Charlatocracy: Welcome to the Rise of Anti-intellectualism, Anti-Democracy, and Pixiedust Economics

Tesla has been producing electric cars since 2003. When Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning founded the company, they had spent several years working on electrical vehicle science and hoped to one day change the world and create affordable electrical vehicles. When Tesla first registered in California, Elon Musk was not attached to the company, and instead was toying around with the idea of building spaceships to send humans into outer space, most specifically the oxygen deprived, highly radiated rock planet of Mars. Eberhard, Tarpenning, and Musk met at a Mars exploration club in the early aughts. Musk had no experience in advanced mechanical engineering. Most of his income and experience came from software programming, which was essentially the code writing that helped him hit it big with one of his initial projects—Paypal, the online payment system. When developing what would go on to become SpaceX, Musk’s first adventure in the aeronautics industry was a failed attempt at buying cheap Russian rockets to bring back to America (quite possibly an illegal operation based on U.S. government restrictions on foreign nationals buying and importing Russian space technology). Now, about two decades later, Musk can topple entire currencies with several taps on his smart phone.

There are three truths that will remain undisputed during this long discussion on modern economics and global leadership: 1) Tesla Motors has never made any money—during the seventeen years it’s been in operation—manufacturing or selling cars; 2) Tesla, the company, was not an original idea developed by Elon Musk, and 3) Most ethicists and leading scientists view the colonization of mars to be a complete waste of time and poor expense of resources. And finally, in case you’re wondering where this is all going, I will, during this article, return to these facts when detailing what exactly defines a Charlatocracy, and why we are headed dangerously close to foregoing democratic meritocracy for a far darker embrace of anti-intellectualism and shoddy economics that favor power, not innovation.

Elon Musk is a brilliant man. But a brilliant scientist he is not. A brilliant scientist, a category exemplified by Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Sir Issac Newton, processes information about our natural world and unravels its intricate designs to uncover facts and truths that have been in front of humans since existence, but unseen by the average person. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, for example, shattered modern physics and sent humanity into an existential crisis, both because it conceptualized an entirely new way of looking at the world, and because it revolutionized academia’s understanding of the universe. And this is not an exaggeration. When Einstein revealed his theory to the world, the response was clear. In 1913, when Einstein first proposed the principals that would go on to become what we now know as the Theory of Special Relativity, The New York Times reported that Einstein was challenging existing scientific theories that remained tied to ancient concepts such as “the ether of space” and occult histories. Reporters dispatched to large audiences that Einstein’s theories were too complex to grasp (the NYT quoted his wife as stating it was “too much for a woman” but that she was, like, happy anyway and didn’t care) and that President Warren G. Harding had met with the scientist and had been “puzzled” by relativity. In true turn of the century fashion, one professor at Columbia, Charles Lane Poor, even compared Einstein’s theory to the Russian embrace of the Bolshevik revolution.

I bring up Einstein’s earth-shattering scientific brilliance because his most famous theory—if you’re lost at this moment on what that theory is just remember it’s the E=MC2 calculations everyone everywhere has seen at some moment in their lives—was not created in a capitalist vacuum meant to solve personal egocentrism or turn Einstein into the world’s most powerful billionaire by shelling people’s private data to political campaigns or hosting garden gnome salesmen on an vast online marketplace. Einstein was a man obsessed with science because he was born with the ability to see beyond our physical space, much like Neo in The Matrix, and read the code between the universe. He was not an inventor for the sake of wealth or ego, but for the sake of the human condition. Einstein was not into science to make money or collect winnings on the speculation that he might change the world. He did change the world. That’s an important distinction to make when you consider that Elon Musk has only four patents attributed to his name, and no one cares about them enough to even list them as part of his accomplishments. Not even Musk. He hardly ever discusses the patents the United States government has provided him in his decades long career as an engineer. He has even gone on record stating that he “doesn’t care” about patents, an odd statement for not only a businessman, but for an engineer.

