Living in Elon's orbit

Christopher Hooks, Try Living in Elon Musk’s Company Town, NYTimes, May 24, 2024. Note that Hooks is an Austin-based writer.

The article opens:

Just after 7 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 18, as the sun was rising in the Gulf of Mexico, Noel Rangel, a 26-year-old native of Brownsville, Texas, was brought unwillingly into wakefulness by an uninvited sensation: The richest man in the world was shaking him. Or rather, his entire apartment. His bed was rumbling, his windows rattling. “I could hear the glass,” he said. He was confused. He woke as if Elon Musk himself had grabbed him by the shoulders.

Rangel was woken up by a launch by SpaceX, which is based 25 miles away. Local residents had not been notified about the launch and so could not prepare. The article goes on to detail how Musk's nearby presence has changed life in Brownsville in many ways:

To some, Mr. Musk has given Brownsville, a particularly poor city of about 200,000 in a neglected part of Texas, a reason for being, a future. To others, he’s a colonizer, flirting with white nationalists online while exploiting a predominantly brown work force in one of Texas’s fringes.

And so it goes.

I live about 300 miles from Brownsville, in Austin, Texas, where Mr. Musk moved in 2020. His presence here is felt very strongly: Residents whisper about his social life, and his companies’ health affects the real estate market. In 2022, he bought the website formerly known as Twitter, where I am still, as a journalist, effectively required to spend a good portion of my time online. Mr. Musk’s presence made both places worse, a little cheaper, a little phonier. His promises always seemed to fall flat, both the trivial (he vowed to eradicate bots, but now X is filled with automated porn) and the consequential (he vowed to make his Tesla factory in Austin an “ecological paradise,” but is now fighting to exempt it from environmental regulations).

Around that time, I started to consider how much of my adult life had been intimately shaped by billionaires and the otherwise very wealthy. The answer, I realized, was all of it. For a decade I’ve written about Texas politics, which is almost all reducible to fights between plutocrats belonging to different factions. I was a stenographer recording the symptoms of feuds between powerful men I’d never meet. National politics was not much different. At some point, it became more important to follow Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel than the Speaker of the House. Billionaires ran the new media (Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and the old (Rupert Murdoch, the Sinclair family). My childhood newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman, was gutted by the mismanagement of the Cox family, descendants of old-school media barons, and then sold to hedge fund vultures. The chaos they created was inseparable from the chaos I was writing about in politics.

For all their wealth and power, these figures generally seem maladjusted, unhappy and insecure. Maybe that is to be expected. In 2012, social scientists found that those driving more valuable cars were less likely to stop for pedestrians at a crosswalk. If that’s what a slightly nicer whip does to the human brain, what does ten thousand million dollars do? What strange ideas might you develop about yourself? Would you feel bound by conventional morality? Would anyone around you seem real?

Mr. Musk seems even more disconnected to the bonds that tie the rest of us. He has talked often of his suspicion that the world around us is a computer simulation, which seems less of a philosophical inquiry than an explanation of how far he feels from human connection.

FWIW, spent the first four years of my life in Ellsworth, PA., which was effectively a company town, organized around coal mines owned by Bethlehem Steel. But I remember nothing of it. The family then moved to Johnstown, PA., which was dominated by both Bethlehem Steel and US Steel. But that was before the world of social media. No matter where you live, if social media are important to you – they certainly are to me – then you live in the orbits of the billionaires who control it. An so it seems to go with AI. This very important and consequential technology is subject to the whims of some billionaires with very strange conceptions of themselves and their place in the world.

And so Hooks goes on to tell his story. At some point a bit later he says:

In writing about politics, I am struck forcefully again and again by the desire most people have to be part of a grand story, an exciting narrative that gives meaning to their lives. We live in an age of declining religious belief and existential unrest. Mr. Musk is offering the public a chance to be part of his grand narrative. It’s a kindness.

Still later:

SpaceX hoped to present to other humans struggling with the big questions “the idea of us being a spacefaring civilization.” That’s the language Ms. Tetreau, and so many others in Brownsville and elsewhere have picked up on: the idea that by “making humanity multiplanetary” by facilitating human settlement of Mars and beyond and by protecting sentience in case humans one day die off here, the “light of consciousness” will be preserved or extended.

It’s language that sounds like it might come from an eastern religion — taking the Dao to Pluto — or New Age syncretists. Mr. Musk has self-interested reasons to make this case, of course. If SpaceX has a spiritual mission, then he is a spiritual leader, all the better to receive the approval he seems to crave. In 2021, he argued that he shouldn’t pay higher taxes because it would interfere with his mission to “preserve the light of consciousness.”

But he clearly also believes it. And Mr. Musk is properly understood as a kind of spiritual leader. There’s something of a dividing line among SpaceX fans between engineer types who think the rockets are cool, and those who accept Mr. Musk’s premise that the company is saving the human race. He offers community. He offers hope.

Returning to earth we have:

In July 2021, Jeff Bezos, a different billionaire with a private space program in a different part of Texas, experienced weightlessness, briefly, after being launched by a Blue Origin rocket. A few months later, the company launched William Shatner, the progenitor, as Captain Kirk, of several generations of adolescent space fantasies. When he landed, while Mr. Bezos grinned nearby at the success of his latest toy, Mr. Shatner wept. He was struck not by how much was “up there” but how little. “Everything I had thought was wrong,” Mr. Shatner wrote later. “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.” He suddenly understood how fragile the home planet was, and he knew it was all we had.

There's more at the link.