“It might sound great to turn it on — but what if it doesn’t turn off?”

Until 2020, I’d never taken much interest in Elon Musk. In late January I was on a farm in North-East Thailand when an evenly spaced line of satellites passed overhead before dawn. Checking online, I confirmed that it was a SpaceX satellite deployment, part of the third Falcon-9 payload of Starlink satellites. It provoked a spasm of self-education and something of a thought-cascade that carried me through the CoVID lockdowns of Year Zero and into Year One.

2020 was also when Musk sat down for the second time with Joe Rogan, eighteen months after his notorious first appearance on the biggest podcast in the world, when he had smoked a joint with his host, or so I’d heard. So I went back and watched that, and then the new one, more or less back to back.

I had always assumed that Elon Musk was a placement, a front-man recruited and groomed for the role, another Zuckerberg or Gates — but a casual assumption was all it was. His reputation as a ‘genius’ seemed somewhat tenuous to me — a genius at what, exactly? He holds first degrees in Economics and Physics; as a 24-year-old graduate he moved to California in the late summer of 1995 to do a PhD in Applied Physics and Materials Science at Stanford University, but changed his mind at the last minute and withdrew from the programme to go into business. So, like his role model Thomas Edison, it appears his drive is primarily commercial, not scientific.

When asked for his views on Nikola Tesla, the man who invented the fundamental technologies of the modern age, after whom Musk had named a company, he professed greater admiration for Tesla’s rival Thomas Edison “because he was able to bring his ideas to market” — a comment which reveals a pretty shallow knowledge of that particular story. Edison brought DC current to market and it was blown away by Tesla/Westinghouse’s Alternating Current within months. Edison invented the light bulb by trial and error, and when Tesla was prevented from using Edison’s bulbs to illuminate Chicago’s World Fair, he invented his own version in about five minutes, without infringing the patent. The modern age grows out of Tesla’s inventions and ideas, and this despite the fact that probably the bulk of them have been sequestered in covert military-industrial research silos from Steinmetz onwards. The entire modern age, in fact, was built on Tesla’s early work. Musk seems unaware of, or instinctively observes the protocol of pretending to know nothing about, this whole scientific/technological context.

By the way, it was Tesla who drove Edison mad, not the other way round.

He can lay claim, perhaps, to a talent for rethinking, for going back to first principles to find solutions — in the business context, yes, it looks that way — but this doesn’t necessarily apply within a scientific/technological context, where the operative phrase is ‘lay claim’, since like Edison he evidently maintains strict control of credit for the manifold breakthroughs and innovations achieved within his companies.

Having ditched his PhD, Musk co-founded a software company, then an online bank. After the sale of the former and the merger of the latter, he was already a billionaire by 2002, when he founded SpaceX. In 2008 Marvel Comics made the first of its Iron Man films; it was put about that ‘Tony Stark’, the visionary tech-billionaire who transforms himself into the Iron Man, was modelled on Musk. By 2018, the driving force and public face of SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, Tesla Inc. and The Boring Company was already surrounded by considerable adulation as a visionary philanthropist. He came across well in interviews: nice guy, unassuming, modest, thoughtful, honest… and funny too. Youtube compilations proliferated: Elon Musk’s Funniest Moments; Elon Musk, King of Sarcasm. Elon Musk, Pumping Irony.

So his ‘genius’, if that’s the right word, lies in commerce, and in PR — in selling. Selling the ideas as much as the products: selling a future. Re-usable rockets and satellite constellations; artificial intelligence and brain/machine-interface; free speech and self-driving cars. Tesla? Cool name, let’s turn that into a brand.

And to the list of advanced products, given his current political orbit, we should perhaps add the Musk brand itself, the constructed persona, the cult image — which isn’t all his own work by any means.1

∆

Elon Musk: feet on the ground, head in the stars. Low latency, high bandwidth. Immediacy and range. Isn’t that how we all would want to be?

He was already famous, but it was his September 2018 appearance on the massively popular Joe Rogan podcast that made him cool.

Rogan turns into a simpering fan-boy across the table from the richest man in the world. But his job is not to ask hard questions, but to get the guy to relax and open up, to humanise this key player in kitting out a future which is, according to Musk, both inevitable and impossible to predict. And it takes a while. Musk is looking kind of tired, and explains that his recent schedule has been ridiculous. He seems a little nervous to find himself (at last!) hanging with the Alpha males. He hasn’t done this kind of thing before, a long-form interview in an intimate setting; he’s used to doing shorter interviews, usually in front of an appreciative audience who hang on his every word and laugh at his slightest joke.

