where his grandfather didn’t.
Technocrats called for elimination of money — and searched for fundamentally different ways of economic exchange, and so bear some resemblance to today’s FinTech advocates, among whom Elon Musk is poised as a chief innovator.
In the interests of modernity, some technocrats took on numbers rather than names — naturally, Lepore points out here that Musk has a son named Æ A-12.
Most of all, technocrats such as Haldeman valued organizational efficiency and aggressive work scheduling — now a supposed hallmark of Musk’s efforts on behalf of his controversial DOGE.
Will Musk’s current trajectory, threatened by financial losses and public backlash, cause him to step back from aggressive social engineering? For this skeptical observer to answer this requires something of a flying leap, or some transparent hedging.
Here goes.
Clearly, his family history is worth a look. History doesn’t repeat — it rhymes. It suggests he will keep at it, but he may not be so committed to the US that he won’t someday pick up his stakes. True enough, he isn’t kidding about that mission to Mars.
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This story also syndicated via Medium blog.