Civil war is coming to Britain, at least according to the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk. But in a new interview with The Economist, he declared there’s good news for the struggling nation: it will take 20 years for it to descend into civil war, but the AI and robot singularity is 10 years away. In short, the robots will have taken over, meaning the abundance they bring will negate any need for pointless squabbles.
There was a time when media figures, investors, and virtually anyone with much influence — not to mention all the relatively powerless people watching the world turn around them — would hang on the every utterance or musing of someone like Elon Musk.
Self-driving cars were constantly just around the corner. Trains in vacuum tubes were going to carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco far quicker and cheaper than high-speed rail. Tunnels for cars were going to negate the need for public transit. And a Mars landing was just ten years away — in 2011.
The 2000s and 2010s were a moment when a select group of men — and most of them were men — were treated as unparalleled geniuses as they lucked into riding an economic rocket created by the internet’s privatization into the stratosphere of wealth and power. But they couldn’t simply be treated as lucky; they had to be recast as uniquely talented and knowledgable to justify the gains our capitalist system was foisting upon them. None benefited from that more than Elon Musk.
I would never deny that Musk had some skills, particularly in those early days. He did have some technical knowledge and seemed genuinely curious about the engineering dimensions of electric vehicles and rockets. But that does not mean he was a genius engineer. His skills were more in the realm of knowing how to package what he was doing to sell it to investors, to a media desperate for readers or eyeballs, and to a wider public disillusioned in a neoliberal reality where their lives keep getting worse.
Musk sold the illusion of progress, by repackaging science fictional fantasies as realities that could be achieved if only people like himself were showered with resources and power to bring them into being. In the process, his repetition of very basic facts about his industries tied up with those fantastical futures earned him a reputation as a visionary — one media around the world were happy to echo, even as he spread bullshit, showed himself to be increasingly vindictive, and more frequently made claims that were demonstrably false.
One has to wonder whether a new Elon Musk could actually rise in 2026, in an era of great skepticism of the tech industry and the exaggerated promises it makes to justify the investment that floods into it. Even more, it’s increasingly baffling how the media still acts as though what Musk has to say is really worth listening to.
In his interview with The Economist, editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes vacillates between pushing him on issues like the DOGE cuts or how investors will actually make money on AI, to agreeing with him on a whole host of issues, including at times his mischaracterization of the political positions he pushes and the outcomes that countries are experiencing from them.
Musk demonstrates very clearly that he creates his own reality. It’s one where DOGE cuts to USAID did not result in any deaths, and that if they did it’s actually Bill Gates or MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) who are to blame for not stepping in to fund the programs being cut. It’s one where the far-right political movements Musk supports are actually just normal people being slandered by hostile media, and Musk’s own politics are centrist, or where Europe is actually a much more dangerous place than the United States because of all the Muslims immigrating there — despite the stats very clearly showing otherwise. It’s one where humanity is about to become the pets of a superintelligent AI that will create “amazing abundance” and render money useless, negating the need for Musk to pay more tax.
Beyond showing the richest man in the world is completely out to lunch, the interview should lead any right-minded person to question why the media continues to engage him in this way. He clearly despises them, despite relying on them for some degree of credibility, while actively using his social media platform and broader influence to try to make people mistrust them so they place more trust in people like Musk himself. Part of the answer lies in the scale of Musk’s influence.
The media continues to turn to Musk for the same reason he remains so wealthy and his companies remain so highly valued despite their poor performance. Chinese auto companies are eating Tesla’s lunch, as its robotaxis are a joke and its turn to robots is little more than a marketing stunt (once again, in the face of Chinese leadership), while his rocket company remains unprofitable and his AI efforts are second rate, at best, leading SpaceX/xAI to become a neocloud provider for Anthropic — not the major player that aligns with the forward guidance that was supposed to justify the SpaceX IPO.
The companies don’t crash because investors have simply put too many eggs in the Elon Musk basket. If he collapsed, they would lose billions, so his myth — or at least his position — must be maintained regardless of the economic reality of his companies. That ensures he remains powerful and wealthy enough to wreak political havoc and muse about unattainable sci-fi futures, despite not delivering on his promises to investors.
For media, it’s much the same: they’ve spend so long helping elevate him to this position, they can’t give up on him. No matter how many racist statements or fascist calls he puts out on social media, they’ll still publish headlines about his latest bullshit prediction devoid of the broader context about how many times he’s lied or failed to follow through in the past, not to mention his embrace of far-right political movements. Elon Musk, in a way, is too big to fail. It doesn’t matter how meaningless what he has to say becomes, how poorly his companies perform, or how much political havoc he incites, he still gets to be taken seriously. The media could turn to so many people to get better insight — or even similarly unhinged musings — but those people haven’t been put in the position that Musk has, so their equivalent or better insights don’t have the same importance.
The interview put The Economist in the conversation and allowed its editor-in-chief to do a media tour of her own to talk about it, calling him an “extraordinary individual” and treating his brain farts about the future as things people should be taking seriously. The whole thing was a shameful display, ending with her declaring she is “not a Musk hater.”
Meanwhile, over on X, Musk was calling her a “traitor to the West” and an “unthinking NPC” as he continued echoing a far-right meme claiming they must “deal with traitors before invaders” — an explicit call to violence against people like Minton Beddoes. It’s long past time for establishment media figures to wake up and stop treating Musk like the character they built him up to be for so many years. But their interests still seem too aligned to be honest that the richest man in the world is a repugnant fascist who got this far with their help.
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