But now, in the interview that will bring him to a global audience, we get this strange note of melancholy, this hint of sadness.

”You wouldn’t necessarily want to be me,” he tells Joe, wryly — it’s a confession; a confidence.

Is it acting? Instinctively adding some shadow to the cool bright picture he’s been painting? A little chiaroscuro to add depth to the cult image?

Rogan has had to work quite hard to get him to go with the flow, and he’s broken out a nice bottle of whisky someone famous has given him. They’re on their third glass when Rogan sparks up a joint and passes it across to Elon. He takes it — it is legal in California, after all — sniffs it, looks at it with curiosity, and takes a token mouthful which he doesn’t inhale but blows straight out. Then he shrugs and shakes his head. No effect.

So it was completely redundant for him to have to spell out in the aftermath that he was not a pot-smoker. That was after the media got all whipped up about it; there was speculation about SpaceX’s USAF contracts being affected, and Tesla stock even took a hit. In fact, it took only moments after his token drag for him to start receiving texts from friends saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing???’

But Elon’s got way too much on his mind to care about that kind of nonsense.

Rogan has finally moved on from the ritual bro-talk about cool cars and watches, and is pressing him to say something on his role in civilisation, his unique position in the culture. “There’s only one Elon Musk,” says Joe, throwing it across.

There’s a long pause.

“I don’t think…” says Elon. “I don’t think you’d necessarily want to be me… I don’t think people would like it that much.”

And OK, it could be the tiredness talking or the whisky, but actually this is not the first time he’s said it. There’s another interview, in front of a live audience of students, I think, where he used the line, perhaps where he first came up with it. Asked what advice he would give to young people who want to be like Elon Musk, he says, “Well, first of all probably they shouldn’t want to be… me.” He’s joking, of course, but…

“I think it sounds better than it is — it’s not as much fun being me as you’d think. I mean (laughing) it could be worse, for sure. But I’m not sure I would… I‘m not sure I wanna be me!” (Audience laughter.)

He passes it off skilfully with that punchline and the interviewer moves on, but it’s coming across a little darker this time, and Rogan presses him…

“Come on, that’s some superhero-type shit. You know, you wouldn’t want to be Spiderman… just sleep tight in Gotham City and hope he’s out there doing his job.”

Again Musk takes his time to articulate a response.

“It might sound great to turn it on — but what if it doesn’t turn off?”

He’s talking about his restless mind.

“It doesn’t stop… it’s like a never-ending explosion. When I was five or six I thought I was insane… because it was clear that other people did not… that their mind wasn’t exploding with ideas… all the time… it was just strange… I hoped they didn’t find out, ‘cos they might, like, put me away or something.”

But of course they found out, Elon. Of course they did. And they didn’t put you away, they put you right where you are now. Nothing to be sad about.

And then, out of nowhere, a monologue. And as he speaks, strangely, he just looks more and more depressed.

“My goal is to try to do useful things… try to maximise it, probably the future is good… make the future exciting… something you’re looking forward to… you know like with Tesla we’re trying to make things that people love …”

He livens up momentarily.

“I mean, how many things can you buy that you really love, that really give you joy? It’s so rare… so rare. I wish there were more things. That’s what we try to do — just make things that somebody loves.”

He’s looking down. His expression, now, seems almost heart-broken…

“That’s so difficult.”

Rogan is letting him speak, gently probing…. This is on the money, now.

“Do you think about, like, what things would improve people’s experience? Like what, what would change the way people interface with life… that would make them more relaxed, more happy? Do you think, like, what could I do that would help people, that maybe they wouldn’t be able to figure out?”

On the word ‘interface’, Musk’s eyes flare momentarily, a tiny movement of the eyelids — a signal: I thought we agreed we weren’t getting into that today? Brain/machine-interface, neural nets, AI… subject for another podcast, bro.

He hauls the conversation clumsily back on track.

“Yeah, like, what are the set of things that can be done to make the future better?” he says. “A future where we are a space-faring civilisation and out there among the stars — this is very exciting. This makes me look forward to the future.”

Happier now.

“This makes me want that future. You know there need to be things that make you look forward to waking up in the morning. Waking up in the morning you look forward to the day, forward to the future. In a future where we’re a space-faring civilisation and out there among the stars — I think that’s very exciting. That is a thing we want. Whereas if we knew we would not be a space-faring civilisation and forever confined to earth, that would not be a good future, that would be very sad. We don’t want the sad future.”

