Finn McRedmond: You don’t have to like Elon Musk to admire him

What does it mean to change the world? In 2006, Time Magazine named “you” as their person of the year. You beat out Iran’s (then) president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; China’s (then) president Hu Jintao; the (then) leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il; and James Baker, former US secretary of state.

Their reasoning behind the decision was something to do with how ordinary people en masse were shaping the digital age, by logging on to YouTube and MySpace and other dot.coms that are now relics of a world changed utterly. In working out who is most deserving of the acknowledgment – the magazine is keen to stress it is not an award for Goodness – Time assesses those who wield the most influence, “for better or for worse”.

But quantifying impact is not an easy thing to do. Musicians and film-makers and artists possess a sort-of-soft influence, shifting our tastes and reflecting the complexities of the world back to us in meaningful and moving ways. Dictators and strongmen have the inverse: forcing their will through sheer might and military heft. There are a litany of ways to wield influence between these bookends.

There are few people who have had such an impact on the planet. He has been the pivotal figure in the electric car revolution

But there is one entrepreneur who most embodies what it means to change things in seismic and irreversible ways. Time Magazine named billionaire Elon Musk as 2021’s person of the year, much to the chagrin of his myriad denigrators (though Musk might prefer the more online term “haters”).

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There are few people – perhaps ever – who have had such an impact on the planet. He has been the pivotal figure in the electric car revolution. His company Tesla recently joined the ranks of just a few trillion-dollar companies, and made electric vehicles cool and mainstream and desirable, pushing its rivals to embrace the technology too. That is not an easy footprint to ignore.

Space pioneer

But he is not solely confined to the earthly. As space travel increasingly falls out of the hands of superpowers and into the remit of companies, Musk leads the charge. SpaceX has significantly reduced the cost of space exploration, it has been selected by Nasa to engineer the return of astronauts to the moon, and when Musk talks about travelling to Mars within our lifetime, he really means it.

All of this forces us to consider what role the hyper-wealthy play in the future of the planet. And it raises questions about how we want to order our world: what does it mean to be a billionaire? What obligations do billionaires have to society? How do we navigate the tension between the individual and the state? Musk is more than just technically impactful: he has become the ultimate icon of these profound movements in our values and our mores.

With all of those things together Musk occupies a funny, liminal space, as both the American Dream personified, and its ultimate disrupter. He turned the imperial vision of American space exploration into a more ambitious, affordable and privately owned reality. And he has reimagined the symbol of American industry – the car – as something environmentally sustainable.

But trying to understand Musk or predict his next gambit feels much like trying to hold water in your hands. He does not speak like a staid chief executive of most Fortune 500 companies but like a regular person – the only difference is he can move markets with just a few words. He is a nerdy and awkward media performer. Yet he has been completely embraced by Hollywood and is the current standard bearer of the celebrity entrepreneur.

Middle-class sneering

There are few who generate such ire, especially among the comfortable middle classes who champion sneering as a national pastime. The relentless campaign of public negativity is motivated by Musk’s unlikeability and his wealth (in spite of his claims that he will “pay more taxes than any American in history this year”). But mostly it finds its provenance in narrow intellectual conformity. Negativity is the easiest thing to reach for when threatened with something new or hard to understand.

Musk occupies a funny, liminal space, as both the American Dream personified and its ultimate disrupter

But it is also the quickest way to put a cork in progress. Maybe we believe progress in the abstract is a positive thing. But when we are met with a character responsible for realising progress who is strange or of ambiguous moral fibre, our instinct seems to be to try to shut it down. Perhaps it is the most natural impulse in the world, but it is one we ought to resist.

Musk is a neat testament to human complexity. And a reminder that people do not have to be nice to be good. He is famously hard to work for – demanding and impatient. And based on the testimonies of his ex-wives, he sounds even harder to be married to. He is loose-lipped and often cavalier, once knocking $14 billion off Tesla’s share price with a seven-word tweet.

But stasis is only overcome by intellectual bravery. Musk is a testament to the renegades and the visionaries and those who elude easy definition. We do not have to like him, but we should know the world would be better off for more, not fewer, Musks in it.