Every person of prominence is fairly subject to journalistic scrutiny. When people move the world, it’s reasonable to ask where, how and why they are moving it. However, I’m not at all comfortable that we have such journalists today. What we have are writers who are expert at first forming an opinion and then gathering and presenting selected facts in support of it. When anyone of achievement is the target of this, the result is nearly always a hatchet job.

The word is out. Musk is too good, too inspiring and most of all, too self-made. His existence is an ideological embarrassment.

Musk stands as an affront to a view of human beings as so deeply flawed that achievement is not possible without it being propelled by dark motives and corruption. And if that can’t be made to stick, the most recent fallback is to diminish the reality of achievement as such. “You didn’t build that” is an example, as though anyone who has built anything actually denies the shoulders they stand on and the roads they drive on. (Well, okay, Trump probably does.) “It’s luck”, that’s another one. The up and coming one is, “there is no such thing as free will anyway,” so the feeling of accomplishment one may enjoy at having achieved say the recent SpaceX success is an illusion, and we are all just deterministic billiard balls responding to external causes and fooling ourselves into thinking we are our selves.

If you are intelligent, honest and curious, it would be very worthwhile to challenge this entire construct. I’m not a Musk fan so much as I am in favor of human beings and in favor of being human. For the sake of humanity, lets not piss on every positive example of a human being that catches our eye. And if this is your knee-jerk reaction whenever you see someone achieve something, seek therapy, not publication.