THE BIG PICTURE: PART ONE

What If Elon Musk PAID Alex Gibney to Make the "Musk" Documentary?

This is part one of a two part series about Elon Musk and Alex Gibney and other things, that appeared in the Entertainment section of the Malibu Times on Wednesday, October 28, 2026.

"In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil."

— Robert McNamara, "The Fog of War" (2003)

Apologies in advance. This is an attempt to review a documentary I didn't get a chance to see, and also to organize scattered thoughts, theories and impressions into what will be an unpopular defense of Elon Musk. I say he is doing more good than harm. I say Musk is a master marketer and showman who does and says weird and stupid things — and sometimes cool things, like those SpaceX launches as seen from Malibu — because that's his form of PR and advertising. I say he is advancing the green revolution toward renewable energy and electric cars, and the foundation and push he is laying down will continue to resonate in positive ways — like saving the world from global economic collapse and chaos — long after Donald Trump is gone and buried on a golf course somewhere. This is scattered because this is all complicated.

A Four Hour Tour

Aw crud, it's a fine, clear, blue, fall, post-rain Saturday in Santa Cruz, and I was girding myself and clearing storage space on my smartphone to sit through and surreptitiously record (audio only) Alex Gibney's four-hour "Musk" documentary.

I was going in with opinions and biases — mostly negative, toward the filmmaker — bubbling in my Gulliver, but I was going to record all the talk, transcribe it with Otter.AI and then run the transcript through Claude.AI to write a review that I was pretty sure was going to be negative — about Gibney.

"I don't think Elon Musk will be remembered for inspiring the EV race or getting us to Mars. I think his footnote in history will be that he was the greatest cause of unnecessary death, disease and disability in history — maybe since Stalin."

— Alex Gibney, on the Raging Moderates podcast

Why negative? I saw some pre-release interviews with Gibney where he declared Musk a "con man," and all the words from him — and from social media — were accentuating the negative about Elon Musk: spending hundreds of millions to get Donald Trump elected, accusations of election fraud, costing a lot of people their jobs with DOGE, and being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands to millions of fellow humans in troubled countries by abruptly ending USAID.

The Guardian called Musk "the world's richest and dullest man," an "ersatz visionary and Trump courtier" — and that was the nice part.

Love the Movie, Hate the Man

The critics who sat through "Musk" agree on two things: they love "Musk" the movie, and they loathe Musk the man.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw calls Gibney's film “excellent and absorbing,” then headlines his review an "epic study of the world's richest and most banal man." He paints Musk as a brattish plutocrat and Trump courtier, a modern Augustus Melmotte, Trollope's charlatan financier.

Variety's Owen Gleiberman calls the film “definitive, lacerating and important,” a showcase of Gibney's mastery of the form. Then he calls Musk a messianic opportunist and something of a crackpot, "a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers."

Writing for RogerEbert.com, Nell Minow goes further, saying the film "may be the most important film of the year," and that Musk is better at engineering everything around him to serve his ego and his bank account than at engineering his products.

Raves for the movie. No stars for the man.

And yet, buried in the takedowns, the critics concede what Musk built. Bradshaw admits Musk is no Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried, because Tesla is a long-running, profitable company and SpaceX invented reusable rockets.

Gleiberman admits that the Tesla is a strong and beautiful car, and that Musk's early push for electric cars was a positive force in the world.

Even the harshest of the three lets a NASA official say SpaceX saved the agency millions.

The Yin of Elon Musk

It is easy to criticize Musk for spending hundreds of millions to support Trump, for taking a flamethrower to American bureaucracy with DOGE, and for pulling the football away from millions of impoverished, sick and starving humans.

But do the critics point out all the good he is doing? The success of Tesla has kickstarted the green revolution more than any other event, and Musk is moving the world toward an inevitable and vital future: electric vehicles running on renewable energy.

Musk has created well over 100,000 jobs with Tesla and SpaceX and Neuralink and the Boring Company and his other projects, and many more at suppliers, and there are people reading this column right now from lanais and yachts and by swimming pools paid for with the capital gains from the more than a trillion dollars in new wealth Musk has created with his companies — and will continue to create.