Forever confined to earth… so sad.

And then Rogan creates another glitch, though to be fair Musk hasn’t left him much to work with. “It would be sad in terms of, just with the finite life-span?”

And Musk interjects — ‘Yeah!’ — before he can finish…

“… of the Earth itself and the solar system itself?”

Ah. Musk readjusts, realising he’s anticipated the wrong question, and continues talking in that strangely wooden fashion about space travel and a multi-planetary civilisation.

At one point he says, completely out of the blue. ‘I’m pro-human, by the way. I love humanity. I think it’s great. Strangely, you know, I think a lot of people don’t like humanity and see it as a blight, but I do not. This may sound corny, but love is the answer.’

Elon — are you sure that joint didn’t have any effect?

It’s such a bizarre speech, coming out of nowhere and sounding so… forced. Yes, of course there are people who don’t love humanity, who hate it, and work for the day they can dispense with it entirely — we know that.

I remember James Goldsmith making that uncomfortable joke in one of his 100th birthday interviews. “Elon Musk wants to go and live on the solar system’s dead planet. He must hate people even more than I do.”

But we’re not going to get into today either, and so, with a rattle of hippy beads:

“Love is the answer.”

Well it does sound corny, yes, Elon channelling 1967 Beatles.

What is that song? Love, Love, Love, right, from Yellow Submarine. But no, it’s not that, I checked. Hey Jude, then. Take a sad song and make it better. But it’s not that either. McCartney doesn’t use the phrase.

In fact it’s 1973 solo John Lennon — a song in which Lennon openly mocks the hippy/New Age movement he played a major role in creating and leading into hedonistic disintegration. It’s a good song, standard piano-Lennon with a strong descending bass line, but actually outstanding in terms of its hook and the insistent refrain-driven verse structure — and, I would say, its irony, from the title onwards. Everyone was no doubt too high to notice, but he was taking the piss, as we British say.

MIND GAMES

We’re playing those mind games together
Pushing the barrier, planting seeds
Playing the mind guerrilla
Chanting the mantra, peace on Earth
We’ve all been playing those mind games forever
Some kind of Druid dude, lifting the veil
Doing the mind guerrilla
Some call it magic, the search for the grail

[Bridge]
Love is the answer
And you know that for sure
Love is the flower
You gotta let it, you gotta let it grow

So keep on playing those mind games together
Faith in the future, out of the now
You just can’t beat on those mind guerrillas
Absolute elsewhere, in the stones of your mind
Yeah, we’re playing those mind games forever
Projecting our images in space and in time

John Lennon, King of Sarcasm.

Well, you may not agree that Elon is deliberately planting an allusion, here, or indeed that Lennon was a Tavistock asset in the great social experiment of the Counterculture, or its infiltration and subversion. Perhaps it’s just a random remark — but if so, it is very random! I came away from the 2018 interview with a strong impression that Elon doesn’t do random. Rather, that he studies up for interviews, decides on certain elements he wants to insert into the dialogue, and mentally ticks them off his list. That’s how he comes across in this interview, heading off the Neuralink discussion in a very unskilled manner because he hasn’t boned up on it yet, and then, in the subsequent lost rhythm of the conversation, awkwardly inserting these peculiar, flat monologues out of leftfield without any transitional gradient. And one of them, it so happens, turns out to be a nod to a major change agent, at the very least, of a previous generation — and an illustrious predecessor in the art of mind games.2

∆

It wasn’t until June of 2020, eighteen months later, that Musk found time to honour his promise to come back for another chat. This time his performance was much more assured. There was no whisky or weed in the sequel, no channelling John Lennon. And no sadness. But plenty of seriousness. And this time we do, finally, get into the interface question.

There’s a lot of talk about biomedical applications first. The blind will see, the quadriplegic will walk, etc. Slightly better than normal, in fact. Musk always tries hard, in his stilted retro-science-fiction way, to evoke ‘exciting’ pictures of the future that ‘people can get excited about, a future people want to be part of’ — but it’s also, as the Singularity approaches, a future that he’s obliged — honour-bound, I would say — to warn us about.

“There’s no way of telling whether AI will be benign,” he says, as he has a number of times before. “Beyond the Singularity, there is no way to predict what will happen.”

Which is, after all, pretty much the definition of the word. A singularity, mathematically speaking, is when one function in an equation takes an infinite value.

