Kara Swisher etc vs Elon Musk
What Kara and the Elon haters have right and wrong about the mad king
Elon Musk is the world’s wealthiest, most talked about, and possibly both the most loved and most hated person.
Kara Swisher is the queen of tech founder interviews, and a widely recognized public figure representing the progressive Democrat views on technology, business, iconic leaders and social issues. She hates Elon Musk with a passion, and is a prominent voice among a large group that has come together to burn down the Elon Musk tent. Let’s unpack this and explore what’s legit and what is just sour grapes.
Elon Musk, love him or hate him, is a genius. Once in a century mad inventor genius. His talent combines extraordinary IQ, out of this world fearlessness and risk taking, a powerful imagination that allows him to see around corners and over the trees, and a freakish capacity for focus, eliminating the noise that often confounds normal humans, preventing us from achieving great things. He is also able to play chess with risk vs reward, allowing him to bet the farm on a risky strategy, and stay with with it knowing that if it succeeds it will pay off and will get him past the current obstacle to where he hopes to be.
Elon Musk has built an impressive number of disruptive innovations that have changed the world, for the most part improving it, and are probably the most impactful innovations on the last 50 years. He has tipped the scale on EV adoption, from low credibility, high cost, low reward, to high credibility, reasonable cost and significant reward. He has made EVs ubiquitous, via a long list of brilliant innovations within the car, the software, the charging networks, the satellite communications, the artificial intelligence that accelerates Tesla’s quality-product feedback loop, and the manufacturing technology that will keep Tesla 5 years ahead of all other automakers for the next two decades.
Musk has also created a space monster. He has moved SpaceX from a barely credible rich boy hobby, mocked and ridiculed by NASA and the old guard, to being the world’s only commercially viable space transportation company. He has innovated in rocket propulsion, reusable rocket launcher and thruster stages, rocket catcher arms and autonomous self-landing components on barges out at sea. He then extended SpaceX by leveraging his very own economies of scale in order to put a revolutionary network of low orbit satellites around the planet and using a novel combination of laser communications, makes available an internet service provider that can reach all corners of the globe, with latencies lower than the fastest fiber optic networks.
He also has innovated significantly in neural implants and experiments in human-machine interactions as part of his artificial intelligence research, and has built AI solutions that outperform the leaders in certain functions, as we wade out into the AI revolution. He has created the DOJO supercomputer to handle the huge columes of data that will power the next AI innovations, and the stock jumped in one day by the equivalent of BMW’s total valuation.
I know I’m not doing justice to all of Elon’s achievements, but this list alone forces us, whether we like him or not, to admit that he is a rare talent and that no normal human could have accomplished any — let alone all — of these feats.
Did luck play a part in Elon’s stratospheric rise? I’m sure it did, but I’m sure he also endured, and overcame, a great deal of mishaps and misfortunes, which would have defeated most normal humans.
It is therefore disingenuous and fraudulent for Kara Swisher to speak of Elon Musk as though she were his intellectual equal, and equally fraudulent to diminish his accomplishments as though she, or Joe The Plumber (remember that guy?) could have achieved the same if they had the resources. This is utter bullshit.
Kara Swisher has never invented anything. Nor has she ever manifested a keen interest in how stuff works, or how a complex problem was solved. I have never heard her question a tech founder in her myriad interviews (she has indeed interviewed almost all of the iconic tech leaders of our generation) on how they solved a particular problem. Instead, she has focused on social justice questions and has poked holes in their companies’ harsh cultures and their seemingly tough leadership styles. I have never heard her extend a genuine compliment to a tech founder without tempering it with a barb of some kind. I have never heard Kara Swisher ponder in awe about what could be — she tends to see what is there, rather than what could be.
Kara Swisher is a fundamentally unkind and not nice person. She has built her success on a pugilistic interview style that pits nasty girl against tech hero, and it has worked very well for her. She is NOT the queen of tech journalism — just the queen of tech icon interviews. She creates excellent content by injecting hate and slander into her dialogue, putting the Aspergers-diagnosed tech geek on his back foot, and causing divisive reactions in viewers and listeners as they either cheer Kara for her bravery in bitch-slapping the face of power, or slam her for failing to understand the brilliance and accomplishments of her interviewee. Her content sells, but I have to ask, what is she bringing to the world that it doesn’t already have too much of? Nice people don’t sell as well as assholes do. And assholes like to call other people assholes. Kara has not, to my knowledge, ever come up with a new or innovative concept. She’s a successful interviwer and podcaster. Her competition is weak. Peter Coffee? Snooze. The TechCrunch kids? Yes they are better journalists, but too young and timid to go up against nasty girl Swisher.
My motivation for writing this is not hate or aggression. I’m sad about the tech industry’s creation of an unassailable royal family that appears, with the AI revolution, to be further calcifying the concentration of power among the very few, and stifling real competition from startups and smaller companies. Imagine a new venture and its founders, knocking on doors in Sand Hill Road, seeking capital to create a play that competes with Google, Apple, Amazon, Tesla or Netflix. Sorry guys, no money from us. Try next door. Another reason for my writing this is my hope that we can reduce the hate campaign against billionaires and tech founders, and perhaps Silicon Valley as a whole. They will exist anyway, but they’ll come from China if we kill our domestic technology garden. We would also regress to a version of America that is even more dominated by New York, with less influence and innovation coming from the West Coast. NYC is wonderful and amazing, but on the whole it does not invent or see the future as well as Northern California, which has somehow been the home of most new ideas since the 1960s, and I’m sad that we hate her for it.
I don’t hate Kara Swisher or the band of similars who broadcast this message of mistrust and fear and loathing against Elon Musk. I wish simply to offer a counter argument, that on balance we are much better off with these mad genuises than without.
Is Elon Musk a nice guy? Fuck, no. By all accounts he is cruel, ungenerous, selfish, and checks many of the boxes for narcissism, perhaps worse. We would be wrong to excuse his nastiness because of his genius. We would also be wrong to dismiss his achievements and innovations, trying to paint him as an Average Joe, just because he isn’t nice. It’s possible to hold both emotions. We can respect and admire his talent, while expressing concern over his lack of basic human kindness. I think he too would acknowledge that and work with us on finding a nicer Elon.
Perhaps Kara can work with us on finding a nicer Kara.
PS: Kara Swisher’s attack on Elon Musk’s actions in Ukraine war is utterly ill-founded. Musk owns Starlink. He can choose who his customers are, and when to cut someone off or allow them to use the platform. If the US wants to legislate, it would need to license a subset of Starlink’s infrastructure for its own exclusive use, such that Elon can’t meddle with it. Or go build its own satelline network that emulates Starlink’s capabilities. Kara Swisher calling Musk a traitor is good TV because it riles and divides people. Beyond this, it is utterly stupid.
PPS: Kara Swisher’s attack on Musk’s alleged commingling of funds and resources between Tesla (public company) and Starlink, X-Twitter, SpaceX and other entities is also spurious. If the board approved, then it is not illegal for a founder to deploy one company’s resources in aid of another company. Let the DOJ/SEC dig and respond. Her ‘reporting’ is childish and incendiary, and not at all useful.