Tesla built its 10 millionth electric car this summer, the first automaker in history to get there. Not bad for a banal man.

Is Musk Banal?

What does that word mean exactly? "Banal means so ordinary, predictable or overused that it's dull and boring: lacking originality or freshness."

Well, no, Musk isn't that. He has a high-end, sophisto sense of humor you may need to be a sophisto to understand.

When Musk was criticized in September 2022 for refusing to switch on Starlink coverage for a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian fleet at Sevastopol, he explained himself, essentially, that Starlink was meant for so people could “watch Netflix and chill,” not for drone strikes and starting World War 3.

That's a funny guy.

Brattish, maybe. But banal? A banal man doesn't launch his own cherry-red Roadster into orbit around the sun, with a spacesuited mannequin at the wheel, Bowie on the stereo and "DON'T PANIC" glowing on the dashboard.

He doesn't name his rocket-landing barges after starships in Iain M. Banks novels, Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions, or sell 20,000 "Not-a-Flamethrowers" at $500 a pop.

He doesn't stroll into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink so he can say "let that sink in."

A banal man doesn't quote "Spaceballs" by giving his cars a Ludicrous Mode, a Plaid mode and a fart button.

A banal man doesn't take a dreary federal rule requiring electric cars to make noise below 18.6 mph, so pedestrians can hear them coming, and turn it into a punchline: a "Patsy Mode" that lets your Tesla clip-clop out of a parking spot to the sound of coconuts, like King Arthur's horse in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

He doesn't name his cars so the lineup spells S3XY. A banal man doesn't tweet a weed joke about taking Tesla private at $420 a share and pay the SEC $20 million for the punchline, or watch his "unbreakable" Cybertruck window shatter on stage, twice, and take the orders anyway.

Banality doesn't name a baby X Æ A-12, host "Saturday Night Live," or challenge Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight.

Dorky, nerdy, juvenile, arrogant, defensive, disregarding, sometimes.

Banal? Not on your life!

Con Artist or Visionary?

"Is he a con man? Yeah, he's a confidence man. He's not Elizabeth Holmes, in the sense that he didn't have a device that was useless. He's a con man in the sense that he creates bigger and bigger fictions every step along the way, because he's always got a problem at his companies, which is how to raise more money."

— Alex Gibney, on The Moynihan Report

After two short weeks in Santa Cruz, "Musk" has been displaced by "You Can See Everything." Speaking of con artists, Elizabeth Holmes really is one. A con artist, as Claude defines it, is "a swindler who cheats people by first gaining their trust, then exploiting it for money or advantage." The con is short for confidence: the trick is persuading the mark to hand something over willingly.

Holmes is a tried and convicted con artist, con woman, whatever. She promised things she knew she couldn't deliver. She was sentenced in November 2022 to 11 years and 3 months for defrauding Theranos investors, and reported to a Texas prison camp in May 2023, so she's about three and a half years in. Thanks to good-behavior credits, she moves to an Austin halfway house in August 2027 and walks free in February 2030, more than four years early. And she's asked Trump to commute what's left.

Conning a con man? She might not be alone.

Musk promises a lot and doesn't always deliver on time — no wine before it's time — but when he delivers, he delivers miracles of modern science — impossibilities "they" said could not be done: electric cars, the CYBRTRCK, private space business, reusable rockets that land on platforms halfway down Baja.

And that bitchin rocket car, released the same weekend the Musk documentary hit screens.

When people look at Musk they see money, but there is a lot more to it than money. Being right about things is a different satisfaction, and maybe a deeper one.

Musk made about $180 million from the sale of PayPal, and if he was only about money he could have bought an island and kicked it in the Caribbean surrounded by supermodels, watched Netflix and chilled as he witnessed the world fall further into chaos from behind safe walls.

But what did Musk do? Went all in, with almost all of it, on two projects "they" said couldn't be done: making an acceptable electric car, and privatizing the space business.

Musk loves doing things that everyone else says cannot be done, or should not be done: from supporting Trump to going to Mars.

What If Musk Paid Gibney?