And the engineer portion of his resume is key to unraveling his lack of scientific brilliance. Musk does not seem to understand that engineering is just a derivative of science, and that science itself is the questioning of nature and the use of experiments to prove new and exciting theories. In an odd twitter barrage several months ago, Musk went on a full hate-spree against “scientists” who he claimed have contributed nothing to rockets and space travel (yea ok, like fluid dynamics and jet propulsion were just sitting around at the science store for engineers’ use), and stated that only engineers deserve full credit for complex mechatronics and aeronautic space engineering. His cult-like followers even spent their time and energy (something he obviously wouldn’t do for him, because you know, he needs their blind tutelage to promote this image of brilliance he portrays) defending this nonsensical dig at rocket scientists. On December 1st, 2020, he wrote, “"Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the Universe, engineering is about creating things that never existed." But even a person with an eighth grade understanding of STEM, pretty much the equivalent of my understanding of most things science, knows that engineers must understand the laws of physics, math, and yes, space and time, to “create things”. To call yourself an engineer and not understand that it essentially means you are a derivative of science, one branch of many out of the entire discipline, seriously calls into question whether you are authentically an engineer. Musk, who studied physics and not engineering by the way, seems to fall short of Einstein’s humility. Einstein once famously wrote, "There are two ways that a theoretician goes astray…"1) The devil leads him around by the nose with a false hypothesis (for this he deserves pity) 2) His arguments are erroneous and ridiculous (for this he deserves a beating)." It’s hard to read something like that, and then take Musk seriously when he spews anti-intellectual mélange like this: “Much of what people think of an (sic) science is actually engineering, eg no such thing as a “rocket scientist”, only rocket engineers. Latter is who put humans on the moon.”

So if Musk is not a brilliant scientist, a people he seems to hate anyway, what is he?

Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX, the space travel company, early-stage investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Inc, the electric vehicle company, and founder of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI, three companies dedicated to tunnel construction, a cyberpunk company that “sews” chips in humans’ brains, and an artificial intelligence company with a billion-dollar backing from Microsoft. There are a couple of items to unravel when looking at Musk’s companies. First, the significant and even lawsuit laden title of “early-stage investor” for Tesla, Inc. Although often discussed as one of the founders of the electrical car company, he was an investor in the company and never an actual founder. Musk did not envision, create, or become involved with Tesla until after two experienced electrical vehicle designers, Eberhard and Tarpenning, had already registered the company and began designs and engineering work on Tesla’s first electrical vehicles. Since he had hit some paydirt with his involvement in PayPal, Tesla’s original founders approached Musk to help fund their company. He was, for lack of a better term, an angel investor. Also, since taking helm of the company as the CEO and chief architect, or Technoking (a title he gave himself), Tesla has turned no profit on its car business. Surprising turn of events for a company that manufactures cars. One would assume what is now touted as the world’s most successful car company would have at least turned a fifteen-dollar profit on its actual products. The only year the company reported a profit was in 2020, but none of that was from actual car sales. Tesla just sold some tax credits to other car manufacturers, who aren’t as heavily invested in electric vehicles (mostly because, as recent studies have shown, it will take decades to create a fully mainstream electric car grid), and celebrated making money off a government program, ironically for a private company currently listed, I repeat once again, as the most successful car manufacturer in the world.

So what about The Boring Company? Musk made headlines several years ago for proposing an ambitious tunnel project called The Loop. The media swept the story up and glamourized the project as a game changing transportation system that would whirl people around a city like those little boxes banks shove in a tube and push towards a drive-through teller system. But The Loop turned out to be a huge dud. The project, which drawings and media envisioned as transporting thousands of people across miles and miles and miles of urban landscapes using unmanned super-intelligent machines like train conductors from an Aldous Huxley darktopia, had a vastly different architectural conclusion. In October 2020, Musk’s Boring Company revealed the company’s signature project to the world. Not only did The Loop only cover transportation of several hundred people per hour, but it was also only limited to The Las Vegas Convention Center. And the hyperintelligent conducto-bots that would whirl humans around like bubble tea through a straw? Well, they turned out to be a couple of guys driving Tesla cars that were pulling a trolley along a tunnel. One analysis showed that the project is no faster or technologically advanced than the 1975 West Virginia University Personal Rapid Transit system, an accomplishment that regresses public transportation, not advances it. So while China and Spain develop some of the fastest bullet trains known to man, Elon Musk pays a couple of guys to haul a huge container full of Las Vegas Convention humans in Teslas, kind of like cattle moved around in a big truck.

SpaceX has fared much better than the other two. It has developed space technology that is more efficient and cost effective. SpaceX’s reusable rockets have successfully advanced space travel’s possibilities. However, the company itself has some odd benchmarks, mostly outlined by Musk. Musk believes SpaceX will play an integral role in the colonization of Mars. He has repeatedly stated that SpaceX will be sending humans up to Mars to begin the red planet’s new human cities. Musk has admitted two things about this project that I find terrifying: he is willing to kill people during the initial trial runs of this colonization, and he thinks Earth is already worth abandoning cause I guess it sucks to be here and Mars’s radiation, atmosphere that boils human blood, and lack of oxygen seem like a more viable option. When discussing SpaceX’s Mars exploration and human colonization plan, he theorized that launching nuclear explosions at the red planet’s poles would help stabilize its environment for human living and that during the initial exploration several of the first inhabitants would die. When challenged by a Russian physicist on twitter that the nuclear bomb proposal, as if just bombing a planet like it’s an upper-level boss in a 90s video game weren’t already a batshit idea, would require thousands of nuclear explosions, and therefore, thousands of bombs and the costs associated with them, Musk just brushed it off and said he would do it anyway.

