‘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?
Certainly the billionaires profiled in these shows get up in the morning believing they can change the world. “I remember thinking nobody had the right to control music,” says Edvin Endre as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in The Playlist. That vision, and the will to realise it, changed – for good or ill – how we listen to music. It was a vision that prompted Apple, for so long the self-styled geniuses of Silicon Valley, to become followers rather than leaders and offer the Spotify-like Apple Music in 2015.
“I think we are fascinated by some billionaires – mainly the ones who make their money in ways that connect with our lives,” says Mark Raphael, executive producer of The Elon Musk Show. “But Elon is not only a billionaire – he is the richest man alive. He has revolutionised electric cars, is building rockets that can send people to Mars, and is working on a chip that can be installed in our brains. It’s hard not to be fascinated by that.”
It’s also hard not to be fascinated by these neo-liberal entrepreneurs’ sometimes unspeakable work practices. In The Elon Musk Show, the tech mogul is depicted pulling all-nighters, sleeping with a physics book for a pillow and becoming red-faced with rage when he wanders Tesla’s offices at 9pm one night to see hardly anybody else still at work. “Elon can be very overbearing,” explains Branden Spikes, lead systems engineer for Musk’s first company Zip2 that Musk and brother Kimbal sold for $307m in 1999. “I have seen him fire dozens and dozens and dozens of people.” At one point in The Elon Musk Show, he tells a Tesla board meeting: “It’s not OK to be unhappy and part of this company. If somebody can’t get happy, get divorced.”
It’s a poignant remark, particularly given what we learn of Musk’s actual divorce from his college sweetheart Justine Musk (née Wilson) in 2008. The couple met when studying an abnormal psychology course at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. They went on to have six children, one of whom died after 10 weeks in 2002, and, thanks to IVF, twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006. One day, Justine tells The Elon Musk Show, she went to see her therapist. Elon had left a message with her shrink telling her he was filing for divorce.
Another reason we’re attracted to watching billionaires is to see their conspicuous consumption. It takes someone with extraordinary hubris, by whom I mean Bill Gates, to build a house called Xanadu 2.0, given that Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu was in Citizen Kane such an eloquent symbol of pride before a fall. In Rise of the Billionaires, we are given a tour of Gates’s bombastic crib and visit Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian estate. In The Elon Musk Show, we hang with the entrepreneur as he takes delivery of a $1m McLaren F1, one of only 64 ever made.
Strikingly, Musk insists he doesn’t want to rest on such materialistic laurels: “I could go and buy an island in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom,” he says. “I’m much more interested in being able to build and create a new company.” Hence, not just Zip2 and PayPal, nor Tesla or SpaceX, but his unveiling last week of a humanoid robot called Optimus and this week his renewed bid to buy Twitter for $44bn.
“Elon has said that starting a new business is like looking into the abyss while chewing glass,” says Mark Raphael. And, at least for the underlings, joining the gaffer in chewing glass is not a long-term lifestyle option. Colette Bridgman, head of global marketing at Tesla from 2004 to 2017, colourfully recalls her working life: “I was drinking out of a firehose every single day for years and years.” The end of her firehose-drinking years came when Bridgman realised something had gone horribly wrong in her work-life balance. “My three-year-old son was calling me dad.” She quit soon after.
But there is another programme about tech billionaires we haven’t yet considered. In Apple TV’s The Problem With Jon Stewart, whose second series starts this month, there is a comedy skit roasting the recent billionaire space race, starring Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander as Jeff Bezos, Adam Pally as Elon Musk and a mop as Richard Branson. How curious that Apple TV this year released Billionaire Space Race – a documentary series about a subject that one of its leading content providers already ridiculed. In the skit, we see Alexander as Bezos arriving in orbit to find that space is filled with penis-shaped rockets helmed by fellow tech geeks. “You don’t have enough sunscreen to be up here, Zuckerberg,” he shouts across space to his rival.
But satire has always followed tech billionaires around like an irremediable stink. Dave Eggers’ The Circle, a novel adapted in to a movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, mocked Silicon Valley’s Orwellian mind-control techniques masquerading as utopianism. Indeed, The Elon Musk Show reveals someone who yearns to be considered as not just a bloke who made it possible to pay our utility bills online, but as a visionary who deserves to be taken seriously. “What are some of the problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?” asks Musk at one point. “The biggest terrestrial problem we have is sustainable energy, the other being the extension of life beyond Earth to make life multi-planetary.”
One of Musk’s ex-wives believes he has the vision to change not just the world but, ironically, to reverse the ills visited on humanity by other Silicon Valley masters of the universe. Talulah Riley, the actor to whom Musk was married twice, reveals that earlier this year she urged Musk to renew his $44bn bid for Twitter – not to run it, but rather to close it down. “Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please!?” she wrote to him.
That’s one possibility. Another is that Musk may use Twitter to spread his own stupidity. We got an insight into that possibility earlier this month when Musk launched a Twitter poll to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Tesla CEO asked his followers to vote “yes” or “no” on his proposals, which included formally allowing Russia to annex Crimea. Ukraine’s former ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, used Twitter to retort. “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you.”
Lest the foregoing suggest that these entrepreneurs are all men, consider Claire Foy’s next TV role. After playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, she will play Facebook’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in a series called Doomsday Machine. Based on Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s bestselling book, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, it invites an intriguing question: which of the two women Foy interprets, the Queen or Sandberg, wielded greater power in their prime?
Certainly Sandberg helped shape the way billions of people communicate and consume information. But Doomsday Machine promises to show how Facebook disseminated disinformation during the 2016 US presidential election, set up a program that shielded VIP users including Donald Trump from the platform’s normal rules, and how representatives of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims have launched a $150bn legal action alleging that its algorithms amplified hate and contributed to genocide. Say what you like about the late queen, but she never achieved as much.
But then Queen Elizabeth II belongs to another age, in which great power came with great responsibility. Arguably the value of the current spate of TV about tech billionaires is to show us the opposite: for Silicon Valley demi-gods, with great power has come great irresponsibility.
The Elon Musk Show airs on Wednesday 12 October at 9pm on BBC Two Rise of the Billionaires is on Paramount+. The Playlist is on Netflix. Billionaire Space Race is on.