So I had a lot to say about Musk and wanted to say it in the form of a review of the "Musk" documentary, but I waited too long. It was here and gone in Santa Cruz. No longer playing anywhere close, so I'm gonna have to wing it, around this theory: Elon Musk is a clever bastard who knows there is no such thing as bad publicity, so what if Musk PAID the Oscar-winning documentarian to make a four-hour anti-Musk documentary that would expose all his dirty laundry and put the Musk name on everyone's lips?

Ludicrous? Maybe not.

Musk knows he's not evil, he knows he's doing good things, and he plays the looooooonnnnnng game. Like saving the world's ass from collapse?

Musk's PR strategy is the far-out, 21st-century extension of "There's no such thing as bad publicity." As long as people are talking and arguing about him, good or bad, and the words Musk, Tesla and SpaceX are on everyone's lips, he's doing his job.

He doesn't waste much money on advertising, for Tesla anyway. Starlink advertises. Musk gets good value and free advertising by doing and saying stupid shit to attract attention, and gets publicity no amount of money could buy.

Musk did not sit for an interview, so Gibney's team built a computer-generated Musk that speaks directly to the camera. Gibney had to make a fake Musk because the real one wouldn't show up — a digital stunt double to take the punches. And the punches keep coming: the film runs 235 minutes, nearly four hours, and a longer cut is due on HBO in 2027. 

That's another year of everyone saying "Musk."

So maybe Musk PAID Gibney to air all his dirty laundry, to interview hostile witnesses like Eberhard, an ex-wife, an ex-girlfriend, dear old dad and other hostiles, and put it out there for the world to see, argue over, hit from all sides and come to its own conclusions.

Edison, Ford, Hughes, Wonka, Jobs, Stark.,

Musk is a weirdo, but that's expected of him and all the abnormally-driven, world-changing, visionary cuckoos: Edison, Ford, Hughes, Wonka, Jobs, Doc Brown, Gates, Stark. 

It's weird to be that driven and that smart and that successful. And it makes you a weirdo. No matter what Musk does, he's gonna be classified as a weirdo, so he does weird things, says weird things.

Musk seems to enjoy doing what everyone tells him can't be done, or he shouldn't do. And that includes alienating the liberal leftists who supported him, and throwing around hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Say what? Have you seen the bumper stickers on Teslas: "I bought this car before I knew Elon was crazy."

Crazy like a fox, maybe.

It's a Complicated World

Did Musk try to shut the movie down? In recent weeks Musk has called Gibney an "idiot," a "horrible human" and a "tinfoil hat crackpot" on X. AP reports the film faces more than a war of words, with Musk's lawyers using the CGI Musk to discredit it. But the film opened anyway. Name-calling from the world's richest man, on the platform he owns, is the best trailer money can't buy.

Okay, here's what happened. In Hollywood-speak, "Musk" in Hollywood speak “didn't open,” nor did it “find an audience.” There are plenty of people out there bumming about Musk, but apparently not enough to sit for four hours of harsh negativities.

Gibney spent nearly four years making "Musk" — one year per hour — with an AI avatar and the kind of legal vetting you need when the world's richest man is threatening to sue. There's no official budget, but one estimate puts it at $10 million to $15 million. Bleecker Street opened it in four theaters on October 9, widened it to 472 screens on October 16, and by the next weekend it had vanished from nearly all of them, with screenings canceled and a few lonely morning shows hanging on at places like the Angelika in SoHo. 

The take: a $290,000 opening weekend nationwide, about $614 a screen, 20th place at the box office, and under $600,000 total.

Why so fast? Take your pick. Four hours is a long time to sit in the dark with anybody. Bleecker Street says it struggled to buy ads on X, which Musk owns, and TikTok suspended its ad account on opening weekend, then called it an "error."

Bleecker Street announced its own sale the day before the film went wide. And HBO, which owns the streaming rights and plans to show an even longer cut in early 2027, is being swallowed by Paramount, run by David Ellison, whose family is close to Musk. 

Gibney says he has serious doubts HBO will ever air it. Musk has called the film boring, a hit piece, and Gibney a man of zero integrity, all before most people could see it.

Bad publicity? There's no such thing.

So who used who? The real winner here? Not Gibney.