Such as at the centre of a black hole.

And Elon’s staring into that black hole.

Does his sadness come from the future?

It might sound great to turn it on.

What if it doesn’t turn off?

He had long been on record calling for the regulation of AI research — in which there were more than forty companies involved at that time, and only one of them, OpenAI, which Musk was invested in, committed to open source research.

But there’s a problem, he explains.

Imagine it takes us, say, a hundred years to invent Artificial General Intelligence — ‘strong’ AI. Not an algorithm, a machine that thinks. That gives us a maximum of ninety-nine years to come up with a way of controlling it.

How do you invent a way of controlling something that does not yet exist?

And that‘s why — the real reason, he says — he’s involved in Neuralink: brain/machine-interface using soft, flexible polymer electrodes threaded through the brain to fuse the human connectome with the telecosm.

Obviously there’s an apparent contradiction here, and he anticipates the question. Why, if he thinks artificial intelligence is such a threat, is he investing in DeepMind, Google’s AI subsidiary, and devoting so much of his legendary problem-solving ingenuity to the interface problem, the bandwidth problem, of being merely human?

Elon is three steps ahead of you.

“It’s already too late,” he says. “We’re already a cyborg to some degree, right, ‘cos you’ve got your phone, your electronic devices… today if you don’t bring your phone along it’s like you have missing-limb syndrome…

“The thing is, even in a benign scenario, we’re kind of left behind. We’re not along for the ride. We’re just too dumb. So how do you go along for the ride? Your computer can do things like a million times faster. Basically at some point the AI is like, talking to a tree…”

He means not very entertaining for the AI, by the way, though it occurs to me that the tree might feel the same way. Tiny human with its head full of neural lace, blurring around like a hyper-active insect…

In any case, we’re all already participating in the creation of digital intelligence.

“There’s sort of like a collective AI in the Google search; we’re all plugged in like nodes on a network, like leaves on a big tree, and we’re all feeding this network with our questions and answers, we’re all collectively programming the AI.”

Since we can’t stop the process, brain/cloud-interface should properly be seen as a survival strategy for humanity.

“The ‘merge’ scenario with AI is that one that seems probably the best. If you can’t beat it, join it. From a long-term existential standpoint that’s like the purpose of Neuralink — to create a high-bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI. Because we have a bandwidth problem. There’s an interface problem — particularly output. You just can’t communicate with your fingers, it’s too slow.”

Really? Didn’t seem to hold Bach or Mozart back too much. Charlie Parker or Oscar Peterson.

But for all his understated delivery, he is a good communicator. In terms of the spoken word, he uses ‘less is more’ to good effect. People seem to feel they know this guy. Admirers just call him ‘Elon’.

I almost feel like I’m getting to know him myself.

∆

From there the conversation just gets more sinister.

The human brain has two layers, Elon explains, warning that brain-purists will quibble, but anyway: the cortex is the rational mind, the computational layer. That’s wrapped around the limbic system, which is the reptilian or paleo-mammalian brain. Our drives, our survival instinct, our lusts, hungers and fears.

The strange thing is, he notes, that the cortex serves the limbic system; the more advanced part of the brain serves the more primitive. You’d think it would be the other way round.

“But we’re happy with that arrangement. I don’t know anyone who wants to replace their limbic system, or their cortex.”

The AI interface will give us a super-intelligent third layer.

But then he says something stunning — the most important thing I’ve heard him say in this entire five-and-a-half-hour marathon.

“But the AI isn’t formed, strangely, by the human limbic system. It is in large part our id writ large.”

And Rogan completely fails to pick up on it.

The id. Latin for ‘it’. In Freudian psychology, the unconscious depths of the mind, the disorganised component of personality that contains a human’s basic, instinctual drives.

So that’s what’s coming.

And we all helped to teach it.

Elsewhere, Musk has put it even more dramatically. There’s a clip, in the ‘Elon Musk: Pumping Irony‘ compilation. It’s from an interview at MIT in front of a student audience.

“With AI we are summoning the demon,” he says.

He nods. Serious. He’s sitting on a deep red sofa in front of a deep red theatre curtain. The interviewer is not in shot. Elon looks out at the audience and makes eye-contact with the camera.

“You know all those stories where… there’s the guy with a pentagram and the holy water and it’s like, yeah, you’re sure you can control the demon.”

Winking, comically, at the camera.

“It doesn’t work out.”

