Musk Derangement Syndrome

No I generally stay away from commenting on US politics but this time, nah.

Writing in The New Republic, a once wonderful and credible publication since taken over by hack and cranks, one Alex Shephard wrote about Elon Musk in this neo-gutter mag. Here is a sampling:

• Elon Musk is evil.

• It’s hard to think of a more pathetic figure now

• he has revealed himself to be a venal, thin-skinned moron

• there is more evidence that Elon Musk is an idiot.

• has decided to devote his fortune and his time to attacking diversity and progress on nearly every front.

• It’s hard to think of a more pathetic figure now

But who is Alex Shephard - a writer for a publication that can’t get people to actually pay for its content so needs to beg for money from wealthy fellow dilettante travellers. According to his bio:

Alex Shephard is senior editor of The New Republic, where he has covered politics and culture since 2015. His work has also appeared in New York, GQ, The Atlantic, The Nation, and other publications.  

So Musk, the wealthiest person on the planet and one of the most consequential entrepreneurs to have ever lived is evil and pathetic. So says Shephard and the TNR.

Yes. Someone living off the generosity of others thinks Musk is a pathetic figure.

But what is this all about? It’s about politics. And people don’t like Musk’s politics. As Charlie Cooke eloquently wrote in the National Review:

He is a genius and a lunatic, conspiratorial and visionary and childish — and all those things are probably related.

and

That Elon Musk is both a genius and a weirdo is no accident. Indeed, historically, the two have not only tended to go hand in hand, but have been inextricable from one another once joined. Howard Hughes washed his hands until they bled, kept his urine in jars, and spent months at a time sitting naked watching the same movie with a cocktail napkin laid out over his penis. Henry Ford was a vicious antisemite who, in his later years, may have been clinically insane. Nikola Tesla was afraid of circles and had to clean his knife and fork with exactly 18 cleaning towels before eating anything. Pythagoras thought that fava beans contained the souls of the dead and that consuming them was tantamount to cannibalism. And don’t get me started on the inventors of Victorian England. John Napier, the aristocratic British mathematician who discovered logarithms and popularized the use of the decimal point, consented to travel nowhere without at least one spider in a box and believed that his pet rooster was trying to tell him which of his servants was stealing from him.

Yes. Musk is imperfect and quirky. We all are. He says strange and stupid things. But he is a genius,

I certainly know which of Musk and Shephard I would prefer to share a meal with and which I would probably not piss on if he was on fire.