The "we'll be okay as long as Elon is in charge" take has aged badly.

We're going to be picking on Noah Smith a lot, and I feel genuinely bad about it. These are not crocodile tears. It seems profoundly unfair to go after someone not because they are stupid or despicable, but because they are the smartest, most articulate person advocating an important school of thought.

Smith speaks for an influential group that is generally Bay Area-centered, mainstream center-left, technocratic techno-optimists. Marc Andreessen is arguably their intellectual leader, though few of them share, and in some cases even acknowledge, the extreme libertarianism at the core of his ideas. They are also decidedly prone to hero worship.

This group is small in terms of absolute numbers, but it includes lots of billionaires and it has a wildly disproportionate impact on the discourse through journalists like Ezra Klein. To make matters worse, the group tends to get something of a free pass from the press at large. All of this makes the need for genuinely critical scrutiny all the more pressing.

From Why America's future could hinge on Elon Musk -- Iron Man, or Dr. Doom? *
by Noah Smith
Oct 26, 2024

In recent months, a number of progressive commentators have suggested that Musk’s support for Donald Trump is part of a campaign to become a “Shadow President”. Many people I talk to in the tech industry also believe this — but they think of it as a good thing. Many of them, even the conservatives, despise Donald Trump as a human being, but they hope that with Trump aging and fading, Musk and J.D. Vance will be running the show in a competent technocratic manner. Put a superhero in charge, the thinking goes, and you get super-results — just as happened with SpaceX and Tesla.

 Apologies to longtime readers who have heard this before, but we need a quick reality check here. SpaceX has achieved some highly impressive, albeit largely incremental, advances with former TRW rocket scientists building off TRW technology. Outside of making some admittedly very good hires, Elon Musk's contribution to this consisted almost entirely of hyping the company and bringing in extraordinary amounts of funding for an operation that was, and probably still is, hemorrhaging cash. 

Tesla is a niche automaker that, for a while, managed to dominate a small corner of the market while turning a small profit, due primarily to government subsidies. Musk's most notable accomplishment with that company was an extraordinary and unprecedented stock pump, keeping the P/E ratio well over 100 even after the company started shrinking.

But even if we were to accept the myth of SpaceX and Tesla, why would we expect Musk to have any special powers when it came to running the government? His only relevant experience with the institution has been getting it to give him large amounts of taxpayer dollars. The answer is because Smith and the rest of this group believe Musk is omnicompetent, that he's a secret genius, and a founding lord of Ithuvania. 

These myths of supermen among us were incredibly popular for most of this century, but it's time we acknowledged how costly they could be. 

 

 

 *We'll be coming back to this one.