The Hater's Ball: Elon Musk, Failson of the Year
TIME Magazine named him Person of the Year, and it's appropriate, just not for any positive reason.
Time Magazine named Elon Musk their 2021 Person of the Year. Granted, in the age of media and writing that is much more accessible and, quite frankly, better than what you find in that publication, that designation is not what it used to be. Then again, was that award all that it is cracked up to be anyway? The same publication named Adolf Hitler Person of the year in 1938. You could claim plausible deniability on behalf of the magazine, but you’d have to be so far up the ass of neoliberalism for it to make sense, even in 1938. Allow yourself to suspend disbelief and believe that this award is somehow “good” though. What has Musk done to earn such an award? Did he invent something that changed humanity? Did he win a major election?
The answer is nebulous outside of being “extremely online” or being able to affect the stock market with one of his instances of being extremely online. I don’t know. He broke up with his popstar girlfriend with whom he sired a child. He kept rope-a-doping several state and local governments on projects that he doesn’t have the mental acumen to complete satisfactorily. Maybe it’s because he got into a space race with human penis Jeff Bezos, but I’m pretty sure he lost it anyway. Not like there are any winners when private citizens have enough money that they can fund space programs, but at least Bezos’ rockets launched. *extremely dril voice* You do not have to hand it to The Penis Man, but I mean, Musk couldn’t even get space right.
Musk basically has thrust himself into the social consciousness because he has a company with a $1 trillion-market cap that sells a product that he can market as “environmentally friendly,” even if every single one of his other exploits undoes any good a single Tesla vehicle might provide. Basically, through posting and taking aid from anywhere he can get it, he has become the richest man in the world and has bought sycophants and press with said money. Whoever said money is the root of all evil is wrong. What greedy shitheads like Musk do with that money is the root of all evil.
What Musk really acts as is the heaviest-fire artillery in the war to defend rich people, institutional capital if you will. At the heart of all his terrible memes is a story. It’s a fiction, but people love a good tall tale if it teaches them a lesson they already believed, especially about poor people and minorities. That story tells a tale of a strapping young lad, equipped only with a dream and a big, science-doing brain that rose up from anonymity in South Africa to become a successful businessman in the big leagues of America. He is the American Dream!1 And now, it’s his mission to not only enhance all of his accomplishments, but to defend them from an insidious force of “selfish” workers creeping up the wall like ivy lurching through cracks in a building.
All of that sounds like a heroic story, but it’s all bullshit. Musk is no rags-to-riches story. His family got rich in South Africa running an emerald mine at the height of Apartheid. His Tesla startup cash came in a roundabout way from that fortune, and it was enhanced through several grants and kickbacks he received during Barack Obama’s administration. When you look at the products that Musk offers, it’s clear that there’s absolutely no way he earned a penny of his fortune. His SpaceX rockets summarily blow up before they launch. He offered to build a submersible to help rescue Thai miners, but not only did it not work, he called someone who called him out on it a pedophile and somehow was adjudged not to have slandered him. He offered to build ventilators to help out with the COVID-19 outbreak at its onset, but all he did was buy a bunch of CPAP machines. They’re great if you have sleep apnea, but when it comes to treating COVID patients, they are hilariously suboptimal. That’s before you even get to his main bread and butter, the Tesla automobile. These cars only have high ratings among Musk’s most obnoxious fanboys, and they also have this pesky reputation of randomly catching on fire. Electric car or not, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to have to deal with burning to death when I start my goddamn car up.
There are no good billionaires, and there are no billionaires who got to their massive fortunes without severely mistreating their workers. That being said, you can’t escape an industry in America today without it being helmed by some nepotist dipshit who waltzed blindly into a fortune with the guarantee from the US government that they’d be too big to fail. The least they can do is offer a good product, like Tony Khan with All Elite Wrestling or the multi-billion-dollar corporation that bought out and owns Popeyes. Musk does not have a product that comes close to Kentucky Fried Chicken, the company that Popeyes is directly competing with. He doesn’t even offer a product that has the history of WWE, AEW’s main competitor, no matter how bad it is now.
Nothing about Musk’s popularity makes sense until you stop looking at it from a classically logical point of view. He doesn’t offer a service to the consumer. He’s a shield, one that isn’t afraid to deploy itself willingly against people that his class doesn’t normally recognize. He normalizes the continued erosion of union rights and gets praise for it because he blames the workers for wanting more than their “fair share” as if it’s some foreign concept Germans wrote about, Russians brought about, and Americans fought against in a cold war. These boogeymen strike fear into the hearts of average Americans who won’t earn in a lifetime what Musk accrues in a day because they are sold on an American dream that sees them not as figures who aspire but as gristle for the mill to make rich pissants like Musk even richer.
It’s not like unionization is completely incompatible with capitalism anyway. In some kind of dystopian vision where wealth is permanently polarized into the hands of those who already had it in the first place, it doesn’t jibe. However, the peak of the era of the Robber Baron was when the idea of collective bargaining really took hold. Unionization was a big thing in the time of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, bosses so powerful that they’re taught in history books alongside presidents and dictators. They’ve been proven to be able to exist in capitalist society, but they’re always painted as a lurching threat to everyone because rich people have inherent greed and ego that thinks because they drew a blueprint that they couldn’t realize without workers, they deserve all the spoils.
The hilariously ironic thing about Musk’s entire operation is that perhaps if he didn’t fight organization so vociferously and with so much applied pressure, he might have a product worth buying. The workers in his factories and in his dealerships already bust their asses for him but one has to wonder if they had things like better pay, benefits, and the other good stuff you get when you work as threads in a larger string rather than as a million little dangling fibers if they might not only have more incentive to take ownership of their work, they might find it worth their while to submit ideas for improvement. Then again, there’s no guarantee that an egomaniacal lurch like Musk would even think someone who didn’t have his brain could possibly improve on his designs, even if every Tesla engine that randomly caught on fire meant to do that. What that workforce would deal with if it had more agency is the same thing they deal with now, a petulant baby who thinks everything is entitled to him because he came up with an idea. You can say people like Musk never learned how to share in school, but you only have that idea ingrained in your brain as a positive trait if you have enough money. Wealth breeds immaturity; thus, you can compare these mega-billionaires, whom Musk himself leads, to huge babies.
If you compared Musk’s behavior online to that of an immature human being, you’d not only be accurate, but you would find it to be an apt metaphor for how the richest and most powerful among the populace act when someone tells them to pay their fucking taxes. Therefore, Musk can be the biggest failson in all the billionaire class and still have people in that class hold him up as part of its vanguard, mainly because he is at the vanguard. His position there and his power and might all expose how much of the current economic system is built on smoke and mirrors, given that Musk has failed to produce time and time again and yet his promises, which you can bet your ass will be empty, get him billions upon billions of dollars. It’s obscene, but the entire existence of the one-percent is such. I mean…
If they disown Musk, they disown the guy who’s best at playing the game, and the whole house of cards comes down. Again, the Time Person of the Year isn’t so much an accolade anyone has to respect, but it’s telling they gave it to him at a time when his accrual of wealth has come under the most scrutiny. It’s an ineffectual weapon, sure, but the out-of-touch elite class doesn’t know how to deploy effective weaponry if left to their own devices without consulting hip and much more devastating agents like Andy Ngo. It’s not something to get mad at in a vacuum, but the fact that Musk has this popularity and wealth despite not ever doing a thing to better society is the infuriating part. This bullshit magazine award is just a reminder of it.
If you can’t detect the sarcasm here, that’s on you. There’s only one American Dream, and his name was Virgil Runnells, better known as Dusty Rhodes.