So what is the point of deconstructing all of this and questioning the richest man in the world’s authenticity as both as a businessman and a scientist? And how does it relate to pixie dust economics and anti-intellectualism? Well, these ideas and less than zero profits have somehow turned the son of an emerald mine owner in apartheid-era Pretoria into one of the most powerful men in the world. He irresponsibly toys with cryptocurrency investors by plunging and raising their life savings out of pure attention-seeking interests, invests his time and energy in petty online attacks on transgender people’s use of pronouns, spouts anti-science information during an international health crisis because it threatens his manufacturing plant in California, and he castigates his employees when they try to unionize to demand improved working conditions at his factories. Musk is an exemplar of the current technological and political crisis we see in modern Western society. Rich and powerful individuals who churn out big promises and offer little results. They sell us snake-oil, and we drink it like drunk toddlers from a sippy cup.

Our society has glorified men like Musk because we have created this fantasy world where actual profit margins, policy discussions, and meaningful scientific change no longer matter. Instead, we promote and encourage intelligent young men (mostly males, but Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos implosion is an example that any young, narcissistic liar can convince wealthy investors into burning their money on a pile of deceptive accounting) to chase imaginary numbers and speculative achievements to beef up a company’s projected economic worth. By doing so, they create a visage of achievement that nets them real-life wall street money and society’s adoration. Scientists and businesspeople that chase ethical business practices and economic reports based on actual profit margins and realistic expectations are discouraged from participating in modern capitalism. As a result, we are overrun by the used car salesmen of America, lying about numbers, features, and products to gain whatever leverage they can to become an anointed golden calf, a rare white buffalo here to save us from our doldrum existence and offer us a new social media app, a catchy misspelled name, or some worthless space exploration scheme that sounds more like a group suicide pact than an actual human expedition into a better future. One infamous example of this charlatan-in-chief is Adam Neumann, WeWork founder and megalomaniac who tried to pass a real estate subleasing company as a tech enterprise. In one odd company gathering, he told an auditorium full of thousands of employees, “I sometimes feel that every single person in this room is me having a different experience.” This sort of cultish narcissism fueled the rapid growth and zero profit of a real estate company marketed as a life-changing brand that many investors and business media moguls presented to the world as the next Facebook. Neumann’s management of the company included fudging numbers and quasi-criminal actions that ruined employees’ lives and burned through investors’ cash with a careless disregard for any financial responsibility or professionalism. And after WeWork pushed Neumann out of the company, he left with a net worth of almost a billion dollars. What sort of ethics and business practices are we teaching our country with this sort of rewards system? When heap praise and money on these sorts of humbugs and mountebanks, and we chip away at the meritocracy we have tried to structure within our already unequal capitalist system.

Do I have a personal beef with Musk, as I am sure most of his followers will allege after coming across this article? Not at all. I used to like him, and I thought he was a bit of a swashbuckler making changes in the automobile industry that could help put an end to the oil barons of the world who pollute our earth and promote the inequities in our society. But after his pandemic nonsense, where he promoted illegitimate science and claimed COVID-19 was no worse than the common cold, I learned he was not an intelligent man, but rather a brilliant charlatan. And like many of the men currently gaming the international order, he lies and spews ridiculous nonsense, and no one holds him responsible. Instead, he is rewarded with more power and more influence, hurling his cultlike followers at anyone who disagrees with him. It’s odd that in 2021 we have to ask ourselves why young men and women feverishly defend a man that wants to kill us in space and that his car company, touted as the most successful of car companies, turns no profits. But dumb men with loud mouths are all the rave in this future we have created. It has become the emerging political trend among corrupt governments in several dozen countries. Remember when Trump said he would present the United States people with a healthcare bill that would solve the financial and bureaucratic hurdles (which have yet to really cause much of a problem when considering the millions who now have access to medical care) of Obamacare? This plan never existed. He never released it or worked on it. He has now left office and his supporters, many who are in severe need of adequate healthcare, did not follow-up with him and question why he just ignored these healthcare promises. The wall, the immigration plan, and even the China trade deal that did nothing to really curtail Chinese technology transfers or protect American companies, none of these things ever came to fruition. But his followers religiously hold on to his every word, like some sort of Sun God from a prehistoric civilization. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has rolled back protections for indigenous groups, bungled his country’s COVID-19 response with junk science and mismanagement, and sped up the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and still a good chunk of the country supports him. The Philippines, Belarus, Venezuela, Myanmar, and many other nations have given over the reins of their fragile democracies to brutal dictators. Facts no longer matter to many voters. Economics and science no longer matter to many businessmen.