Elon Musk: The Genie or the Janitor of the Galaxy?

Sarit
Who is Elon Musk and what does he want from us?

Elon Musk: The Genie or the Janitor of the Galaxy?

By Sarit Zadok

Spring 1995. The Quad. University of Pennsylvania.

The monthly meeting of Resident Advisors in the Quad Freshmen dorm has once again commenced without Elon Musk.

The University of Pennsylvania hired Resident Advisors to serve as a student leaders and  oversee a group of freshmen residents in their dormitory.  I was hired, as well as Elon and a dozen other Seniors to work in the notorious freshman dorm.

“Does anyone know where Elon is?” Asked in exasperation our Resident Director, an African American woman in her 30’s.

We bite our lips. Pull our shoulders. Her guess is as good as any. Studying? On the phone? In a meeting? Cogitating? Or probably just forgot. 

It was the age avant cell phones and the screeching internet was crawling on Netscape. No way to track Elon.

Our Director begins by laying out the plan for Spring Break, do’s and don’ts, social & cultural activities each RA must plan for their residents, budgets, admin, forms—

Twenty minutes later Elon traverses the lounge, breathless, hardly apologising for his tardiness and takes his seat. He has that characteristic grin on his face that you can’t really read. Is he happy? It’s more like a smirk. He doesn’t participate. His mind elsewhere. He’s actually super bored. Today, he would be engrossed in his phone. Lacking such device back in ’95, he plunges into the crevices of his brain.

The Director throws an annoyed look in Elon’s direction. He is so disrespectful, she thinks. We all think the same thing. But whatever, it’s 1995 and we are part of the whatever generation that can’t be bothered. 

But not Elon. He is always bothered by some stimuli bombarding his cortex. Yet he does not take offence at his Director’s scornful looks. He’s not being disrespectful. SHE is inefficient. Or more accurately, the system she serves is inefficient. He could do her job from the shower. 

Which begs the question of why is Elon even here?

I remember when I first met Elon as part of the RA orientation back in late August 1994. He told me he was a transfer student and two years older than everyone. I could tell the age difference bothered him, like he had less time to do stuff, at a disadvantage. An imaginary tickling clock poked his shoulder. Like he made bad choices, wasted time and was ineffective. 

He was tall, cute, rather shy and awkward. He had a funny South African accent that made him sound classy without the British snooty inflection. I was just a Psych major, enrolled in some Marketing elective classes in Wharton. So insipid by Elon standards. But he was a dual degree major. An almost impossible feat at Penn—to graduate from both schools: the College of Arts and Sciences with a Physics degree and from The Wharton School of Business with an Economics degree. There was nothing to do with Elon, I know. And I won’t be seeing much of him. He had no life, and must be a masochist for attempting that. Dual-degree majors at Penn were considered to be over-achiever show-offs.

How did he even have time to be a student leader in a Freshman dorm?

But unbeknownst to me, Elon at Penn was like a Genie someone had let out from the bottle. He wanted to taste all that life had to offer. In the promised land of the US of A. And in hind sight, if I had to place my bet on the only three things which limited Elon then and now, I’d say they were:

  1. The pettiness of mankind.
  2. His own mortality.
  3. The speed of light.

Still why was Elon—who was up to his neck in Physics and Finance, bothering himself babysitting Freshmen?

If he was like me, the decision was heavily influenced by the perks of free room and board in the coolest and oldest dorm at Penn built by Benjamin Franklin himself. It was the quintessential collegiate experience. If he was also like me, he probably enjoyed the power trip of managing people. And to an extent—influencing their young lives, with also a sprinkle of voyeurism.  

An anthropological experiment. Into which Elon Musk inserted himself as a subject.

Not Everything is Funny

Years later I caught up with another ex-RA friend in a New York pub. While she is describing to me the amusing whirlwind of her last few year, she interjects: “Hey, remember that RA Elon Musk?”

“Yes, what’s up with him?” I suck on my beer bottle.

“You know he invented PayPal and just sold it for like over 100 million!”

“What?! That guy? How does that happen?” I ask disbelievingly. But hey it was the dot-com boom and every idiot with a website was making a crazy exit.

But now in NYC, years removed, him being a millionaire and us still being two Gen-X under-achievers, it didn’t seem so funny.

And from there, as we say, the rest was history. I spent my youth travelling, working here and there, eventually got married, moved around a lot, had kids, got divorced and finally settled in the south of France.

