Sorry Elon

This morning's Rocket Launch

I will admit that I woke up excited today for the SpaceX launch of Starship into orbit. Maybe because I was born in 1962 and some of my earliest memories was following Apollo flights on black and white TV’s.  There are some photos of me in a silver space jacket I wore, so listening to T-Minus, 10, 9, 8, 7 is kinda of Pavlov dog stuff, I get a little excited about the powerful engines at lift off.  And these are the “good” rockets to watch, not the bad ones we have been watching lately in the middle east.

But I followed the first few minutes this morning, second stage separated from the main rocket and the broadcasters where excited.  Then they lost contact, and as I type this, which will be old news later today, they “potentially had an automated detonation”, not clear, but they are still cheering the test flight as successful.    

In layman terms, the rocket blew up.  And you know what, I am not unhappy about that because it’s Elon Musk’s.   There is a part of me that still supports the genius mercurial entrepreneur.  I’ve been reading the 670-page Isaacson biography, I have driven a Tesla for 5 years, I have watched every Joe Rogan interview with him drinking scotch, smoking cigars, and talking about LSD trips.  As a fellow entrepreneur, I have even argued in his defense of some challenging moves at Twitter earlier on to cut staff and make experimental changes.  I admit to paying the $10 bucks for the blue check so I finally was able to prove that I was I.

But the motherfucker has crossed the line on his antisemitic rhetoric and support of fringe “free (hate) speech”.  His battle with the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt is absurd and totally unnecessary.  I’ve read and reread his words, really trying to surgically give him the benefit of doubt.  Everyone wants to knock down “the man”, the successful person who accomplishes a lot, makes tough decisions, etc.   So I stood by, being more in the minority lately, saying, the “jury is still out”.  But my jury verdict is in, and based on my Walter Isaacson insights of his youth growing up South Africa, and his comments recently about Elon, I think Elon has crossed the line, some synapsis have exploded damaging his compass.  Allowing anti-Semitic things on X to be amplified has the effect of supporting antisemitism.

Isaacson said recently in an interview: 

“A lot of my book is sometimes what Maye Musk, his mother, said, which is the danger of Elon is he becomes his father. His father lives in South Africa. He's a very--he thinks the election was stolen from Biden. He thinks if you get vaccinated, you're going to die right away or something.  So if you talk to Musk, you say, well, a lot of those conspiracy theories, whether it's--I don't know--lab leak or whatever--turned out to have some merit to them. So there are times when he gets into this--what you might call fringe or conspiratorial mindset.  But one thing I have to emphasize in this light--the book is a narrative--is that there are times he's not that way. He snaps out of it, where he's very rational, where he's trying very hard to make it an environment in which hate speech is not amplified. “

So if Elon does not want to blow up his entire legacy, I do hope he snaps out this trend towards his father and conspiracy thinking, right leaning, and overly harsh acceptance of fringe thinking in the name of free speech.  “Sticks and Stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt me” might have been a children’s rhyme in a world before Twitter.  But social media’s words incite wars, killing of innocent civilians, helps support the rationalization of killing Jews, Arabs, Gays, Blacks, Immigrants, you name it Elon.  Sorry your rocket blew up just now, but a lot of lives are blowing up because of X.