Did Musk use Gibney? Is he using Donald Trump?

I have suspicions: Musk is playing the long game. He is doing more good than harm, and what he is laying down now — foaming the runway for a non-apocalyptic renewable EV future, and bringing infallible satellite internet connectivity to every village from Alaska to Zimbabwe — are good things that are going to resonate long after Donald Trump is gone and buried on some golf course somewhere.

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kid. In fact it’s cold as hell.

• Elton John, Rocket Man (1972)

Everyone focuses and freaks out about Musk's money, but it's just a tool for progress, a tool for change, and Musk needs oceans of it to head off the potential apocalypse, launch satellites, get to Mars.

Every time he blows up a Starship it’s a hundred million bucks.

Musk wants to go to Mars for the same reason Magellan tried to circumnavigate the globe, Amelia Earhart tried the same, Mallory and Hillary eyed Everest and Lewis and Clark explored the Louisiana Purchase: because it's there, it's a massive engineering challenge and a grand adventure, and how many of those are left?

Tesla and SpaceX are shaking up the world now. Neuralink could be next: it's already letting paralyzed patients move a cursor with their thoughts, and Musk's endgame is merging the human brain with artificial intelligence.

The speed that Tesla does things, and the range of knowledge that Musk possesses makes you wonder if Musk is like the guy in Hair Club for Men: “I’m not just the owner, I’m also a client!”

Has Musk supersized and speeded his brain with Neuralink? Seems like it.

Musk is doing more good than harm, but you have to see the Big Picture, the Long Game. If Musk is a conman, he’s playing the long con.

Sometimes to do good you have to engage in evil.

Will these seemingly nasty ends justify the means?
To quote a weird Escher-esque Van Halen line: “Only time will tell if we stand the test of time.”

There’s a lot more to say about Gibney and Musk and the world in general. Next week, Part Two: Is Musk using Trump, or is Trump using Musk? Is Gibney the actual con man here? Mars, Starlink, DOGE — and what happens when the juice runs dry.

THE YIN AND YANG OF ELON MUSK: PART TWO

He’s a Mixer, That Musk Chap

“To resent efficiency is a mark of inefficiency.”

“I have striven toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of human effort.”

                  — Henry Ford (1863–1947), the second quotation from My Life and Work (1922).

Stuck in the middle with Musk. Illustration by Chat GPT.

Want to lose friends and alienate people? Say something nice about Elon Musk. Defend him. This is a continuation of Part One of what was supposed to be a review of Alex Gibney’s four-hour “Musk” documentary which I missed because it got pulled from theaters after two weeks. So this is a vamp on the good and evil of Elon Musk, a lot of these facts and figures and philosophies and confusions pulled from arguments with friends on email/text and strangers on social media. I still say Musk is doing more good than harm, but you have to look at the big picture to see that.

The Yin and Yang of Elon Musk

Looked at from the yin angle, the Alex Gibney angle, Musk is an opportunist, a nepo baby killer and a power-hungry turncoat. He turned his back on the Democrats, whose Obama-era Department of Energy loaned Tesla $465 million in 2010 to help build the Model S. Payback is a bitch and Musk is investing gazillions to pay back a grudge against the left because he believes the “woke mind virus” alienated his daughter. Which would hurt.

Bad idea to piss off the world’s first trillionaire. Musk was the biggest individual donor of 2024 at about $290 million and he put it all on red. This cycle he has spent  $366 million more trying to help Republicans hold Congress, after saying he’d spend less on politics.

Waste and Inefficiency

"Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins."

                  — Max Weber (1864–1920),The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

As a South African of English and Pennsylvania Dutch (German) ancestry, Musk seems to embody that old Northern European Protestant work ethic: an almost visceral aversion to waste and inefficiency. An allergy. Whatever his motives, he brought that obsession to Washington. The American government made him break out in hives, so he led DOGE. Through layoffs, buyouts and retirements, the federal workforce shrank by about a quarter million in 2025. Even the libertarian Cato Institute notes that the cuts didn’t actually reduce federal spending.

