SFGATE columnist Drew Magary consumed Musk’s entire erratic interview so you don’t have to
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for NYT
Secretly, I’d prefer it if the richest men on Earth were special. I know that there are genuinely exceptional people out there, because I’ve watched Steph Curry play basketball. So it’s only fair of me to want our most successful businesspeople to be people of comparable, if not greater, talent. That’s how I thought of the Waltons and Gateses of the world when I was a middle schooler. And in a just world (ha!), I would have been not only right to think it, but happy to KNOW it. If these men really were great, then the socioeconomic system that elevated them would also be great. And fair.
Which brings me to Elon Musk. At one point in his career, Musk was the heir apparent to the late Steve Jobs. He ran multiple tech corporations at once and seemingly did so with élan, and with genuine interest in improving the lives of his customers. He launched the first reusable space rockets. He had nascent plans to reinvent modern public transit with a “Hyperloop” that could shoot you from LA in San Francisco in 36 tidy minutes. He made Tesla’s patents available to all, and described his reason for doing so with simple brilliance:
“If we’re all in a ship together, and there’s some holes in the ship and we’re sort of bailing water out … and we have a great design for a bucket … even if we’re bailing out way better than everybody else, we should probably still share the bucket design. Because we’re all going to sink.”
That Elon Musk was the naive person’s idea of what a billionaire should be. But we’re all a little bit wiser now, whereas Musk is no longer as articulate, nor as magnanimous, as he once was. He delivered final proof of that yesterday at the New York Times’ DealBook summit, in which he had the following bizarre exchange with journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin.
