How seriously should we take rocket man Elon Musk?
In our series giving a glimpse of life at The Independent, technology editor Andrew Griffin says sorting the nonsense from the news is something he has to navigate every day
When Elon Musk announced this week that he was renaming a rocket, it was true to form. He sent a significant but mostly unexplained tweet, and left the world – and particularly the journalists like us who follow him – to try to decipher exactly what he meant.
The spacecraft previously known as the BFR (for “Big Falcon Rocket”, officially, but that middle word is usually taken to really refer to something more explicit) is now known as the Starship, he posted, and we had to work out the rest. Including whether to listen to him at all.
The strange thing is that even Musk doesn’t seem to be clear about how seriously to take himself: he jokes about the most serious aspects of his companies, and has a tendency to take seriously some of the most jokey propositions. It’s exactly the kind of venturous thinking that has made him take risks on space travel and electric cars, but it makes him a difficult person to cover as a journalist.
When he tweets that he is going to take Tesla private when its share price reaches $420, for instance, it’s tempting to take the supposed reference to cannabis slang as a joke and therefore not take the claim at face value. But it turns out that even cracking a joke about one of the biggest companies on the planet is serious business; it ended with a reorganisation of Tesla and personal sanctions for Musk.
That Tesla tweet was just the latest in a run of controversial posts that also included making “jokes” suggesting one of the heroes of the Thai cave rescue was a paedophile. Musk offered no explanation of this unfounded allegation, of course, and like everyone else we ended up writing up the fallout but feeling distinctly awkward about having to echo such a strange and damaging personal attack.
Like Donald Trump and Kanye West, it seems Musk has taken the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity to its very extremes.
We tech journalists still flatter ourselves into believing that being savaged in the press can be damaging. But it’s clearly not, because we kept writing about Trump and criticised him right into the White House. So what’s the solution when someone behaves so outrageously?
One option might be not to give him the joy of publicity, and to ignore the more fanciful of Musk’s flights of fancy. But they just happen to be the future of spaceflight too: whatever it’s called, the spaceship formerly known as BFR could be the capsule that carries the first humans ever to Mars, as well as on other pioneering space journeys. So the name and everything else matters, even if they are a little silly.
It’s possible to be both the future and frivolous; Musk seems intent on being both. His specific blending of those two things is a new challenge for news organisations, and similar to the one posed by professional and powerful internet trolls. But it’s something we’re required to work out daily – even if it requires some particularly careful navigation.
Yours,
Andrew Griffin
Technology editor