Trussonomics trashed within eight weeks. Former US president Donald Trump’s anointed candidates cut down in the midterms. Sam Bankman-Fried, the poster boy of the cryptoworld, collapsing into bankruptcy. Elon Musk throwing Twitter into turmoil. The bursting of myths and the shredding of reputations seem to be the themes of the day.
Each of these cases is, of course, distinct and the root causes of each disaster different. There is a danger, too, in discussing these developments, of seeming to revel in failure. Too much of the debate about Musk and Twitter, especially, has mixed despair with schadenfreude. Yet, viewed collectively, these cases also tell us something deeper about our age and, in particular, about the ways in which we think about innovation and change.
Since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, Musk has emerged as the leading virtuoso of technological innovation.
Illustration: Mountain People
“His brilliance, his vision and the breadth of his ambition make him the one-man embodiment of the future,” Fortune magazine said in 2014.
The world seems to divide into Musk lovers and Musk haters, a cleavage that has become particularly acute since his acquisition of Twitter last month. For Musk supporters, the critics are little more than know-nothing dullards, attempting for political reasons to hack down a genius of the day.
“It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX,” computer scientist and venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote on Twitter.
However, look more closely at Musk’s record, and the mystique begins to vanish. Musk was removed as chief executive of each of the first companies he helped found: Zip2, an online business directory; X.com, an online bank; and PayPal, created by the merger of X.com with its much more successful competitor Confinity, cofounded by another Silicon Valley wannabe, Peter Thiel.
Nevertheless, the sale of Zip2 netted Musk US$22 million and the acquisition of PayPal by eBay US$176 million. He used that money to set up a series of other ventures, most notably the electric vehicle company Tesla and SpaceX, which manufactures and launches spacecraft. Yet his record here, too, is hardly that of an entrepreneurial genius.
Tesla is today the world’s most valuable auto company. However, it has been plagued by a host of major problems — from fatal crashes to fines for alleged fraud to accusations of creative accounting. The company has also been accused of garnering more than US$295 million in green subsidies from the state of California for a battery-swapping technology that was never made available to customers.
SpaceX nearly folded in 2008 before a last-minute US$1.6 billion contract from NASA. Before that contract, Musk acknowledged: “We were running on fumes.” His projects were so reliant on public money for survival that in the days before he discovered the necessity of voting Republican to provide “balance” to US politics, conservatives derided the degree of state support for his ventures.
The icon of the self-made entrepreneur of genius has survived only because of fabulous state subsidies. Nor is it just public money that Musk arrogates. According to his biographer, Ashlee Vance, Musk constantly appropriates for himself the credit for the work of his engineers and programmers.
“I don’t really have a business plan,” he has boasted, never letting, in the words of Vance, “the fact that he knew very little about [an] industry’s nuances bother him.”
Musk’s real genius is in creating an aura — around himself, of making vast promises and getting people to believe that he can deliver. Sometimes he does deliver; many times he does not.
However, it is an approach that yields dividends in an age in which people yearn for the visionary, without particularly scrutinizing the vision, who will on the disrupter without necessarily caring what the disruption will be.
It is the approach that allowed figures such as Elizabeth Holmes, who last week was jailed for 11 years for marketing a seemingly miraculous but in reality fake blood-testing system, and Bankman-Fried, whose cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed earlier this month, to win acclaim and adulation from investors, politicians and pundits.
Before he finally bought Twitter, Musk was sued by the social media platform for seemingly backing out of the deal. As part of the litigation, a huge document of e-mails and text messages, sent and received by Musk, was made public by the court. What they reveal is a world of very rich people who, for all their self-mythologizing, are defined largely by the shallowness of their understanding and their use of their wealth to insulate themselves from having to think too closely about what they might be investing in or what change might entail.
“Solve free speech,” Mathias Dopfner, CEO of the publisher Axel Springer, tells Musk in his “#Gameplan” for Twitter, as if to state it is to solve it.
“I’m very skeptical of books,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview in September (a flattering piece that since the collapse of FTX seems to have been deleted by Sequoia magazine). “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
He added that “if you wrote a book, you fucked up and it should have been a six-
paragraph blog post.”
I doubt Bankman-Fried has never read a book and I doubt whether reading a book would have helped save FTX from bankruptcy. However, it is the kind of flaunting of ignorance, the parading of shallowness, that in certain circles now passes for profundity.
Not just in technology or business, but in politics too, we can see the yearning for the visionary who promises the world so long as you do not look too closely at the small print, and the creation of politicians, from Trump to Truss, who come to believe in their own fantasies.
It is an age of growing support, especially among the young, for authoritarian leaders and “strongman” politics, the inevitable product of disenchantment with democracy and of a lack of faith in traditional agencies of change.
There is a danger in all this that, as the self-proclaimed titans and saviors tumble, what becomes nurtured is a cynicism about change and innovation. The problem is not having a transformative vision about the future, whether in technology or in politics. It is the shallowness and lack of seriousness of those who today present themselves as messiahs.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Forward Forum in Taipei, former Singaporean minister for foreign affairs George Yeo (楊榮文) proposed a “Chinese commonwealth” as a potential framework for political integration between Taiwan and China. Yeo said the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait is unsustainable and that Taiwan should not be “a piece on the chessboard” in a geopolitical game between China and the US. Yeo’s remark is nothing but an ill-intentioned political maneuver that is made by all pro-China politicians in Singapore. Since when does a Southeast Asian nation have the right to stick its nose in where it is not wanted
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has released a plan to economically integrate China’s Fujian Province with Taiwan’s Kinmen County, outlining a cross-strait development project based on six major themes and 21 measures. This official document by the CCP is directed toward Taiwan’s three outlying island counties: Penghu County, Lienchiang County (Matsu) and Kinmen County. The plan sets out to construct a cohabiting sphere between Kinmen and the nearby Chinese city of Xiamen, as well as between Matsu and Fuzhou. It also aims to bring together Minnanese cultural areas including Taiwan’s Penghu and China’s cities of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou for further integrated
During a recent visit to Taiwan, I encountered repeated questions about “America skepticism” among the body politic. The basic premise of the “America skepticism” theory is that Taiwan people should view the United States as an unreliable, self-interested actor who is using Taiwan for its own purposes. According to this theory, America will abandon Taiwan when its interests are advanced by doing so. At one level, such skepticism is a sign of a healthy, well-functioning democratic society that protects the right for vigorous political debate. Indeed, around the world, the people of Taiwan are far from alone in debating America’s reliability
As China’s economy was meant to drive global economic growth this year, its dramatic slowdown is sounding alarm bells across the world, with economists and experts criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for his unwillingness or inability to respond to the nation’s myriad mounting crises. The Wall Street Journal reported that investors have been calling on Beijing to take bolder steps to boost output — especially by promoting consumer spending — but Xi has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, seeing it as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse, and
RSS