He and Trump also pulled the football away from USAID. Trump froze foreign aid for review saying it was “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”  Musk called USAID “a criminal organization” and fed it into the wood chipper. Marco Rubio announced that 83 percent of its programs were cut. By summer, its remaining operations had moved into the State Department. More on the human price below.

So, it’s easy to point fingers at Musk and call him names, say he’s evil, while you slap anti-Elon bumper stickers on your Tesla as you thumb your nose at high gas prices and laugh at 20th century fools still driving fossil-fuel burning stinkpots, inefficiently burning an increasingly scarce and expensive, environmentally and politically toxic resource, wasting oceans of energy in heat and noise, and stinking up the atmosphere with toxic fumes that drown polar bears and Nepalese.

Hate the man, love the product(s). 

Anger is an Energy

Looked at from the “yangle,” the positive, solarized yang angle, Musk is a bullied kid from a dysfunctional family who fled a dysfunctional country as soon as he could because he disagreed with apartheid and didn’t want to serve in the military. Musk was steam-cleaning boilers in Canada at one point, and has said he left college with roughly $100,000 in student debt.

Malibu knows rich kids. Some reading this are rich kids. They don’t steam clean boilers, and they lack the almost superhuman drive that propels Musk.

Anger is an energy: Musk is a bullied kid with dad issues who started companies, got fired from a few - once while on his honeymoon - and still made more than enough money to allow him to buy an island and kick it with supermodels, watch Netflix, chill and witness from a safe distance the world crumble and burn.

But propelled by that angry energy, Musk went all in with a couple hundred million and focused his brains, vision, drive, talent for hiring talent and unwillingness to give up on two seemingly impossible missions: making badass electric cars and privatizing space.

Tesla alone employed nearly 135,000 people at the end of 2025, and it paid back that $465,000,000 government loan in May 2013, nine years ahead of the original schedule, with interest and an early-repayment fee. If Uncle Sam had taken that almost half a billion in shares at the $17 IPO in 2010, it would have been worth more than $200,000,000,000 with a B at the peak:

$465,000,000 / 17 x 15 x $498.83 (12/22/25) = $204,667,014,705.88 = righteous bucks!

Musk’s companies have created trillions of dollars of new wealth, and there are people reading this from yachts and lanais and oceanfront properties - in their PJs on PJs - smiling to themselves because they hit SEND at the right time.

Tesla’s impossible success dragged the whole auto industry kicking and screaming into electric cars and inspired invention in batteries and renewable energy, across the industry. As you read this, Bill Gates and TerraPower are building a safer, cleaner, sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor in Wyoming. A next level design to improve safety and supply low-carbon electricity. 

 If Musk could figure out a way for SpaceX to safely launch that spent nuclear fuel off the planet and at the sun, that would be swell. Starlink now runs about two out of every three working satellites in orbit, delivering internet to places from Alaska to Zimbabwe that wouldn’t have it otherwise.

And those launches as seen from Malibu are way cool, no?

Yin and yang. Hero or heel? Buck Rogers or baby killer? Job creator or job destroyer? Savior of Ukraine or Putin’s favorite genius?

He’s a mixer, innit?

The Week in Musk

“Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill.”

• Elon Musk to Walter Isaacson for the “Elon Musk” biography, 2022 - 2023

If Elon Musk does anything better than build rockets, it’s make headlines. In recent weeks, reports put his midterm spending at roughly $366 million to help Republicans; he sparred with Bernie Sanders, warned Democrats would destroy democracy, and acknowledged that serving Grok Bot was unsustainably expensive relative to revenue.

In Ukraine, officials reported Starlink and Starshield service restored after restrictions disrupted drones and air defenses. Musk acknowledged SpaceX restricted civilian Starlink, alleging misuse for offensive strikes, but said the government controlled military Starshield. Who ordered those military restrictions remains disputed.

Meanwhile, Vladimir “The Polonium Poisoner” Putin, whose emerging Starlink rival is far smaller than Musk’s roughly 11,000-satellite constellation, called Musk “a genius, a true genius.”

Alex Gibney’s “Musk” documentary has brought in roughly $710,000 at the domestic box office, according to The Numbers. So maybe running a four-hour movie in theaters here in the short-attention-span 21st Century was the wrong call. It’s unclear whether “Musk” will be screened for people to chill and watch on HBO, now that Paramount is swallowing HBO’s parent company. 

