The Sunset of Musknukonomics
"He came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye"
T’was ever thus. The great masses of people do not set the course of history. Even in times of social overturning, it is for a chosen few—Marti, Robespierre, Marx, Gandhi—to inspire, rather than command; to light the fire and bask in its glow.
As Elon Musk departs Washington to try to rebuild his tattered car company by parachuting robotaxis onto the streets of Austin, he leaves behind in the deserts of the Sahel, the hospital wards of Haiti, and in war-torn Red Cross camps of the world, thousands of child corpses. Across the United States, he leaves hundreds of thousands tossed out of their lifetime employment, veterans shorn of medicines and treatments, former food stamp recipients going hungry, and a looming economic depression with empty shelves and rationed toys at Christmas.
Musk embodies a different sort of firebrand. He is the AntiRobespierre.
— Elon Musk on X
There are many exposés of Musk by esteemed biographers and journalists—most recently a profile in The New York Times—but Musk is of a peculiar Gen-X genre, randomly empowered by the fickle finger of a rewritten history.
Like Bonaparte or Bolívar, Elon had an intrinsic capacity to rise to greatness, but it would not have happened without repeated and extraordinary lightning strikes of luck. At age 12, the young, privileged white South African sold a self-coded video game (Blastar)—an omen of his entrepreneurial and technological chops. After emigrating to and educating in Canada, he briefly went to Stanford on a foreign student visa (irony?) seeking a PhD in applied physics, but dropped out after 2 days to pursue a digital dream.
1995: Co-founded Zip2, a web software company providing city guides for newspapers.
1999: Sold Zip2 to Compaq for ~$300M.
1999–2000: Founded X.com, an online bank, which merged to become PayPal
2002: Sold PayPal to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
As the Millennium unfolds, we find the world’s first 20-year-old self-made billionaire reading science fiction—particularly stories about colonizing other planets—and pulling all-nighters in role-playing computer games. Philosophically, he slides into the Silicon Valley ethos: disruption through code, decentralized innovation, information wants to be free, and the belief that small teams can outcompete institutions. He accepts the idea that the private sector can displace bureaucratic systems—e.g., banking (PayPal) or aerospace (SpaceX), ignoring the fundamental truth that governments exist to provide what businesses either can’t or won’t—unprofitable services like waste management, environmental protection, public well-being, and foreign aid. In Musk’s view—it's a tech bro mantra—if the private sector finds no value in it, it has no reason to exist, at least on an unwilling taxpayer’s dime. Instead, give us Techno-Utopianism:
2002: Founded SpaceX, aiming to reduce space transport costs and colonize Mars.
2004: Invested in and became Chairman of Tesla Motors.
2006: Co-founded SolarCity (run by his cousins) to expand solar power.
2008: SpaceX's Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit.
Climate
“We have shown that the late-20th-century land-air temperatures have been increasing at almost twice the rate of the surface oceans and are now about two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,” the authors write. “If these current rates of warming continue, mean land temperature will exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius by about 2035.”
Scientists 30 years ago underestimated both the speed of climate heating and the degree of change to date, placing us, within the next decade, a full half degree beyond the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree climate tipping point. As the inevitability of climate change sank in, Musk’s futurism migrated from Earthly self-sufficiency (Tesla and Solar City) to escape from Earth (SpaceX, the Boring Company). This meshed with Silicon Valley’s “first principles thinking”—stripping ideas and institutions down to their fundamentals and rebuilding from scratch.
2015: Launch of OpenAI, initially a non-profit to ensure AI benefits humanity.
2016: Founded Neuralink (brain-computer interface).
2017: Founded the Boring Company to build underground transportation systems.
2022: Acquired Twitter for $44 billion, changing the name to X.
2025: Merged X into xAI, a rival to privatized OpenAI now led by Sam Altman.
The move into the Boring Company, xAI and Neuralink was perhaps an outshoot of his unwilling concession, based on the NASA twins genome study, that human biology was unsustainable in the ambient cosmic radiation of space or on planets that lacked robust geomagnetic shields (pretty much all of them). With Neurolink, it might be possible for a discrete human intelligence, even one augmented by A.I., to operate an Android body, either onboard or remotely, a la Avatar. The Boring Company recognized that caves could be humanity’s default habitat, whether on a sun-scorched and radioactive Earth or under the surface of Mars.
Musk the transhumanist grew more vocal, calling for reduced government oversight of emerging tech—especially his. He publicly clashed with centralized authority (e.g.: California COVID rules; NASA drug testing) and acquired Twitter to promote his reactionary techno-libertarian-fascism. He vascillated between AI for all and fretting about AI in the wrong hands, which gave him cognitive dissonance vis-à-vis government regulation. Yet, in one belief, he never wavered—that progress should not be hindered by bureaucracy.
There was just one fly in his ointment.
Energy
To run the kind of data centers needed for a techno-utopian future, a vastly greater energy supply is required than is currently or foreseeably available. The shift to renewables, which Musk had well championed, was inadequate. Fossil energy had peaked, and he knew it. Fossils were a billion-year savings account—a trust fund energy bounty stored as photosynthetic hydrocarbons in Earth's outer layers. Renewables were a cash infusion arriving from the Sun that needed to be balanced daily or it would overdraft.
The Silicon Valley solution was, of course, atomic energy—clean, safe, too cheap to meter. Rather than learn to live within Earth’s means, “oikos,” the Tech Bros viewed expansion of means as “iapokopē” (severance)—or “exōthen” (external to the whole). The rules of ecological economics, such as accounting for neglected externalities, did not apply to them.
Next week in Part Two: Zombie Musknukonomics
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#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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