---

So, my impression over these five or six hours of conversation was of Elon Musk as a rather carefully constructed persona, consciously established and supported by copious enablement and myth-making through all media, including cinema as well as the internet — one could almost say a socially-engineered construct. He has something in common with Einstein, then. But I’d say his scientific knowledge, as opposed to his problem-solving abilities, is quite limited. His scientific positions on many questions tend to be outmoded and pedestrian, which is to say, mainstream, and his ontology is quite stunted. He believes in things. He wishes there were more. Musk has an interface problem, a limited interface with reality; he is not really interested in what is; only what can be engineered, given the right tools. The human brain, for instance.

At one point Rogan is seems to be about to get into some more esoteric scientific areas, and he’s saying, “Like for instance people used to have this idea that we are just a brain in a vat…” and Musk cuts him off:

“You are a brain in a vat.

Your skull is the vat.”

OK. Rogan drops that particular direction.

And it is sad, I think, to have such a 1950s view of things, to be so out-of-touch with new thinking on consciousness, the role of the brain, morphogenesis and the field theory of mind. But you do find that with very busy successful people. They’ll go a whole career, very often, and retire on a lot of money and no wider a knowledge base than they had when they were twenty.

Elon is very effective, but he’s not actually that smart. He has an interface problem with this deep and fractal reality at which science stares through a keyhole. But then, so does the whole culture, in that sense — have an interface problem, that is. The sadness, for me, is the mechanistic-materialist Cartesian paradigm itself, the machine model which has brought such success and such atrocity to the modern history of humanity and such disconnection from the source.

Musk quite obviously has his rosta of propaganda topics to influence perceptions of technology — he might as well have shown us the list. Faith in the future. It’s probably good. It’s the future we want, the good future, not the sad future.

At the same time, probably the technology is going to kill you. Almost inevitably, unless you, you know, merge… with it.

It’s the same technology-run-amok meme which has dominated the science fiction genre from its inception in 1818, and the cinematic science fiction of the last hundred years, from Fritz Laing onwards. Musk is heavily invested in the idea. I’ve always seen it as a cover-story for the day the robots climb out of the movie screens and hunt us down in packs, but that’s just me. How will we ever know, in any case?

It’s an article of faith, then: I don’t believe consciousness is emergent. Or that only humans have it. Or that becoming a multi-planetary civilisation will enable us to spread consciousness, rippling out throught the universe. Or that it’s boring talking to a tree, necessarily. And I especially don’t wish there were more things.

Or more Elon Musks, for that matter. Catherine Austen Fitts jokes that no one man can be that productive and there must be whole teams of Elons, one to play the front man, one to attend board meetings, one to hire and fire, one to tweet, (or ‘ext’ / ‘Xt’), one to run DOGE, one hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, and so on. One to play video games….

She may not be far wrong.

By the way, the tree says, watch that fucker, he’s not real.

He has his uses, but the long game is technocracy, and the rest is mind games.

1

I did register, flippantly, the temporal coincidence of Musk’s 1995 swerve into business with the denouement of the Unabomber‘s 18-year career as a paleo-terrorist. I’d been intrigued by Kaczynski’s reported negotiating position, i.e. his stated intention, if his manifesto was published, to take one more life before surrendering himself to the FBI — which he was forced to do much sooner than he’d planned, thanks to the astuteness of his younger brother — and we never found out who it was he had in mind. As Kaczynski languished in jail for the rest of his life, watching everything unfold over the next twenty-seven years, I wondered how often he must have run that thought-experiment in his head — If I’d been given that one last chance, who would I have taken out? Who should I have taken out?

The individual who would do most to enable the technocracy, obviously. But who would that be? Gates? Kurzweil?

Hindsight is 2020. In 1995, when Kaczynski went down, no one had heard of Elon Musk.

2

The title itself is ironic, derogatory. Mind games forever evokes the futility of the new age spiritualism he references mockingly in the lyric. I think it’s important to remember that liminal figures, threshold guardians like Lennon, Dylan, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Noam Chomsky, Alex Jones, Trump, Musk, Carlson — figures who have one foot in each camp, or two faces, if you like, one of them in shadow — should still be listened to, not dismissed in high-minded fashion. Because sometimes — probably always — it is in their nature to want to tell you. To articulate the truth, sometimes accidentally, sometimes cryptically — while living the lie. Mind Games is Lennon’s confession; he never believed in any of it. And this is Elon’s couched confession, his post-modern touch. The allusion to the song announces his self-promotion to a fine tradition.

NEXT: The MERCY of MACHINES