And like everyone on the planet, I could not avoid the headlines of Elon’s global rise as an innovator and entrepreneur. Elon was like a meteor breaking the atmosphere. He could do no wrong. He had the midst touch. And now he was the wealthiest man on Earth, the most influential, elusive, divisive, hated, worshipped. 

At one point in time we were equals. Both Penn students. Both RAs. But I chose to have fun and be funny. 

And Elon chose to construct his own hero system.

The Terror of Death and Hero Systems

At birth, the human baby has no knowledge of death. In fact he is faced with a great tragedy: the food and warmth he passively received, he will now have to work for. For the rest of his life. It is said that the child becomes aware of death around the age of 9, but even this knowledge is abstract. It is an acceptance that some people go away and never come back. As we grow older, this notion of forever-gone-people becomes more concrete as we attend funerals, or accompany loved ones in their final moments.  It becomes an unavoidable truth: we will die and the world will carry on without us, despite us. 

It is an unthinkable predicament to be in. In the face of such maddening uncertainty—that this is all so finite, how do we carry on with every day life? In fact, we absurdly live our lives as if we were immortal. Wasting time in front of the TV, lounging in bed, calling in sick, procrastinating. In the Theatre of the Absurd.

We should be going out of our minds with the tick tock of death brutally harassing our every living moment. But we don’t. And the reason according to Sigmund Freud is our narcissism—death happens to others, to him or her, but not to me.

According to Ernest Becker, in his profoundly insightful book ‘The Denial of Death’: “Of all things that move man, the principle one is his terror of death and heroism is a reflex of the terror of death.” Hence, we have devised for ourselves a cultural hero-system according to Becker.

While this hero-system can be religious, scientific, or civilised, it is still mythical where the hero is desperately seeking cosmic significance and specialness, to contribute to the greater creation. The hero is not just a Roman Centurion, Churchill or Leonardo da Vinci, but the hero is also the every day man putting bread on the table for his family.

Modern human heroics is a curious beast. In most cases it is a blind foolhardy drive that incinerates people who are screaming for glory. It can come in the form of the olympic gymnast who sticks the landing despite her injury to win the gold for the team.

The crisis plaguing our youth today is—what to be heroic about? They can upload a TikTok video and become heroes for the day in a tight outfit. Then what? Another hero has risen on the social network to replace the former. A new hero-system must be erected, and the youth adopts a cause, a war, a gripe and print a t-shirt. The addictive nature of social networks is precisely because they are able to generate endless hero-systems. Today, you can become an instant hero by posting a photo of your lunch.

But the ‘real’ hero is someone who endures, is courageous, lives outside of time and defies death by repressing the terror of death. Like Jesus Christ. Like the Olympic gymnast. 

Like maybe Elon Musk taking us to Mars?

The Paradox of Man

According to Erich Fromm, man by nature is paradoxical—he is half animal and half symbolic. Man is actually split in two. His consciousness and awareness, towers above with such majesty, conjuring up ideas and creating thoughts of art from seemingly nothing. But at the same time, all this beauty and majesty is encased in the most decrepit, inefficient, and repugnant armour: the human body. The body sentences the lofty mind to a finite life.

We can only suppose that this paradox is much more tragic for the greatest thinkers, innovators, artists of our time and before. Imagine to be blessed with such a genius mind, to be cosmically selected among all living men to design and build the Sagrada Familia only to never see it come to conclusion due to the crippling fleshy prison your mind finds yourself inhabiting? Imagine how modern day innovators must feel? Imagine Elon Musk.

Elon today is at the cross roads. He has practically unlimited power, but perhaps 20-30 years left to harness it, to make an everlasting difference. He doesn’t have time for naysayers, haters, opposition, small minds, small desires, cash poor, cash rich. Where is your mind going? Where is your future? And by YOUR he does not refer to the individual but to the collective of the human race.

“Idiots!” I can hear him think. “We can’t put all our eggs in the one basket of Earth. We must become a multi-planetary civilisation before we self destruct. With war, disease, climate change…”

Elon gambled all that PayPal exit money on rocket launching and it nearly finished him. Because money to him is just numbers. Numbers that facilitate his cosmic heroism. Elon is plagued by the built-in disaster of our species. Its finite nature. There will be an end, sooner than you think. But it’s also what makes the cake of life taste that much sweeter. Elon knows that there are a limited number of sunsets to gaze at.

