The Mask of Musk
by Creative Partner Chris Clarke
Elon Musk is the real Tony Stark, the genius billionaire who will save humanity with his incredible innovation. Musk is also a reddish brown substance secreted by a type of Ox, a key ingredient in perfumery it has a long history of masking bad smells. It was Louis XIV who popularised musk based perfumes. He was said to have taken three baths in his life and members of his court were known to defecate whenever the urge took them in the heavily perfumed halls of Versailles. Musk then has a history as an olfactory mask.
In America, in many ways, the land of the mask, the superhero, the alter ego, the greatest mask is money. And Musk’s money mask masks a great deal.
On 15th July after a cack-handed attempt to insert himself into a genuine story of heroism by sending an unusable mini-sub to the divers working to rescue 11 young boys from a cave, Musk’s mask slipped.
This now deleted tweet represents perhaps a moment in history where the true nature of some of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies is revealed. Facebook stock has just lost the value of the entire cheese industry ($156bn) now that its cynical business model has been exposed. And Musk showed himself to be every bit as petulant and entitled as someone who inherited a fortune in his 20s rather than making it as he did. The assumption of virtue offered to the very wealthy is not a new phenomenon. What perhaps is new, is the way in which wealthy tech companies are able to lean into the human penchant for cognitive dissonance by showing us shiny things that make us feel good.
Arguably Elon Musk got lucky with PayPal (through his X Finance company). Subsequently he’s taken a lot of glory for things he’s simply perfected by deploying his cash.
Solar panels and better batteries are excellent things to perfect, but the question of motive with Musk is troubling. When wielding such enormous financial power, is migration to Mars the best outcome? Dubai or (Slavey Vegas as a good friend of ours calls it) is a desert location populated by crass billionaires, but at least it only takes 5 hours to fly back to civilisation. It’ll take 5 years to get back from Mars. With Volvo which has a 100 year history of genuinely caring about eliminating road deaths set to release EVs to rival Musk’s over polished Mondeo, can the value of Tesla still be justified? Would you rather go to Mars with Musk or try to make things work on the pale blue dot with Volvo?
Despite the image companies like Facebook and Tesla try to project, what lies behind them is ego and an attendant propagandist tendency. Milan Kundera described propaganda as “the absolute denial of shit.” Elon Musk’s mask, may not being able to mask that smell for too much longer but at least we know he’s got something to grow his potatoes in up there on the desert planet.
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