“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde had one of his characters say in his 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan. This week, Elon Musk managed — not for the first time — to be simultaneously in the stars and the gutter. SpaceX’s IPO valued his rocket company at $2 trillion — making Musk, officially, a trillionaire, the richest person in the world by hundreds of billions of dollars. The space Musk — the defiant genius who bet everything on a reusable rocket and the promise of a cosmic monopoly — is astonishing. The Wall Street Journal called the IPO a Goldilocks debut with Musk starring as the three bears.

But there is another Musk — the one in the gutter, promoting white nationalist violence from his platform on X. This week Musk not only stoked the anti-immigrant riots in Belfast but reiterated his support for the English white supremacist gangster Tommy Robinson.

So is this another Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella? Keith Teare, publisher of That Was the Week, certainly thinks so. While Keith is in awe of Musk’s entrepreneurial genius at SpaceX, he seems to excuse Musk’s support for Tommy Robinson’s paramilitarism. “I’m not even sure I like him,” Keith confesses in his musings on “civilisation.” Nor do the rest of us.

But I wonder if this good/bad Elon narrative is too convenient. There is an awkward symbiosis between Musk’s journey to SpaceX and to white nationalist violence. For all the utopian cornucopia of space, our earthly reality is one of scarce land and fear of immigrants — Trump, Tommy Robinson, and this weekend’s Swiss referendum on capping its population at 10 million. For all the Muskian promise of cosmic abundance, today’s Muskian politics is paranoid and exclusionary. So maybe it’s not just Elon. Most of us these days seem simultaneously in the gutter and looking up at the stars.

Five Takeaways

• SpaceX: $2 Trillion Juggernaut. 25 years, El Segundo warehouse, reusable rocket, near-bankruptcy, global payload monopoly, Starlink, NASA subcontracts. Wall-to-wall startup applause. Wall-to-wall social media pylon. Both simultaneously true.

• The Grimace vs the Applause. Mainstream press applauds. Social media rages. Keith’s verdict: judge Musk not on likability but on criteria. Civilization or net worth. Different criteria, different judgment.

• California and Europe: Failed Government. Zakaria: California is a case study in failed government. Fukuyama: optimistic about liberal Europe. Keith: Fukuyama ignores the EU’s structural problem. Populism is not the disease. It’s the symptom.

• Bernie Sanders Finally Had an Insight. A sovereign wealth fund owning 50% of all high-growth AI companies. Keith: right direction, not enough. The kicker: David Sacks agreed and said 75%. When Sacks and Sanders agree, left-right labels stop helping.

• Planning Beats Complaint. Not celebrating Musk vs resenting him. Planning vs complaining. John O’Farrell resigned from Andreessen Horowitz and wrote the op-ed. Gary Tan organised and won. Citizens who act beat citizens who complain.

About the Guest

Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch.

References

That Was the Week by Keith Teare: thatwa.st
Fareed Zakaria, “How California Became a Case Study in Failed Government,” Washington Post
John O’Farrell, “We Can’t Let My Former VC Colleagues Buy Off Democracy,” New York Times

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 SpaceX IPO: Goldilocks debut
00:01:57 Where’s the grimacing?
00:03:36 Should we like Elon Musk?
00:04:23 From El Segundo to $2 trillion
00:20:00 Nigel Farage and the UK working class
00:30:24 Fukuyama and Europe 2031
00:32:09 California: failed government
00:35:06 Planning beats complaint
00:36:00 Bernie Sanders and the sovereign wealth fund
00:37:21 David Sacks agrees: 75%
00:38:29 Andrew is away next week