The final pioneer

The rich space playboy who, in an instantly meme-able moment, bounded across the stage at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania and offered generous cash prizes to voters who signed his America PAC has not always been so political. Three years ago, when Time tapped Elon Musk as the magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year, the bleeding-edge business magnate had only begun to flirt with red-meat conservatism. Mostly, he just built cars and cast his vision for a spacefaring Noah’s Ark. (“We’ll bring more than two, though,” he said. “It’s a little weird if there’s only two.”) But then again, has the word “just” ever described Elon Musk?

“Take the red pill,” a pre-political Musk tweeted in 2020. When Time confronted him about this seeming right-wing dog whistle, the billionaire pleaded ignorance.

“Actually, when I said take the red pill, I didn’t realize there was some politically charged phrase,” he claimed. “I was just referring to “The Matrix.” You know, make sure to accept reality for what it is. But it turns out it’s also some right-wing dogma thing. I don’t even know. But I didn’t realize that at the time.”

Time’s profile dedicated a lavish 77,000 words to describing the man’s manifold technology empire with scarcely a fleeting nod to politics: “Musk,” the publication briefly remarked, “has disavowed terrestrial political affiliations and maintained good relations with politicians of both parties, including Presidents Obama and Trump, though he quit the latter’s business council after only a few months over the decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. Of President Joe Biden, he says, ‘I don’t think he’s doing an amazing job, but I don’t know—it’s hard to tell.’”

So, that was Musk — in 2021. A man whose quirky “porcelain throne” tweets sent markets into fits of frenzy but, nevertheless, projected ambivalence about politics. He was, more than all of that, though, an explorer, a trailblazer, the last American pioneer.

“For all his outlier qualities,” Time acclaimed, “Musk… embodies the zeitgeist of this liminal age. This [2021] was the year we emerged from the hundred-year plague only to find there was no normal to go back to, a year that felt like the cusp of a brave or terrifying new world, with nobody in charge and everything up for renegotiation—from how we work and travel to what we find meaning in and cherish. Musk is our avatar of infinite possibility, our usher to the remade world, where shopworn practices are cast aside and the unprecedented becomes logical, where Earth and humanity can still be saved.”

A 12-year-old Musk might not have envisioned all that, but he had already designed and sold a video game, “Blastar,” for $500. In 1995, he founded Zip2, an early prototype of GPS-based apps like Google Maps, which he sold for $307 million. Next, he co-founded X.com, not the Musk-owned social media platform we know today, but an online banking company that eBay purchased for $1.5 billion and converted to PayPal.

The same year eBay acquired Musk’s financial services website, the rising business prodigy founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), convinced that humanity must become a multiplanet species. “SpaceX was created… to accelerate the development of rocket technology, all for the goal of establishing a self-sustaining, permanent base on Mars,” he said. Despite early financial hardships, SpaceX quickly outpaced the competition, becoming, in 2014, one of NASA’s closest allies. Eight years later, NASA extended its contract with Musk’s still privately owned company through 2030 for an estimated $5 billion.

Musk managed to overshadow himself again in 2004, transfiguring into the da Vinci of the electric car renaissance. Although he did not start Tesla, he largely financed its launch, becoming the company’s CEO in 2008 and overseeing the creation of groundbreaking vehicles, including the Tesla Model S, Model Y, and, more recently, the Cybertruck. As of November 2024, Tesla enjoys a titanic market cap of nearly $1.1 trillion, according to Companies Market Cap.

No wonder Time reported, “Electric cars, like homemade rockets, were a graveyard of well-intentioned investment before Musk barreled into an industry in which he had no academic training.”

This is the real Elon Musk — the Elon Musk once embraced by presidents on both sides of the aisle — the unorthodox visionary whose workaholism and far-fetched dreams encapsulated the American Dream over an otherwise unfruitful decade. In all this, the man, the myth, and the legend kept himself (mostly) clean of partisan wranglings, barring the occasional dust-up with a politician on Twitter. But Musk’s reflective, dimly lit face plastered across the cover of Time’s iconic annual issue would inevitably become political if for no other reason than the fact that he had become immensely rich in an affluent society of scavengers.

“Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,” Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted.

“You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,” Musk fired back. “Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen.”

“And,” he added, “if you opened your eyes for [two] seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year.”

It wasn’t exactly an unusual exchange for a man whose uncontrolled reputation on Twitter proceeded him, but it was political. Moreoever, the brief schoolyard brawl spotlighted a depressing sentiment amongst vast swathes of the population who refused to see Musk as an asset to the country’s disappearing entrepreneurial drive, focusing instead on the apparent inequity of his colossal wealth.

One year later, Musk had purchased Twitter (which he later renamed “X”), consummating his metamorphosis — for better or worse — into a decidedly political figure. But his political transformation appears to have been about more than just free speech. So, too, the growing media contempt for Musk (since the election, mainstream outlets like The New York Times have hounded Musk relentlessly, accusing him, for example, of possessing the “solipsistic attitude of a spoiled rotten 11-year-old”) emerges from something deeper than his recent vociferous support for Trump.

Musk represents a dying class of pioneers, the men and women who could revitalize this tragic age of futility and gridlock. It’s no surprise, then, that those who have dedicated their lives to creating red tape and handouts clutch their pearls in the presence of a man who virtually doesn’t sleep. Musk’s political involvement is less about Republicans versus Democrats, instead representing a more fundamental clash between beneficiaries and builders. It begs the all-important question of our nation: will we be the kind of people who siphon other men’s wealth, or will we, like the brave settlers before us, take tomorrow into our own hands and dare to build an impossible future?   

“This country was conquered by those who moved forward,” President John F. Kennedy once said. “We choose to go to the moon… not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….”

Once upon a time, that was the American way, the knee-jerk race to the illimitable frontier. Now, it’s the Elon Musk way, and precious few follow. But, perhaps, this brave new band of pilgrims is enough to reawaken the sleeping giant: the entrepreneurial spirit by which men like Musk built the American empire from the ground up.