12 June

Musk is the world’s first trillionaire today, like him or hate him, because he represents something that is missing in our lives. He’s like a hybrid of Jules Verne, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He promises grand visions of modern life, in the way Verne did in his novels. He dares to imagine amazing futures, in the way the whole public used to, even in my lifetime with the moon landings. Now public life is a toilet of petty social media squabbles. He employs thousands of engineers to invent ways to make those visions happen, like Edison did. And he takes that engineering invention to scale in the way Ford did, with cars, to make those engineering visions affordable and available to the wider public. He has some ridiculous, toxic personal views. So did Ford and Edison. It didn’t stop them making our lives vastly easier and richer. Kidult society can only play the man, not the ball. Everything is personal. ‘I don’t like him/her’ is now what adult life has become. The playground, as I say time and again. Edison and Ford were deeply unpleasant people in many ways. They still invented much of your modern life. I wish the world could do the things Musk does, without his toxic personal views. But we’re not doing them, and so he gets rich beyond imagining because he’s filling the void we’re not filling ourselves.