‘From the age of three I thought he was a genius,” says Maye Musk of her son, Elon. “He would reason with me and his reasoning was sensible. And how do you do that when you don’t have that much experience?” She wanted her son to start nursery a year early, but was refused. “You don’t understand,” she told teachers. “I have a genius son. And of course, they rolled their eyes as if to say ‘Every mother thinks their child is a genius.’”
One reason there are so many TV shows right now about brash tech billionaires – Rise of the Billionaires on Paramount+, Netflix drama The Playlist about Spotify’s creators, and the BBC’s looming The Elon Musk Show – is that they are about geniuses at work in the sense defined by Schopenhauer: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” Who but Amazon founder Jeff Bezos could see that selling books online would be a brilliant way to capitalise on the world wide web? Who but Elon Musk that banking could be done online, or that we need to become a multi-planetary species to avoid extinction? Who but Mark Zuckerberg could realise a business model to connect like-minded souls, so we would spill our personal details then he could make a fortune monetising that hitherto private data?