Terminating the Road Warrior

My Big Picture argument is that Musk is like Sarah Connor in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991). She is haunted by - and desperately prepares for - a nuclear apocalypse caused by an Artificial Intelligence program called Skynet.

But that’s fiction. Musk might be similarly haunted by - and preparing for - a real world, different catastrophe: an economy dangerously dependent on fossil fuels grinding to a halt when the fossil fuels run dry and no alternatives in place.

A possible future summed up nicely nicely in the opening narration to "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" (1981)

“I remember a time of chaos, ruined dreams, this wasted land. To understand, we have to go back to the other time, when the world was powered by the black fuel and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel — gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded — a whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.”

Global Economic Chaos

If you think the economic disruption of COVID was uncomfortable, it was a temporary burp compared to the chaos that will break out when the global economy grinds to a halt because fuel supplies have been disrupted, with nothing up and running to power a planet of eight billion people. Global warming is a clear and present danger - with foreshocks from Nepal to Newport Beach - but nothing is more dangerous than millions - hundreds of millions - of panicked, desperate, food-rioting humans.

That's not a Mad Max or Schwarzenegger movie. That's an unfixable, apocalyptic future that haunts intelligent, forward-thinking people. Like Musk. 

A time when there is no Netflix. No chill. Just chaos.

Norway Leads the Way

Musk has done as much or more than anyone to advance the alternative, renewable, electric future. If you want to see that future, look at Norway. Its electricity production is about 98% renewable, mostly hydropower with a dash of wind. Last year, 96% of new cars sold in Norway were electric, and Tesla was the best-selling brand for the fifth year running.

That's saying something, because Norwegians are perhaps the most practical, frugal, thrifty, intelligent people on this planet. If Teslas were skranglekasser or drittbiler, Norwegians would avoid them like surströmming. Go see a country run right, and catch the Northern Lights while you're there. Even better than a Malibu winter sunset.

California aspires to follow Norway’s lead and is plunging into the 21st century while much of America wallows in the 20th. The Golden State aims for 100% clean electricity by 2045, and last year clean energy met all of the main grid's demand for hours at a time, the equivalent of 77 full days. Its 2035 rules would have ended sales of new conventional gasoline-only passenger cars while allowing qualifying plug-in hybrids. Trump and Congress revoked the federal waiver in June 2025. California challenged that action.

Mars Ain't the Kind of Place

People ask why Musk doesn’t spend his money curing cancer or solving world hunger instead of going to Mars. Those are worthy causes, but neither is a problem one billionaire can simply write a check to solve. Cancer is hundreds of diseases; hunger often persists where war prevents food from reaching people.

So why Mars? In fact it’s cold as hell. Musk wants to go to Mars for the same reason Magellan wanted to sail around the world, Amelia Earhart wanted to fly around the world, Mallory and Hillary eyed Mount Everest: Because it’s there.

Because launching a 408-foot rocket on a 300-million-mile trip and bringing it back is a massive engineering challenge and a grand adventure, and how many of those are left? 

The Useful Idiot

Gibney's theory is that Musk went where the federal money was. The alternative theory: Trump is the useful idiot.

Look at the record. Musk voted for Obama, Clinton and Biden. Then he spent hundreds of millions to elect Trump. Then he blew up over the "big beautiful bill," which killed the federal EV tax credit. But Musk said for years Tesla didn't need subsidies and its competitors did. His argument was that Tesla could withstand losing subsidies better than its competitors. Whether that proves true is a question for the sales figures.

Pissed at Donald, Musk briefly floated a new party and claimed Trump was in the Epstein files. Then came the handshake at Charlie Kirk's memorial, the party effort faded, and now he's the biggest known donor of the midterms.

Musk is a mixer, a man playing multidimensional chess while everyone else plays checkers. He may be looking 40 steps and 40 years down the line. 