The Duality of Men

This duality of men creates and sentences all men to a mad existence. As Blaise Pascal so aptly put it: “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

We inoculate ourselves with social games, addictions, self-improvement projects, shopping, all removed from reality—a collective madness that cascades down generations.  Because how else can we solve the problem of who we are and what are we here for? We are blessed with a brain that thinks but does not tell us what to think about. 

This duality renders men like a hurricane spinning out of control with no place to go. Man desperately needs to evade his predicament, the harsh verdict, to escape the human condition which is—the human organism on planet earth. The animal and its surrounding habitat in the most simplest of terms. Man can’t change himself. But he might change his habitat. Using his beautiful mind—and the two legs he was given to take his mind elsewhere.  And this is his only chance to to escape humanism: to go to another planet. 

And so our race to become multi-planetary starting with Mars is a race to escape humanism.

How frustrating must it be to be Elon Musk. To be power rich. But time poor. Because time moves in only one direction—forward. He can’t stop it, but by multiplying his actions, he multiplies himself. And places many Elons on the assembly chain of time moving forward. Multiple companies. Multiple offspring.

Some say Elon sold his soul to the MAGA devil. But I say before you can be the wish-granting-Genie of the Milky Way, you must clean it up. You gotta roll up your sleeves and be the Galaxy Janitor. A big sweep up of humanity’s inefficiencies so the path is clear to grant us our three wishes.

If we behave. If we listen to him. He is our Resident Advisor and we are his forever fresh men.

Elon acts like he has prescient knowledge of things that we are not privy to. All the infantile behaviour of ‘Earthlings’. Wading his way through the muck, for our own benefit, to push us outside ourselves, higher, outside our planet.

But what he didn’t think about, while racing is ahead, is that the creator, finally liberated and well funded by NASA, to fashion a starship, a Mars colony, a space station, in order to unshackle us from humanity—will have just created a substitute prison in days to come.

But for Elon Musk all this doesn’t matter. He has figured out a way to circumvent the paradox of all men, the inherent duality. He has figured out a way to escape humanism by going to Mars and removing himself from the human condition on Earth.

Or as he recently told Joe Rogan: “I just keep trying to get back to my home planet.” But some Space-X launches take off while others explode in a kaleidoscope of colours. 

The Correction and Simulation Theory

A few years ago, as I hit middle-age, I too was finally plagued by the paradox of men and a feeling of cosmic insignificance. I constructed my own hero system—to write my sistine chapel in the form of an epic Science Fiction/Fantasy novel called The Correction dealing with simulation theory.

Not having a Physics degree, I spent a few weeks researching simulation theory. My digital travels landed me on a YouTube interview where Elon argued for the case that we are living in a simulation and that there’s very little chance that this is the base reality.  “The argument for a simulation is very strong…There are many many simulations, you’d might as well call them reality,” he plainly said.

I kept rewinding the interview with Elon again and again, he was so confident about it. And as a student of Psychology, body language and human behaviour I could tell, frighteningly—that he believed it. 

Fascinating. Fiction. Or not.

Elon’s urgency, at all cost to ‘correct humanity’ was like my Simulation Guardian protagonist inserted from the base reality to save the Earth sim from total collapse.

In the now infamous interview by Joe Rogan, Elon sat in his studio chair, on a higher plane, outside time. When Joe asked him: “How do you have time to do all this?” Elon replied cynically: “I’m an alien. I keep telling everyone that I’m an alien but nobody would believe me.” And we laugh. Or not.

I’m an Alien

Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels like an alien, unknown. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” 

This is the great gift and message of The Myth of Sisyphus, which is based on the mythological figure Sisyphus condemned to eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time before reaching the end.

Yes, Elon feels like an alien on Earth, surrounded by the paradox of men, its crippling duality, the pettiness of the common man. 

Or maybe as an immigrant, he’s just searching for a place to call home.

In another recent interview with Joe Rogan, Elon slipped and said: “In my view we should move to Mars,” before quickly correcting himself.

Albert Camus ends The Myth of Sisyphus with quite possibly one of the most provocative lines in existential philosophy: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Is Sisyphus ignorant of the futility of his actions?  No. On the contrary—he is quite aware. He owns the struggle and accepts it. And enjoys the movement, up and down, rather than remaining static. 

One must imagine then Elon Musk to be very happy. How many boulders did he roll up the hill over his life only for them to roll back down, some probably crushing his foot? If it’s rocket launching, car manufacturing, personal life, he never stayed static: “I want the opposite of an ivory tower, I want to be in the middle of the battle,” he asserts.

