Posting here the other day, I discussed the idea (entertainingly set out in a series of tweets by Antonio García Martínez) of how the battle within Twitter could be seen as a class struggle of sorts, with Musk representing entrepreneurial capital on one side and his opponents various elements of the managerial class on the other.
In the course of an article for the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Orlowski sees another class struggle (again, of sorts) at play, but this time between billionaires. Orlowski can be too gung-ho at times about Musk, but there’s something to this:
Musk’s emergence may herald something new and genuinely interesting. Not merely because Musk is a counterweight to the billionaire boomers who already influence so much political debate. Team Musk likes to point out how dependent the Democrats and its sprawling alliance of NGOs and dark money groups on the Left have become on a tiny handful of Left-leaning donors.
Michael Bloomberg has donated more than $1bn (£820m) to climate change causes. George Soros, the largest political donor in the US this year, has shifted criminal justice policy to the radical Left in major US cities. Over here, Extinction Rebellion and its identikit franchises owe their seed funding to the hedge fund billionaire Sir Chris Hohn. The Climate Emergency Fund which funds the Just Stop Oil disruption is a creation of the Getty family. Without these guilt-stricken billionaire boomers, politics might look very different. So what’s wrong with another billionaire for balance, the Muskovites argue?
What’s significant, and overlooked I think, is that Musk is cut from a very different cloth to self-flagellating financiers like Sir Chris. At heart, he is an engineer and an industrialist, one who builds factories and who creates good jobs. Most of all, he’s an optimist. For Musk, nature is not destiny – it is there to be mastered by invention, and he inspires by example. His popularity with the young is not because he is rich, but because he builds and he evidently believes in humanity.
By comparison, the monochrome climate austerity on offer from the doomsters is not nearly so attractive, and it insidiously reaches into every corner of your life. . . . Few parents wish their children to be poorer, and few children would choose living within some limits arbitrarily imposed on us…
I don’t think Orlowski is right to attribute the behavior of these “billionaire boomers” to (with, doubtless, the odd exception) guilt. Their greenery is about power and status. Bloomberg and his like are happy at the thought of the static, controlled world that the climate fundamentalists are intent on bringing about, because it will be a world in which (they think) their position will be entrenched. That’s why Britain’s Prince King Charles has (oddball mystical beliefs aside) embraced climate fundamentalism (if not its lifestyle) with such enthusiasm. He’s essentially a neo-feudalist, dreaming of a slow-moving, backward-looking society in which a monarch is once again taken seriously. Musk, by contrast, provides an example of our species’ restless creativity, for good, for bad, and for ridiculous. He promises constant movement rather than stasis. That’s not something that those on the top of the heap generally want to see. In a world forever being remade, most of them have only one way to go. And that is down.
But Orlowski is on to something when (by implication) he contrasts Musk’s view with that of the preachy billionaires babbling on about ‘nature,’ how we must live within its limits and so on. Well, Humanity did so for countless millennia, and it wasn’t a lot of fun: Most people died young and poor, even they made it past their birth. Heckuva job, ‘nature.’
Musk takes a more Promethean view. To repeat Orlowski, “nature is not destiny – it is there to be mastered by invention.”
Well, yes.