Meltdown May #5: Miami Virtue, Miami Vice
As Elon Musk's "only good" billionaire branding unravels, people are finally realizing how absurd it was to begin with.
Like a lot of thing that became popular following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, such as Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, Elon Musk’s brand was forged in the fires that consumed popular trust in American society’s major institutions. SpaceX became a populist hero in opposition to the stagnant military-industrial complex, Tesla against the shameful decline of Detroit, and Musk himself stood out as somehow distinct from the mainstream tech billionaire class personified by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. These foils were in many ways the most brilliant aspects of Musk’s world-historical exercise in personal branding, lending him the cool veneer of an outsider without having to ever get to specific about who he actually really is.
It was a hell of a run too, for the better part of a decade, but as time has gone on and circumstances have changed, it’s becoming increasingly clear how thin this “only cool billionaire” branding always was. Not for the hardcore fans, of course, for whom vagueness is a virtue because Elon will always be a featureless action figure for them, to be dressed up in whatever way the moment seems to call for. But for everyone else, comparisons between the increasingly well-defined Musk and his fellow billionaires are becoming a far more ambiguous exercise.
Take this tweet, contrasting Musk and Jeff Bezos’s photo ops at the weekend’s Miami Grand Prix. The fanboy account’s fawning smarm contrasts the family man Musk with Jeff Bezos and his midriff-baring girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, implicitly presenting one divorced billionaire as morally and intellectually superior to the other. And sure, on the one hand this tweet was obviously just a sick dogwhistle to Musk’s incel army, but let’s take the factual claim being forwarded here on its on terms for just a moment.
The person behind the “Teslaconomics” actually has a real point here: it is possible to suss out real insights into “true colors” these two billionaires from just one tweet contrasting these two staged photos. On the most obvious level, nobody is out here pushing a contrast like this in favor of Bezos, through an account called, like, “Amazonconomics.” The fact that Musk has cultivated an entire army of weirdoes to make posts just like this one (this was hardly the only one!) is really the most important key to understanding the difference between these two billionaires “character, mindset and purpose.”
Reflecting this reality is the fact that Bezos and Sanchez look more or less like normal wealthy people who have come to Miami to watch a Grand Prix. Sure, Bezos went and hung out in the McLaren pits, but there was no posed photo or strained grab for attention. The entire knock on him seems to be that he brought his girlfriend, who is attractive and confident, implying through the transitive properties of unspoken sexism that he is somehow taking his eye off the ball (at a company where he is no longer even CEO, it must be added).
Elon Musk, by contrast was as on the job during his visit to the Miami Grand Prix as his fanboy army is in their posts about the event. In addition to dragging his son around as a prop so his deranged fans could make him out as father of the year, Musk himself tried so hard to work the genius inventor angle that he made a complete ass of himself. Claiming to have had a “fun discussion of aero and battery technology in F1” with the dominant Red Bull Team, Musk further tweeted that he proposed a “pure EV vs gas/hybrid race.”
Here’s the thing though: that’s a really, really stupid idea. The entire point of “formula” series is that it’s very difficult to create a set of rules that creates a relatively even playing field while rewarding technical innovation, and creating two classes of drivetrain would make that impossible. The FIA already has a pure electric racing formula, Formula E, and for some strange reason Tesla doesn’t participate in it at all. Of course there’s also Le Man endurance racing, where new drivetrain technologies have traditionally been advanced and validated, but that’s one form of racing where battery EVs have literally no chance of success… at least without battery swap and other massive rule changes.
And while Elon was making brain dead “proposals” during Red Bull’s rich guy visiting hours, flaunting the one child he actually brings to his photo ops (with the notable exception of last year’s bizarre papal visit), and generally doing his full-time hypebeast tap dance, Jeff Bezos… just seems to have had a good time? Not to whitewash Bezos’s many objectionable qualities or anything, most notably his abominable labor relations (one thing he and Musk do have in common!), but he just doesn’t care. He looks like a guy who would be perfectly happy if nobody noticed he had even been there.
Of course, Musk was a much better tap dancer a decade ago. The fact that he could leverage popular sympathy through things like social media, rather than just being handcuffed to a cash printer, also really hit different back then. Hopefully part of that is the growing awareness that Musk has been developing some really disturbing interests, but hopefully part of it is that it’s just plain getting old.
The real problem that Elon has, after a decade of some of the most frantic and (it must be admitted) successful tap dancing in human history, is that he still isn’t actually handcuffed to a money printer. Bezos can afford to relax, have fun and play the normie. Elon will be tap dancing until the music the stops… and then just a little longer.
Nicely done!