1.

If I could have gotten through life without ever writing about Elon Musk, it would have been a better life than this. But late last year I was asked to review the book, Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, for the Australian Book Review. For my sins, the ABR also made me record an audio version of the review for their podcast, which you can listen to here:

Listen now · 10:53

As I said in the review, the book was written and published well before the U.S. Presidential election, and I filed the review before the inauguration, so this could hardly be considered a comment on the current moment. And yet, as it turned out, Musk is a one-trick pony and the playbook he applied in his takeover of Twitter back in the day, is pretty much the same playbook he is applying to his attempted takeover of the U.S. Federal government.

But this piece is not intended to be a further contribution to the many breathless commentaries that currently focus on the figure of Musk. As I argue in the review this narrow focus – on the figure and not the ground – is constantly training our attention to focus on the wrong things:

‘Although critical of Musk – his excesses and poor decision-making abilities – and not shy of pointing out the personal shortcomings of various investors, lawyers, engineers, and board members, this narrative insularity [of Conger and Mac’s book] operates by focusing on individuals transacting with one another without a broader social, political, or institutional context. It leaves intact the underlying origin story of the entrepreneur as genius, self-generating and all-conquering, even if their genius is flawed, their reign prone to hubris.’

And this not only ascribes to Musk a depth he lacks, but it also gives most of the commentaries about Musk a depth that they lack. But this isn’t really about Musk. And this point generalizes. There is a symbiotic relationship between those individuals who create content for our news and social medias, and the public figures they report on, that seems to negate the shallowness of each, or at least works to keep our attention misdirected from that shallowness. Like street hustlers playing three card monte on the back of an old milk crate, we are not really seeing what we think we are seeing, and we keep paying for the opportunity to continue to do so.

2.

In the review, regarding what we omit when we think about the figure of ‘the entrepreneur’, I cite Mariana Mazzucato’s 2015 revised edition of The Entrepreneurial State (although I now note that an even newer edition is available here), regarding how Tesla Motors, while still a fledgling company, benefited from a $US465 million publicly funded guaranteed loan from the US Department of Energy. And the largely ignored fact that all of Musk’s companies – Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX – have piggybacked off technologies that they themselves had not invented – batteries, solar panels, and rocket technologies – which were the product of direct investments, research and development, facilitated by the US Department of Energy and NASA.

‘Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, all led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, are currently surfing a new wave of state technology,’ Mazzucato wrote nearly ten years ago. ‘Together, these high-tech ventures have benefited from $4.9 billion in local, state and federal government support, such as grants, tax breaks, investments in factory construction and subsidized loans. The State also forges demand – creates the market – for their products by granting tax credits and rebates to consumers for solar panels and electric vehicles and by contracting $5.5 billion worth of procurement contracts with SpaceX and $5.5 billion for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Air Force ... But all we hear in the media is the one-sided myth of the lone entrepreneur.’

That was as of 2015. More recently, the Washington Post has provided a more up-to-date analysis, reporting that ‘Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments… Nearly two-thirds of the $38 billion in funds have been promised to Musk’s businesses in the past five years.’

In light of these current events, Mazzucato has recently repeated her original point. Responding to the claim that entrepreneurs like Musk are state parasites, she stated: ‘I mean, more than a parasite, he should have even just said thank you.’ Even here she pushed back at the narrow focus on this one individual, arguing that this is the political norm, and should be reported as such.

This is a point I also tried to make in my review:

‘In reality, Bezos, Dorsey, Gates, Jobs, Musk, and Zuckerberg are all very small men standing on the shoulders of a very large state apparatus. Everything, from the internet itself to the Graphical User Inter-face upon which Apple and Microsoft operate, to the touch screens we constantly thumb, have emerged from this publicly funded innovation. The ubiquity of social media platforms would have been impossible, for example, without WiFi, invented by the Australian CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation]. When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he was acquiring this public legacy; and when he trashed Twitter (devolving it into X), it was this legacy he trashed.’

But our inability to fully comprehend the consequences of this, to understand what this actually means, seriously limits our capacity to judge our political reality. Even in the reporting cited here – as in the Conger and Mac book, they being themselves business journalists – there is an unspoken assumption that the market, and various economic activities in the market, are fundamentally independent from the activities of political and state institutions.

In their book published only last year, Conger and Mac make only a passing reference to Tesla benefitting from a billion-dollar government contract when the company needed it most, which not only omits the billions more in government funding received by Musk’s companies, but maintains the illusion that this funding is transactional only. Even the more recent Washington Post reporting undercuts their own analysis by suggesting that SpaceX has become ‘less dependent on government business’. This downplays the involvement of the state, relegating it to a separate realm that only now and again is called upon to dip its toe in otherwise autonomous and ‘free’ market. And then only limited to occasional low-interest business loans or else government contracts (this latter point being usually cited as proof that the public sector accepts that the private sector knows better and should be left to its own devices).