Joe Rogan continued his inspection of Elon in that interview and stumbled him again with a difficult question about the dangers of AI and where we’re heading. I could tell this topic bothers Elon. He dropped his head, diverted his gaze, his retinas oscillated, like he was processing his brain for an answer, a careful one:

“I try to tell people to slow down, but nobody listens, nobody listened…I tried for years…it was futile…regulation is very slow…there will be some new technology…damage or death, there will be an outcry, there will be investigations, years will pass, there will be an insight committee, rule making, there will be an oversight…this all takes many years…one thing for sure—we will not control it. But if you can’t beat it, join it (neurolink)…You are already a cyborg, your phone is already an extension of you.”

Elon is very afraid of AI. What does he know that we don’t? “It’s going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon,” he finally said. But who will be tempted Elon? Is it us or you?

The Artist as the Wannabe-Hero

As the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank put it: “No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood.” And sooner or later we realise that our gods and heroes also ‘take a shit’, we have over-invested ourselves in them, the lie is exposed, and the only thing left to do is to bring them down. This is why we attack celebrities or tech gods that just yesterday we worshiped on a cult level. 

The hero then can be thought of as the ultimate artist and creator. Isolated in his workshop, studio, office, computer to create something out of nothing. All artists start out as wannabe-heroes. According to Rank, they want to earn their immortality by using their real or perceived unique gifts. But what right does the artist have to impose his work and meaning onto the world? How narcissistic! Grandiose! The artist knows that the work is him, and possibly just rubbish, so that to achieve heroism he needs external validation. So the writer seeks publication. The tech startup—seed money.

We have elevated Elon Musk to the tech hero and then we tore him down for being ‘too much’, for buying twitter, for siding with MAGA, for creating DOGE. We rightfully question the inherent egoism in his creations. We never asked for these things. What right does he have to impose his vision and hero system onto us? To teach us lessons? To infantilise us? What is wrong with indulging in popular media? Netflix? A cruise to the Bahamas? Getting drunk? What is wrong with refusing the call?

L’enfer, c’est les autres

The first time I heard Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous quote “Hell is other people” (L’enfer, c’est les autres) from his 1944 play No Exit (Huis Clos), I naively assumed like many that the French writer had finally captured the essence of misanthropy where the only logical solution is introversion and isolation.  But in fact he was talking about a different kind of hell people inflict onto others. A hell that begins with their eyes.

If you are a modern day hero you are gazed upon infinitely and judged just as often. It is a heavy burden the hero accepts for stepping onto a stage and accepting the spot lights. The hero can’t please everyone. But first he is content to please himself. To be a hero is also to accept that hell will come from other people.

My heart travels to Elon’s first child that he lost at 10-weeks. Elon the tech hero came face to face with the worst kind of mortality. How do you recover from something like that? Even if you are an ‘alien’. As a mother I know that you never do. But the insurmountable pain of loss changes your constitution as you are slapped with the fragility of life. And how at any given moment the wish you were granted can fracture into a heap of shards in your palms.

Following this tragedy, Elon recovered at the relative speed of light. To date he has fathered fourteen (?) other children from four different mothers, most the result of IVF treatments and surrogacy. It is another cube in the Elon puzzle: “If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble…There are not enough people. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilisation faces by far…I hope you have big families, and congrats to those who already do!”

Elon Musk considers himself again to be a hero saving our civilisation from destruction. This time a procreational hero by casting his gene net as wide as possible. How removed is he from the struggles of the common man? Most of us can’t afford the raising of more than two children.

The Genie and the Janitor

Somebody let Elon Musk out of the bottle back in the mid 90’s, right around the time I met him. He was hungry and wanted to eat from the all-you-can-eat buffet of the US of A. The Genie was let out, but there was a price to pay. Like most genies, he owes us three wishes. And we’re still waiting or squabbling over what these three wishes should be. World peace? Climate control? A Mars colony? Universal healthcare? The list is long.

Like most wise leaders, he leaves us to haggle and fight each other, while he turns his attention to the janitorial duties of the galaxy.  Freedom of speech, x.com, a Tesla in space, internet for all, solar energy (The Boring Company), curing neurological diseases, and the latest massive sweep up—DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

And while the prospect of colonising Mars may stroke our human ego and Elon’s need to escape humanism, Elon should know we’ll always like Earth better. It’s home. With the comfortable sofa, messy kitchen, and unbalanced check book. 

****

 

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