Along with an increasingly worried crowd years ago, I watched as a man casually played fetch with his dog right next to a busy Manhattan intersection, the ball—and thus the dog—occasionally bouncing into the road. “I’m not sure that guy should have a dog,” I observed.
“He probably has kids,” one of my companions intoned glumly. That’s probably true, if for no other reason than that the dangerously incompetent seem to be drawn to positions of authority. Humanity nonetheless keeps thinking that the way to solve problems is to put the authorities in charge of the situation—and give them more power while at it.
Thus you end up with tragedies such as the recent death of baby donkey Heehaw, shot by Georgia police officer Trenton Garner, who, while looking for a lost child, roamed onto the farm where the innocent and outgoing Heehaw lived, making donkey noises. (I’m reminded of upstate New York authorities murdering domesticated P’Nut the squirrel two years ago this week, lest he be raised in an unregulated fashion.)
Government controls, deforms, and destroys, and anyone who wants it to fix anything in this world is either a very dimwitted naif or, more likely, a vicious ghoul feigning naivete.
So it is that despite all the time Alex Gibney spends in his four-hour documentary Musk describing trillionaire Elon Musk’s wealth, competitiveness, ethical lapses, and social influence, the two most damning things we learn about the owner of Tesla, X, and SpaceX—besides self-driving cars sometimes making fatal mistakes—are arguably that he’s a dilettante about parenting and was arguably a dilettante in his capacity as a government budget ombudsman, heading the Department Of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.).
Would that Americans were as incensed about the $40 trillion in debt their government racked up when Musk wasn’t on the case as they are about the few missteps during the roughly six months when he was, though.
After seeing the long, long documentary, I worry less about the minuscule handful of laid-off bureaucrats who ran afoul of D.O.G.E. than about the surprisingly large brood of Elon-offspring who seem destined to be caught up in the occasional tug-of-war with Musk’s various baby-mamas. He’s described as a “pro-natalist” in the film, believing it’s urgent humanity (especially the smart, accomplished humans) make lots of babies to populate the other planets he hopes we’ll soon colonize.
You can’t blame people for seeing his love of rockets, military tech, and Trump through a fascist lens when even the most intimate parts of his life sound like an experiment in eugenics. His fellow Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein was also reportedly fascinated by the idea of turning private compounds and a series of baby-mamas into something like a self-cloning factory process.
There’s nothing wrong with people reproducing, and you won’t hear me wanting to use government to determine whether and how much they do, but I can’t help noticing that my acquaintances who are most closely tied to the natalist movement include women who admit to big doses of autism, near-dwarfism, alcoholism, low empathy, and retardation in their immediate families. Perhaps just as those most eager to govern should be kept far from power, those most eager to foster reproduction should take a cold shower.
Instead, we might end up with President JD Vance pushing sperm subsidies in a few years. That prospect only gets more unsettling when you consider that he’s been the vice to a president who now stands accused of rape by a former Miss Switzerland, who adds for good measure that she was effectively given to Trump by Epstein, back in the early-1990s. (This news breaks not long after the apparent suicide of a banker who outed the close ties between Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and Epstein.)
The natalists, not to mention the polyamorists and the cloning researchers and fans of Nicki Minaj’s ass, are all welcome to be as lusty as they like—and even to give others advice about how lusty to be—just as long as they don’t forcibly control other people’s bodies, just as the capitalists can be greedy as all get out without doing the world any harm, so long as they keep their hands to themselves and don’t use the property or bodies of others (whether by theft, fraud including false advertising, or merger with government).
So it is that no matter how depraved Musk may seem to some in his private or business life, he still doesn’t strike me as anywhere near as disturbing as the former labor secretary Robert Reich, who looks with rage upon Musk’s works and now declares that a top priority for the Democratic Congress likely to be voted into power next week should be not just investigating or chastising but nationalizing Musk’s companies Starlink and SpaceX, likely to the cheers of most of Reich’s fellow academics.
Whatever wealth inequities or military obstacles Reich thinks we would thereby overcome, one tragic side effect—which no doubt would delight him—about that massive seizure of private wealth is that it would reverse the recent process of space privatization, a process that promised to end inefficient, irrational government’s dangerous monopoly on the universe beyond our atmosphere.
I sat through four hours of Musk-bashing and then it took that dwarfish, power-hungry Clinton appointee Reich only a moment to remind us that liberalism is just as fascistic as the right.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey