Chaos Monkeys at the Gate: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, & the Unraveling of Rocket-&-Rage-Tweet Tech Statesmanship
Technology’s greatest overpromiser & overdeliverator has met America’s chao-monkey-in-chief. The result is a Musk entangled in the Trumpian vortex and no longer able to outmaneuver failure, for he did not recognize that Trump is not a transactional politician at his core…
Last fall, I thought I understood what Elon Musk was doing.
Face it: The guy is annoying. He lies a lot. He overpromises, constantly. But there is, or there was, a but: Although he massively overpromised, nearly always, he substantially overdelivered. Tesla made cars. Starlink carried voice and data. SpaceX launched rockets. And it was not implausible to think it was his presence and actions and salesmanship and overpromising that had kept those three operations from being wound-up and wound-down. And those three operations were immensely valuable to humanity as technology-forcers, and substantially valuable to all their stakeholders from raw-material suppliers to users as globalized value-chain economy production networks. He had somehow turned overpromising into a kind of business and financial sorcery, delivering rockets, cars, and satellites against the odds, as his audacity propelled technological revolutions.
So I was surprised and disappointed when he showed up as a value-subtracting chaos monkey with Twitter. And then I was disappointed when he began spending all of his time attending on America’s chaos-monkey in chief, Donald Trump. But I was not surprised when he began spending all of his time attending on America’s chaos-monkey in chief, Donald Trump: I thought I understood what he was doing.
But now I don’t understand. It appears that he tried to arm-wrestle Washington and lost. This is the story of a man who mistook political chaos for a new frontier, only to discover that Trump’s dealmaking is not a zero-sum game.
But wasn’t this very predictable? I mean, Musk thought he was the frog and Trump the scorpion in the Russian fable of the frog and the scorpion crossing the river. But how could he not understand Trump’s nature, and not see that Trump who knows his own nature well had strapped on a jetpack?