What Elon Musk Is Selling: Hope

It doesn’t have to be like this

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. … We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad — worse than bad.”
— Howard Beale, Network

Since I was a child, I have loved technology. The story of technology is fundamentally redemptive. Technology is often our clearest sign that things can get better. The future can be better than the past. We can solve big problems. Technology is synonymous with hope.

For decades, Steve Jobs was the foremost torchbearer for the hopeful spirit of technology. In an interview in 1986, Jobs described the feeling that motivated him to keep pushing forward in the computer industry:

“I felt it the first time when I visited a school — it was like third and fourth graders — and they had a…