Musk and the "Great Men"

 I feel the need to write a brief follow-up to my post yesterday about Elon Musk, since it seems the topic is even more in the zeitgeist than I had realized. I don't just mean the fact that Elon is in all the headlines (that's obvious, unfortunately); but, specifically, that people are debating just now how much he qualifies as one of the "great men" of history, how much he is vindicated by "results," etc. 

The latest dust-up appeared to start when a Musk biographer posted on social media that the Tesla founder is not as smart as people think he is. Nate Silver and others retorted that this is preposterous, leading to a debate over the "great man" theory of history. Someone compared Musk to Genghis Khan. Musk himself reposted a podcast episode about the history of the Mongol ruler. 

And finally, Noah Smith weighed in this morning to say: "you all are fools. You underestimate Elon at your peril." Smith's argument was, in part, that—even if the comparison with Genghis Khan is valid, this merely proves the point. The Great Khan was obviously very effective. He must have been an organizational and strategic genius, to have conquered so much of the known world. 

I still find Musk's business achievements less impressive than Smith suggests. He has made a luxury EV that few people can afford or want to own. He ran a social media giant into the ground, before—years later—finally raising it back to a valuation in the same ballpark he originally bought it for. He has made a number of other promises on behalf of his various companies that haven't materialized. 

And then there's the question as to how much of Musk's achievements really belong to him alone. When confronted with tales of "great men," I am inclined to ask the same questions as Brecht's "worker who reads"—did they do it on their own? Were the kings the ones who laid the stones for the pyramids? Did Elon build his rocket-ships? Or did he just hire the right talent and then take the credit?

But Smith will say that hiring the right talent is itself the key skill here. 

Plus, he will also say that I am speaking out of class and psychological bias anyway (much of Smith's post is ad hominem of this sort), so let's drop the point. Because my main thesis yesterday was that—even if we grant that Musk gets "results" (and, as I conceded at the time, I can't deny the evidence of SpaceX)—even if we admit that much, I say: it's not clear exactly what this proves. 

Genghis Khan certainly had "impact." He certainly was "effective" at gobbling up a lot of other people's land and lives and possessions. If "mere power and success" is the standard (as Matthew Arnold phrased it), then I agree: Genghis won the game. 

The same can certainly be said of Musk as well. No wonder he has discovered a sudden affinity for the Mongol warlord. Both Musk and Genghis certainly gained a lot of power and left a big impression on the world. They both pass—as I said last time—the Henry Fielding test for "great men"—namely (as Fielding put it in Jonathan Wild) that of: "bringing all manner of mischief on mankind."

But—to my point yesterday—I'm not particularly interested in the whole "Elon makes the trains run on time" argument. Let's say he does—is he therefore vindicated? Or is that argument-from-success not—as Alasdair Gray put it— merely "an excuse for Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan [...] and all such tyrants who could honestly say, 'To the end of my days I never had a moment's rest.'"

It's hard for me to believe that murderers and tyrants of this sort—and, yes, billionaire entrepreneurs—are inevitably justified merely by the evidence that they "get things done." On all such men, rather, I pass the same verdict that Hugh MacDiarmid did on Housman's army of mercenaries: "It is a God-damned lie to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride."

The best that MacDiarmid could say of them—and the best I can say of Elon Musk, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and all other "great men"—is that: "In spite of all their kind some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on Earth."