Ronan Farrow ’04 Reports on “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule” for the New Yorker

“The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new,” writes Ronan Farrow ’04 in a piece on Elon Musk for the New Yorker. “But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive.” The United States government is widely dependent on Musk and his companies, Farrow reports, “from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.” A recent crisis regarding the abrupt disruption of communication among Ukrainian military forces via Musk’s Starlink technology only furthered the point that Musk, despite not being a diplomat or statesman, increasingly operates as such. Tracing both the histories of Musk’s companies and the man himself, Farrow argues that science fiction has influenced the billionaire’s mindset, especially Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the video game series Deus Ex. “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told Farrow. “But only if he can be the one to save it.”

Post Date: 08-22-2023