Why Do People Need Musk to Be a Genius?

Again, I don’t like taking on specific posts from specific people. I, unlike many of the people who write newsletters, have a life outside this space. If there is contention, I will likely miss it which seems at least a little unfair to the people I post about. And the individual posts are usually the symptom, not the disease. But I have seen this argument floating around for a bit, and it fascinates me. So I will sue this as a representative of the form, knowing that it is only one example and not the entirety of the genre.

Noah Smith has been on something of a tear recently trying to convince the world that Elon Musk, despite all appearance, is actually a supervillain. It culminated in this post. You can read it yourself. It is not very interesting or compelling, but the heart of the argument is this:

And yet whatever his IQ is, Elon has unquestionably accomplished incredible feats of organization-building in his career. This is from a post I wrote about Musk back in October, in which I described entrepreneurialism as a kind of superpower:

Yeah, not much of that is true. Musk was such a terrible leader at PayPal that they had to be fired by Peter Thiel, a man whose picture is in the dictionary next to the phrase bad boss. He didn’t start Tesla, he bought into it and forced the founders out. So what, you say, surely he got Tesla to the place it is now. Well, not really. Tesla folds if it is not propped up by a government loan. SpaceX’s advantage seems to be that it ignores regulations that protect the environment and save workers, taking advantage of dedicated dreamers. Neither is really a good model for a sustainable company.

And Smith also ignores what Musk’s companies have become now. Tesla’s sales are cratering, in part because people are tired of Musk imposing his fascism onto their governments, but also in part because the quality of the cars is not up to their competitors and their model line has not been refreshed in years. Twitter, from a value perspective, is a disaster (one could argue that Musk got his own propaganda outlet, but Twitter is even failing at that. By pushing so hard into alt-right nonsense he is driving normal people away from Twitter, lessoning it impact as a propaganda outlet). Even SpaceX has been impacted by Musk’s poor decisions.

The idea that Musk is somehow an entrepreneurial genius is poorly supported at best. So why do so many people want to believe it to be true?

I suspect there are many reasons, but I do think they are largely tied up in the writer’s own sense of their place in the world and their own perception of their intelligence and how they should be rewarded for said intelligence.

Partly, I think this comes from the sense that if Musk really is functionally stupid, as he so clearly is, then what does it say about them that they were fooled by him? A lot of people thought Musk was both a good businessperson and good for the planet. I certainly did at one point. But that was then, and this is now. And what it says about people still clinging to the idea that Musk is some super organizer or businessperson rather than a functional idiot protected from the consequences of his actions by his money and a corrupt society that does not hold rich people accountable. I have always understood that intelligence is, in part, the ability to adjust to new facts. People like Smith missed these changes, and so they must insist, in order to maintain their own conception of their intelligence, that there were no changes to miss.

Smith also wants to argue that denigrating Musk is just a form of cope. That dunking on his idiocy on Twitter dangerously deludes people into believing that he is defeated, and that we don’t need to worry about him. This is so far from reality that I genuinely had to read these sections multiple times to make sure I was being fair to the argument. But Smith himself ends the post with this little bit of odd understanding of human beings:

Except that in the real world beyond the little X app on your phone, simply calling someone “dumb” does not actually defeat them, any more than Rachel Maddow actually “destroys Trump” when she says mean things about him on MSNBC. Maybe saying that Elon has a 110 IQ makes you feel like you beat him in your little online fantasy world, but out there in the actual world, he is still ripping up your national institutions at breakneck speed.

People who think that denigrating Elon’s capabilities will somehow defeat him or make him go away are simply fools — not low IQ, but simply unwise people reacting suboptimally to an external challenge. Elon Musk is, in many important ways, the single most capable man in America, and we deny that fact at our peril.

That fundamentally misreads that purpose of pointing out that the Musk has no clothes (and you are welcome for that image). Musk and his supporters, and his more credulous opponents, like Smith, want to portray Muska s a super genius business doer in order to justify his actions. After all, he built Tesla and SpaceX and his giant brain is the reason we have outer space and electricity and apple pie at all! We should let him do for the government what he did for Twitter! By showing that Musk is not, in fact, a super-duper giant brain haver, that he is functionally stupid, that his success is contingent on luck, other people’s efforts, and the government either turning a blind eye to his rule breaking or actively bailing him out, we weaken him.

Such information makes clear to people that the justification for allowing him to run riot is, well, bullshit. That he is not a super genius reminds people that what he says or does should not be given any special weight and that we have no reason to fear that he cannot, in fact, be stopped. He’s not a cartoon supervillain whose devious plans we cannot hope to overcome. He’s a dork who’s been protected from the consequences of his actions at almost every step of his life and thus nothing to be afraid of. People pretending otherwise, in the words of Mr. Smith, are simply fools unable to see the reality in front of their faces and are already pre-surrendering before the fight has even been joined.

But I think the larger reason is that people like Smith desperately want history to be driven by “great men”. Smith’s post spends a lot of time attacking historians — something he is not — for daring to suggest that great changes stem not from individual people but from societal changes. Individuals can and do have an effect on the edges of those changes, but there is a reason calculus was invented twice — the ideas were percolating in a society that had both the spare resources to support and the need for mathematical advances. No single person, literally in this case, decided that calculus was needed. The society drove their pursuits.

Same with Musk. He bought Tesla after others had seen that electric cars were one way out of the climate disaster. The worst decision SpaceX made was at his behest, and others did the hard work of making the rockets a reality. His Nueralink company is leaning on ideas that are decades old, and doing so in a way that had him investigated until he fired the investigators. At no point has he really done something amazing by himself, or created something that was not already in the air, so to speak, at the time. And the deeper he gets involved in his forms, the worst they tend to do.

But pretending that he is special, that he is a supervillain, allows people like Smith to believe that history is made by great men, rather than by societal changes. It allows them to think of themselves as great men and it allows them to denigrate the idea that change comes from mass movements, from the collective will of many people working together to push society in the right direction. I suspect that for these people, the idea that their intelligence is not as useful as they were told it would be, that luck, culture, the ability to subsume your work into the greater good, and the material constraints of a given society have more impact on history than individual brains is a direct attack on their conception of themselves and their place in the world.

And so instead of seeing a functional moron, a man who gets called out for falling for the dumbest partisan nonsense on twitter and can only manage a “fuck you” as an argument, they need to see a super genius. Because if a functional moron can succeed, what does that say about the dreams of meritocracy that they have built their lives upon? Easier, I suspect, to live the dream of Elon Musk Super Brain Haver than face the reality that they can only change history as part of a society rather than by standing astride it and yelling “I AM SMART!” and expecting history to care.