Musk already convinced the left and liberals he’s a cool dude. Now he has to persuade the right. And if he has to throw in with Trump for a few years to do it: Sometimes the ends justify the means. “Sometimes to do good, you have to engage in evil.” Musk keeps his eye on the Big Picture. Long after Trump is gone and buried on a golf course somewhere - and Alex Gibney’s ashes are in an urn next to his Oscar - what Musk is laying down now will still be resonating - and maybe saving the world.

DOGE, USAID and a Woman in Nigeria

I practice my own small form of USAID. A Nigerian woman named Rose who has done graphic work for me always seems to be in peril: medical treatments, a mean landlord, a hurt leg. It smells like a scam, so I ask for photos and receipts, and she sends them. I'm too full of the milk of human kindness to leave her hanging.

So I looked into Nigeria. It has roughly 242,000,000 people, and the projected 2026 GDP is $377,000,000,000 so Nigeria has six times as many people as California, but the economy is 11 times smaller. That overpopulation is ridiculous, and adds up to poverty, misery, illness and death.

Also known as waste and inefficency. 

And that's just Nigeria. USAID spent more than $12 billion in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, and about $32.5 billion worldwide, from Ukraine and Congo to Gaza and Yemen.

America is something like $40,000,000,000,000 in debt, and that’s another thing Musk is allergic to. DOGE and pulling the football from USAid was a way to combat that allergy.

The backlash was loud. HIV programs started by George W. Bush were thrown into chaos. A study in The Lancet projected more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030; critics challenged it, and a later study estimated 9.4 million. These are projections, but the stakes are human lives.

Cutting the waste was defensible. The speed and the wood-chipper glee weren't, and real people paid for it. But when the checks stopped, Nigeria found $200 million of its own to keep its HIV patients on treatment. Sometimes tough love works.

Musk Is a Mixer

The British have a word for someone who stirs up trouble: a mixer. Musk is a world-class mixer. But he comes from a long line of them, whose achievements outlasted their controversies, even when those controversies remain part of the story.

Samuel Morse ran for mayor of New York on an anti-immigrant ticket and wrote pamphlets defending slavery. Remembered for the telegraph.

Andrew Carnegie sailed off to Scotland while his partner sent 300 armed Pinkertons against striking steelworkers at Homestead, PA in 1892, and about ten men died. Remembered for 2,500 public libraries.

Henry Ford ran an antisemitic newspaper Hitler admired. Remembered for the Model T.

Steve Jobs denied his daughter Lisa was his and swore in court he was sterile. Remembered for the iPhone in your pocket.

Howard Hughes faced a Senate investigation into wartime aircraft contracts that consumed millions without delivering production aircraft. Remembered for aviation records, Hughes Aircraft and the Spruce Goose. (Many years ago, I compared Musk to Howard Hughes on Instagram and Musk actually responded: “I hope I’m not that crazy.” I wish I had saved that exchange, dangit.)

And Wonka? Don’t get me started. He fired his workers, sealed his factory and replaced the workforce with Oompa-Loompas paid in cacao beans. Then he turned Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry, microsized Mike Teevee and nearly drowned Augustus Gloop in chocolate. Monstrous! Remembered for the chocolate and some music.

So What?

So if you don't like Trump, believe in loving your neighbor, lost your job to DOGE, care about millions in the third world or think electric cars are for vegan tree huggers, you probably think Musk is the devil's own.

But small minds see small things, and bigger minds see the bigger picture. Have to assume Musk is mesmerized by it.

Thirty years from now, long after Trump is gone, what's left? Reusable rockets. Starlink wired around the planet. Grid batteries. A whole car industry dragged kicking and screaming into electric.

And hopefully, a world that runs like Norway and is not Terminated like Mad Max.

One anti-Musker friend I kind of alienated just texted with an image of the poster for the “Musk” documentary and the words: “I’ve watched half. My opinion has not changed.”

If “Musk” the documentary makes it past Elon’s protectors to streaming, I want to chill through all four hours and see if my opinion changes. I don’t think so. I still say Musk in the short term seems whack. But in the long run, he is doing the right thing.

Only time will tell if he stands the test of time. 

Election results this Wednesday will be an indicator. If Texas flips blue, despite Musk’s millions, that will be something.

Short term, anyway.