How do we explain Elon Musk? Moby Dick

You may not realise this if you look at the tweets of Elon Musk. Or the list of top 50 most-skilled players in Diablo. Musk tweets incessantly. He is also one of the top players in Diablo, playing video games for hours. From his gaming binges and his tweets, you would never get an impression that Musk runs multiple companies on a daily basis, has just finished doing a victory lap with Donald Trump after helping him win the US Presidential polls, and is currently involved, deeply and absolutely, in the formation of the Trump administration. So, how does Musk do it? By burning himself, of course. “The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly,” he once said about his working style.
The more difficult question is: Why does he do it? A few days ago, someone posed a question on X. The person noted that Musk could have retired after taking his $175 million when PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002. And then asked, why would someone not do so. Why indeed! Often young tech millionaires have cashed their cheques and have retired. One obvious example is Tom Anderson, who sold MySpace and made millions. He took his cash and then chose to travel the world, clicking travel photos.
But not Musk. There are many ways to explain how Elon Musk does what he does. But there is only one way to explain why he does what he does. That is Moby Dick.
Of late, I keep seeing Ahab — the eponymous villain of the Herman Melville novel — in Elon Musk. A man with an ego so large that he would “strike the sun if it insulted” him, Ahab had a mission in his life. The mission was to hunt Moby Dick, the great white whale that he once fought and which chewed his leg. “The whale dismasted me,” Ahab tells his crew. “(It was Moby Dick) that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye! And I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.”
Elon Musk looks like a man chasing his own white whale. Real life is more complicated and nuanced than fiction, but novels like Moby Dick are mirrors in which our world gets reflected. For Elon Musk, it seems his white whale is what he calls woke-ism. He has suffered losses to it and so deeply he feels his loss that he has vowed to destroy it.
Not enough people know about Xavier, who has now legally changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson. Wilson, one of the eldest children of Musk, was biologically his son. A few years ago, however, Wilson transitioned, opting to be identified as a trans-woman and changing her name. Musk, in his conversations, again and again, has talked about this episode in his life. He says that the episode changed him. Much of his rhetoric, which in uncanny ways has a tendency to drive his actions, seems to be a response to what he calls the death of his son.
Musk earlier appeared on Daily Wire, a talk show hosted by Jordan Peterson. “I lost my son, they call it dead naming for a reason, so my son, Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that,” he says.
For Musk, “the woke mind virus” is a manifestation of the rot that he sees in the contemporary world. In his mind, the entire civilisation is sick. The way governments work — with tremendous regulatory oversight — is a problem for him. The programmes around diversity, immigration, subsidies, affirmative actions, freedom of speech or the lack of it…all of it is a problem. The falling birth rates across the world are catastrophic, according to him.
In Moby Dick, the narrator — Ishmael of Call Me Ishmael fame — tries to understand Ahab. He reaches a conclusion and puts the white whale at the centre of Ahab’s world. “The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them,” he tells readers. Everything Ahab does is tinged by his hate for the whale, his whole worldview filters through his desire to push a stake in the heart of Moby Dick. For him, the whale stands as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the world, somewhat like how Elon Musk now has a worldview painted entirely by his disgust for “woke mind virus.”
And just like Ahab, Musk has created a coterie of his fellow travellers who believe in his vision. “For the present, the hunt is as much theirs as it is Ahab’s,” says Ishmael, talking of the crew of the whaling ship. “In their intense tribal wildness and levity, they circumambulate Ahab as if he were a god.” He might have been talking of MAGA bros and the anti-woke crowd that Musk has gathered around him.
Certain books are timeless — and Moby Dick, often considered the Great American Novel, is part of the list — because they carry the kernels of universal truths, which are accurate for all times and for all people. In a way, we all have a white whale that we chase and hope to conquer. It might be small, it might be big, but we strive to tame this whale. The key, however, is not to keel over, not to be driven to a destructive madness. There is a thin line that separates the maniacal effort, which lets people change the world, from the rank madness, the kind that inflicts Ahab or Shakespeare’s King Lear.
In the case of Elon Musk, the jury is still out. Is he an adventurer and a visionary who is going to reshape the world and save us all from the myriad dooms that he sees on the horizon, or is he doomed to be driven to madness by his quest? We don’t know yet. But the story of Ahab is a tale of caution, as much as it is about an adventure. Even Ahab realises it, albeit late. By the end, he is consumed by his disgust for the whale. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale, to the last I grapple with thee, from hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee,” he shouts as he jumps from the ship with a stake. It is a fitting end to Ahab. But it doesn’t change the world even a bit.
(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. He has been writing about personal technology and gadgets since 2005)