Elon Musk, Artist.
Capitalism, Transgression, and the Future
Here’s Elon Musk pitching a new kind of solar roof in 2016. It didn’t exist. It doesn’t still exist. It’s a product of his imagination (reserve yours now).
Then there’s Musk shooting his roadster into space for no practical reason. Performance artists in dim SoHo cellars were likely jealous of the obdurate extravagance of it all. If only they had a rocket company.
Then, Musk pitches a semi truck in 2017. It didn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It was supposed to start deliveries this year, which, assuming I know how calendars work, is almost over.
And full self-driving? Always six months away. (Anyone who knows anything about automotive AI will tell you that FSD is, optimistically, a decade away and Tesla’s technology is behind Waymo, GM, Ford, and pretty much everyone else.)
The fictions mount. A 1,000 solar roofs a week. The Gigafactory powered entirely by renewables. Autonomous LA to NY driving. All promises for 2019. And all fantasies.
Then there’s the hiding or misallocating warranty costs, offshore channel stuffing, churning through apparently disposable upper management, releasing the tragi-comedy that is “Advanced Summon” just so the company can book some of the full self-driving revenue.[1] This list of fantasies and tragedies seems so interminable there are even websites to track them.[2]
Is Elon Musk even a businessman?
The company’s namesake, Nikola Tesla, was something of a scientist. But he spent much of his life dodging bill collectors and spent much of his time wandering the streets of Manhattan at night to feed pigeons (seriously and literally). He invested ridiculous sums to build a contraption to heal a broken wing of a pigeon (really). He claimed to have invented a motor that runs on cosmic rays, claimed to have proof of a new kind of energy (whatever that means), and claimed to have built an engine that could run for 500 years. All fantasies. At one point, Tesla said he was working on a process to photograph the retina to record thoughts, and finally spent years working (supposedly) on a death ray (seriously he called it that.)
When Tesla died, the U.S. government sent an M.I.T. professor and aide to the National Defense Research Committee to Tesla’s hotel (where he was living) to secure any research and prototypes of these new inventions. If someone was making a death ray in a Manhattan hotel, then the U.S. government wanted it. The government official reported back: there was nothing. Nada. Zippo. Not even a pigeon.
The M.I.T. professor reported that Tesla’s “thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.” Whether you concluded that Tesla was a dreamer, a theoretician, a fantasist or a con man probably depended on whether he owed you money.
Category Confusion
Back in the day, well, around the 10th century and earlier, labels (if they existed) and categories were remarkably fluid. By the 19th century, labeling metastasized and categories became weaponized taxonomies. I’ve written about this a lot.
Sometimes we miscategorize people — not their efforts or their industries, necessarily, but the actual human. Often, people miscategorize themselves and then attempt to force themselves into the ready-made definition of the category. Such categories allow for quick understanding and misunderstanding and, in the end, produce a lot of friction.
Henry Ford was a businessman. No one would call him a scientist or an artist.
Nikola Tesla was part mad scientist and part fantasist. He walked the line between prophecy and delusion. He was obsessed with the future, with predicting and revealing it. The fantasy was borne from Tesla’s lack of interest in yesterday; the con man was borne from his lack of interest in today. All was for tomorrow, whatever that may be.
No one would categorize Nikola Tesla as a businessman. But his mad science fantasies and obsession with the new and the next strikes me as the ingredients of an artist. Businessmen are rarely artists and artists are rarely businessmen. Henry Ford was a pure artless businessman. Nikolai Tesla was an artist. He died poor, living in the squalor of a cheap hotel and injured pigeons, fed by unrealizable dreams.
Confession
From a purely business perspective, Elon Musk is some kind of con man. Rational empiricism demands such a conclusion. Through the interest in the ongoing drama and inevitable collapse of Musk, I discovered his girlfriend. (Why investors and short-sellers mention his girlfriend, and the precise details of the girlfriend status, I have no idea.[3]). Obviously they were about as unkind to her as they are to Elon.
And so I looked up this girlfriend, stage-name Grimes, bank-name Claire. The guilt-by-association assumption is that she, too, is a Musk-level grifter. She dies her hair pink and/or purple, which, according to normalcy, is a symptom of grift and probably a liberal arts education.
Instead, I discovered someone in possession of genuine artistic talent.[4] Certainly above-average talent for musicians (despite her lack of training) and above-average talent for artists in general. She’s certainly more talented than Damien Hirst, who is probably the most famous modern artist (aside from gift-shop aficionado Koons). You could spend hours abusing your aesthetic sensibilities in SoHo galleries and not experience her level of talent. She’s got boundless creativity confined only by a lack of formal training, which, of course, is part of the charm. She’s a babe in the woods who stumbled on a keyboard, started tinkering, and primal creation ensued. Rousseau would be proud.
From that revelation, it dawned on me that Musk, like Grimes and Nikola, is an artist. He’s obsessed with tomorrow, uninterested in yesterday and barely cognizant of today. Like Grimes, Musk is unfettered by expectations, despite SEC agreements and bond covenants.
Artists are forces of discovery and revelation. Artists are not fearless visionaries; rather, their obsession with the future allows them to channel their great fears into a relentless pursuit of the new. This pursuit is commonly rendered as transgression; it causes social friction.[5] But if you attached money to it, it looks like a con.[6]
I think all of this becomes obvious as long as one isn’t invested in Musk/Tesla, or else financial blinders will cause you to view Elon the same way the last hotel manager thought of Nikola — just some guy who owes you something. Investing in an artist is dangerous. Artists don’t try to read the market. They try to become the market. Damien Hirst is a better businessman than Musk (Hirst has been cash-flow positive for decades). But Musk is the superior artist. So is Claire.
A short piece on great works of art. Alas, Elon didn’t make the list. https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/top-5-works-of-art-all-time-b879137f40b0?
[1] Some even think Tesla is just a giant deposit-ponzi scheme. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-18/modified-ponzi-scheme-2008-78-tesla-operating-cash-flow-has-come-customer-deposits
[2] https://elonmusk.today/ & http://shitelonsays.com/ are examples.
[3] The globe has an over abundance of short-sellers of Tesla, from famous/wealthy Jim Chanos (of Enron fame) to $TSLAQ on Twitter.
[4] Here’s Grimes, just sitting on a floor, creating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ5XUw4qHZo
Her first hit, written & performed by her, produced on her Mac, while in college. This song made several song-of-the-year/decade lists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtH68PJIQLE
Live, some confection of rock star and DJ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2XE0YG7ilc
[5] Transgression, pop music, and civil rights: https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/the-accidental-rosa-parks-1adc42f9705?
[6] The beauty of capitalism isn’t its wealth-creation but its wealth-destruction. Unfree economies create great wealth too; they just don’t have adequate mechanisms of non-violent destruction. You know capitalism is working when someone loses a few billion.
About Nathan Allen
Founder of Xio Research (A.I.), Applied Magic (A.I.), and Andover (data). A.I. strategy and development leader at IBM. Academic training is in intellectual history; his most recent book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense…. Lectures on historical aspects of media, privacy/law, and power structures (mostly). Previous book: Arsonist.
