For the final Last Week Tonight episode of the year, John Oliver focused on Elon Musk, “a man who can pull off pretty much any bad-guy-in-a-movie look”.
“There’s Lex Luthor, posing for the cover of Metropolis Maniacs Monthly. There’s ‘why no Mr Bond, I and my child bride expect you to die,’” Oliver said next to a photo of Musk and his former partner, the singer Grimes.
“There’s ‘I just bought your media company, I’m about to strip you for parts.’ There’s space’s first racist sheriff,” he continued. “And finally, the less fuckable reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic. Truly, the man has range.”
Musk has, typically for him, been in the news frequently in 2023, from test-launching a powerful rocket to having one of his companies, Tesla, recall more than 2m cars because of safety concerns, to outrage over his behavior on X, the social media platform he owns, formerly known as Twitter.
Musk’s time at Twitter “has definitely changed … how many people perceive him”, Oliver noted. Until then, he had cultivated an image as a “maverick celebrity avenger who could cut through red tape, revolutionized space travel and made electric cars cool”.
Musk once bragged that he’d “done more for the environment than … any single human on Earth” demonstrating what Oliver called a “pretty strong messianic streak”. As Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, put it in a Musk profile for the New Yorker: “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”
“Which is a pretty big asterisk,” Oliver noted. “It’s like Jesus says in the book of Matthew, ‘Love thy neighbor, but more importantly, me, and if you don’t, fuck you. Find your own heaven. J-Crizzle, out.’”
Threading the needle between those who love Musk and those who hate him, Oliver recapped how he built his reputation as a business genius. Musk made his first fortune with the company Zip2, founded with his brother, and then PayPal, co-founded with Peter Thiel. He then invested his personal fortune into SpaceX. “Like Henry Ford, Elon Musk managed to build on the technology that others had invented,” Oliver said. “That’s not actually the only way he’s like Henry Ford, which you’d know if you ever Google either of their names and the word antisemitism.”
SpaceX “began with a big gamble, had a flirtation with disaster and then became a massive success”, Oliver explained. The company was funded in part by pre-sales of Teslas plagued by production delays, ballooning costs and the embarrassment of the cybertruck, which looked like “every child’s first attempt at drawing a car”, said Oliver.
“Embarrassing moments aside, there’s a lot to like about Elon’s companies,” he added. “SpaceX has made real achievements like reusable rocket technology and making space easier and more affordable to access. Tesla has pushed automakers to take electric cars seriously in a way that would’ve seemed impossible 20 years ago.”
But “there are costs to that progress that often get overlooked”, such as Musk’s harsh treatment of employees and safety issues with Tesla’s self-driving assistance system, which has been involved in at least 40 fatal or serious crashes since 2016.
“History is littered with titans of business who were shitty or broken people, from Thomas Edison to Henry Ford to Steve Jobs,” Oliver said. “The difference is, by and large, they didn’t open up their brain to have the whole world have a constant look inside. But Elon does, and the glimpses we get can be terrifying.”
Which brought Oliver back to Twitter. Musk has been a heavy Twitter user for years, and is addicted to the platform, according to his own biographer. And he has leaned “increasingly into the realm of rightwing troll” in recent years.
Musk’s behavior on Twitter – boosting a transphobic documentary, commenting “interesting” on a tweet that said “Black kills each other, whites kill themselves” and posting a Pizzagate meme – “makes me miss the man who posted ‘send me your dankest memes!’” said Oliver.
“The fact Elon seems to be getting increasingly radicalized is a big problem because we put a lot of power into his hands, and much more than you may realize,” he continued. Because the government has also invested a lot of power in Musk – more and more of its control of the internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, national security infrastructure and its energy supply. Musk’s company Starlink, for example, now controls over half of all active satellites.
“The problem isn’t just the optics of having someone as erratic as Elon in charge of half the world’s satellites,” said Oliver. “His opinion can change the shape of world events,” such as when Starlink provided internet access via satellite to Ukrainian troops after the Russian invasion.
“The Ukrainian military was grateful to SpaceX and Elon Musk, which is one of those headlines that even a few years ago would’ve sounded impossible, like ‘Panera Bread’s lemonade leads to second death’ and ‘Henry Kissinger: finally dead’,” he joked.
“The fact is, whether we like it or not – and the answer is absolutely not – a huge number of very important things going forward are going to depend on how Elon is feeling, which is a terrifying thing to say about anyone but especially this guy,” he said.
What can be done? “Just create a robot infrastructure economy that can resist easy monopolization by private firms headed by overconfident billionaires, and we do it about 15 years ago,” Oliver deadpanned.
Still, Oliver noted, if anything, learning more about Musk made the risks of his power more apparent. “I’m probably now more impressed by what he’s doing, but more worried by the fact that he’s the one who’s been doing it,” he said. “Because he cultivates an image that he’s simply too visionary, too original to play by other people’s rules, and he waves away the damage that he does as the cost of innovation and saving humanity.
“But the truth is, that way of thinking isn’t remotely original,” he concluded. “The least surprising thing on Earth is a middle-aged billionaire CEO with self-serving libertarian views, increasingly racist politics and a messiah complex. And it is long past time that he faced the kind of accountability that should come with that.”
