After the documentarian Alex Gibney opened his four-hour film about Elon Musk at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Elon nailed his review in minutes. Four hours, he wrote, equals “boring”. When I was asked to review the same documentary, I said I’d do my best, but I guessed I might end up sounding crazy. Start taking Elon seriously and you’re on a slippery slope.
Never mind, let’s set out in a playful mood, beginning with a question from a Guardian quiz: “What’s the link: Nevada; Arcadia; Saxon; Azure…?” If you’re having trouble, I can help you out by adding a fifth item: “X Æ A-Xii”.
Has that extra item given the game away? We’ve all glimpsed “Lil X”, as his nursery pals call him. He was the adorable imp, the one Elon brought to the Oval Office that day and who was chattering away in his own world, picking his nose, while Donnie was mouthing big-boy strategies. You see, the answer to my quiz question is that these are all names of Elon Musk’s children.
Wasn’t that Oval moment touching? Doesn’t every glowing dad think of taking the kid to the office — not just to show him or her off or to prove how domestic and human he is, but to let the toddler smell the office and know that POWER is more than the hum of business machines and the dismissal of minions.
At the latest count, Elon Reeve Musk, aged 55, had 14 children. Though he is not shy about admitting there might be more. Indeed, he’s a naughty boy proud about how many others there could be, hiding behind that curtain, waiting to jump out and goose their dad. After all, a guy can’t keep count of everything — you wouldn’t expect Musk off the top of his cloudy head to know to the nearest 10,000 just how many people he rendered unemployed in his DOGE crusade. Nor that various estimates put the number of deaths caused by the withdrawal of USAID at sort of 640,000. Musk counted zero.
Of course, most of those unlucky 640,000 were far away — if you’re weak on geography, just think of it as “out of sight”. We are accustomed to that tradition now. Strangers are dying all the time. It’s an elementary aspect of strangeness. Nothing personal.
It’s the “nothing personal” that upsets me. The best thing about Elon is the silly-kid angle. To see him playing with Lil X reminded me that we seldom see Donnie with Barron (and I worry about Barron) sharing a hot dog at a ball game or playing chess together. And indeed, chess tells you a lot about Elon. He used to play. I bet he’s pretty good, yet easily wiped out by masters. Like Garry Kasparov resigning against Deep Blue back in 1997. So Elon has said chess is over. It’s just a matter of so many finite moves. No point in playing. That must be hard for a smart four-year-old who dreams of mating dad. And hard for Elon who does seem to aspire to being four.
That age has so little shame or doubt in being selfish — and selfishness is necessary because it’s total (as in totalitarianism). Perhaps that’s why Elon is in his element playing with children? It’s being with grown-ups that makes him sweat. So he’d go to Mars where he could jump two-and-a-half times higher than here. Have you ever considered what diminished gravity might do for elongation?
So spare us those snarky know-alls marvelling at how a genius couldn’t keep his fly zipped. (No one has ever said Elon enjoys the sex. It’s just a progressive duty for him.) Instead, what one has to recognise in Elon is the populating generosity, the sacrificial impulse prepared to give up his own brain cells, his vital bodily fluids and 20 minutes now and then with a view to spreading genius as if it was manure.
Remember, folks, this Elon is 55 and promulgating his eyes out for science, for the future, for America. He’s being horny for posterity — excuse my language, but if you’ve ever sexed with anyone that old you know this is no joke, and in his steadfast duty of impregnation Elon is wearing himself ragged. For us. For civilisation. For peanuts. And now, he has been appointed to co-lead a project to examine the future conduct of war.
Like a child playing with toy soldiers, Musk wants an army of mini-mes. And when it comes to armies, he knows sufficient principles of engineering to understand discipline and marching in step. That’s all that works if the infants begin to get the idea that in his natural forgetfulness they don’t matter individually. And Elon is so famous that he could hardly go anywhere without raising clouds of awe and contempt. How could such a dad take you out for a burger and a movie? As if a kid doesn’t prefer his father being just one of the great crowd of dingbat dads. Imagine how hard it is to be the child of the richest man on earth without succumbing to a fatal lassitude, a catastrophic carelessness, or even some whispered thought of revenge.
But Elon doesn’t know how many children he has had. He’s open to being open-minded — and he enjoys a joke or two about his affect sometimes seeming vacant. But his apparent indifference can be read as a kind of universal paternalism along the lines of: “Imagine me as the father of all children… Et cetera.” You know where that loftiness is headed. Et cetera isn’t just a boasting allusion to the X that Musk owns, it’s a computer’s vision of delicious series.
Amid all the mysteries that await our far-away future, there will be the uncertainty over whether Elon was an actual, breathing human being, or something less provable but more enduring — an idea? A fiction? A commercial?
Of course, there was no way we were ever going to get Elon to Mars (and he had talked about that happening in the next 10 years — by which time he would have been set for Medicare). So try to think of an alternative scenario: suppose Elon was to reveal that instead of going to Mars he is already from there. How did he get here? By magic, by religion, by being beamed up, or just garden-variety AI. Was he sent as a torment or a tease? Your call.
You see, I think I’ve worked it out: he is not one of us. The silly kid is really an alien, like a saviour sent to reclaim us. I’d prefer him in full-length sackcloth robes, sandals or barefoot, sermonising on the mount and in the malls, doing tactful miracles on talk shows. He grows a beard, his hair goes white, he mouths the blather of salvation — you know that routine. You thought this ministry had gone out of fashion, but Elon can bring it back, as our revered hermit surrounded by children, with that daft smile pinned on his face. Yet if you look behind the empty eyes, you may wonder if he isn’t anticipating some assassin, one of his own, who holds a knife as bright as the sleekest Tesla Cybercab.
I warned you, I could end up sounding crazy. But these days, what excuse is left for trusting sanity?
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