3.

But Mazzucato’s point is that the market is constituted by the state, and as such is entirely dependent upon it. Not just through economic, fiscal and financial instruments, but through legal and legislative instruments, the state has created, maintains, and regulates the market. The market does not have its own devices. Even money, as a medium of exchange, that oils the wheels of commerce and makes transactions run smoothly, is an invention of, and entirely backed by, the state. The reality is that in every transaction we make, in every dollar earned, every dollar spent – whether we are being paid for a Substack subscription or are buying Twitter for US$44 billion – the state remains a silent partner. It remains the ground.

And yet, in everything we read or hear, we are repeatedly told the opposite. And not just by advocates of the so-called ‘free’ market, its theoretical acolytes and entrepreneurial show ponies. Incredibly, we are even told the opposite by people who are otherwise critical of such advocacy and those who claim to be ‘against’ the ‘free’ market. The focus is always on the figures, judgement limited to whether we are for or against them.

But we have known otherwise for many decades – or rather we have pretended not to have known this for many decades – at least since Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation in 1944. Incidentally, that book has very recently been republished, so there is really no longer any excuse. As Stephen Collini has pointed out, in a review for the London Review of Books:

‘It remains as true as ever that there is no such thing as a ‘free’ market: all trade, investment and exchange depends on a complex network of supporting institutions and restraining regulations, which are matters of politics and culture, not simply of unfettered economic activity. To that extent, Polanyi’s emphasis on what he called the ‘embeddedness’ of economic activity might seem in danger of being no more than a truism were it not for the fact that both governments and theorists frequently seem to have tried to ignore this truth.’

Crypto-libertarians, for example, enjoy sharing fantasies of a decentralised digital currency that operates independent from any state, separate from centralised banking, the US Federal Reserve, and governments and corporate bureaucracies controlling the currency supply. And yet, the whole project piggybacks on a system of computer networks and energy supplies created and maintained by the public sector. Meanwhile, crypto-millionaires can still only account for the value of their digital hoards to the degree that it is transferable to a state-backed US Dollar.

Meanwhile, it may have been only a coincidence that Jeff Bezos sent a memo to the management of the Washington Post on the same day that the aforementioned reporting on Musk’s ongoing dependence on government funding was published, announcing that the Opinion Pages will focus on promoting ‘personal liberties and free markets’, and will no longer publish opposing views.

There is, of course, a performative contradiction in Bezos’s proclaiming ‘personal liberties and free markets’ in order to ingratiate himself and his business interests to the U.S. President and the current administration, to which he depends, while at the same time imposing limits on the personal liberties of the staff and commissions of the Washington Post Opinion Pages. An identical performative contradiction is revealed in basically everything Musk says and does, along with every other tech billionaire. Of course, this is not different to what every other business leader has said and done for decades.

4.

It could be said of such figures that, on the one hand, they actually believe what they say about their own individual initiative and business acumen and the free market, in which case they are delusional. Or, on the other hand, they understand the reality of the political ground upon which they exist an upon which their wealth is dependent, in which case they are cynical. I would suggest that it is more complicated than that, and yet more simple.

I would suggest that they believe at one and the same time the economistic fallacies they espouse while also understanding perfectly well the political ground upon which they depend, that they are simultaneously delusional and cynical. But the problem is that in any given moment, in any given decision, they lack the capacity to tell the difference. And that inability to distinguish between what is real and unreal, what is true and false, what is ground and what is figure, is the measure of their thoughtlessness.

But it is our inability make and maintain these distinctions that is the measure of our own general thoughtlessness, and it is that, more than anything else, that keeps us from holding such banal figures to account.

5.

The image above is called “The Foolish World Prefers the Temporary Good” by Hendrick Goltzius, from ca. 1575. The Public Domain Image Archive describes this image thus:

‘The personification of the Foolish World (Sultus mundanus) wears the glasses of Wrong Belief (Opinio). She points out to him the shadow figure Lie (Mendacium) who comes with a bag full of worldly goods: wealth, gluttony, sensual love and power. In exchange for this temporary good, Foolish World offers his heart, while standing with one leg in the grave and the other on an hourglass, which symbolizes the temporality of human existence. The personification of Truth (Veritas) tries to change the mind of Foolish World with a crucifix, but in vain.’

Finis

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