Everywhere one looks these days, one sees Elon Musk blazing a trail—an audacity not without its sparks and, yes, the occasional firestorm. Most recently, Musk had some choice words for advertisers leaving X in protest over his controversial posts on the platform.
But online provocateurs, even very rich and successful ones, are a dime a dozen.
What makes Musk’s star so bright—a brightness by turns illuminating and searing—is not just that he is the richest man on the planet. It is that there is such an outlandish drive behind that outlandish persona. When it comes to new technology, he has had his hands, and his pockets, in just about everything, from reusable rockets and electric cars to artificial intelligence and brain implants. One can close up the X app and step outside for fresh air only to see a string of his Starlink satellites—widely mistaken for UFOs—traversing the night sky.
Amid both the furor and the fascination, a surprisingly scant amount of attention has been paid to the Musk’s own worldview. To paraphrase Chesterton, his opinion on X matters; his opinion on politics matters; his opinion on all things, however, does not seem to matter. “Everything matters—except everything.” What does Elon Musk believe about everything? What drives him to do what he does?
In the same New York Times discussion in which Musk blasted X advertisers, Andrew Ross Sorkin made bold to ask the question. Musk answered:
If I were to describe my philosophy it is a philosophy of curiosity. I did have this existential crisis when I was around twelve about, “What’s the meaning of life? Isn’t it all pointless? Why not just commit suicide? Why exist?” I read the religious texts. I read the philosophy books that—especially the German philosophy books—made me quite depressed, frankly. One should not read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as a teenager. But then I read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a book on philosophy in the form of humor. And the point that Adams was making there was that we don’t actually know what questions to ask. . . . My life is finite—really a flash in the pan on a galactic time scale—but if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. And maybe we can find out the meaning of life.
Musk has touched on this “existential crisis” in interviews before, but we find a more detailed accounting of the episode in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography. The prelude to the crisis, Isaacson writes, was his mother taking him to Sunday school at the local Anglican Church. The young Elon questioned the miracles of Jesus (“That’s not possible”) and the idea of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ (“Is this a weird metaphor for cannibalism?”). “Elon came to believe early on,” Isaacson writes, “that science could explain things and so there was no need to conjure up a Creator.”
But neither religion nor science, Isaacson notes, gave Musk a solid answer to the great “why” of the universe. So he turned to philosophy—Isaacson adds Heidegger to the list of existential German downers—which “had the effect of turning confusion into despair.” He eventually found his answer in science fiction, especially in Hitchhiker’s challenge to challenge to find the right question. And the rest is history.
Today, Musk’s stance toward philosophy and religion seems to be one of respectful if bored indifference. He recommends Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and entertains the Oxford philosopher’s theory that the universe could very well be a vast computer simulation. And he confesses, with Einstein, the “God of Spinoza,” and endorses, in the spirit of Jefferson, “the teachings of Jesus.” But his heart and his mind appear affixed to that same bright blazing curiosity that first ignited that young mind—the excitement of tech innovation and space exploration.
For Musk, this excitement, not the dreams of the sages and saints, is our greatest hope.
Love him or hate him, Musk has at least dared to dream of a bigger and better future for humanity. But can his philosophy bear the weight of the world? Musk’s passion for human life led Google co-founder Larry Page to accuse him of being a “specieist.” His frustration with advertisers has him bemoaning “people who care about looking good while doing evil.” All the while, he is busy contending with what he calls the “wild storm” of his mind—a storm evident in his own digital footprint. (Is it a happy storm, at least, Sorkin asked? Musk’s blunt response: “No.”)
The onslaught of this triad of inhumanity, wickedness, and inner chaos—in traditional Christian terms, the world, the devil, and the flesh—cry out for a deeper engagement with the wisdom of philosophy and religion, which would not only shield curiosity, but strengthen it.
But supposing that it could, and that a philosophy of curiosity could one day take us, on its own strength, all the way to Mars, fulfilling Musk’s great ambition. What would we find there? Maybe a finite sense of meaning—but an ultimate one? Perhaps the wonder of a new frontier—but without the same old wounded nature, or its same old existential predicament?
Philosophers of curiosity would benefit from reading Walker Percy, a friend of Isaacson’s, who followed the opposite course from Musk: from science, through existential philosophy, and into religion. Percy knew existential despair; his own father and grandfather both committed suicide. And his wry Lost in the Cosmos, another philosophy book disguised as humor—published, incidentally, in the very same year as Musk’s crisis—grapples with the great mystery of the self, from everyday alienation of modern life up through a future “space odyssey” in which a small contingent flees Earth to colonize one of Jupiter’s moons. For Percy, the scientific search, even in its greatest success, only deepened the mystery of the spirit.
The brightness of Musk’s achievements are certainly something to behold. But will his philosophy amount of more than just an impressive flash in the galactic pan? The answer might just depend on its communion with eternal light—and a willingness to ask the right questions.
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There is only One Messiah – Jesus Christ. So there’s no reason to elevate anyone else to that status and, conversely, there’s never any reason to hate anyone as if they’re unredeemable. Take the best of what anyone says or does that speaks to the Truth and leave the rest. And above all, we all need to remember one fundamental fact: none of us is God either – not even the Pope.
you’re so confident of that, and yet you all feel the need to profess it and remind each other of it on a daily basis, in cult-like fashion. you’d think scientists would have a gravity creed they recite daily, or does actual confidence work somewhat differently? when I see that almost half of all religious commenters are saying stuff like “God is REAL!” it only fans the flames of doubt in the skeptic.
Are you making a point, Andrew?
No, Andrew is a paid troll who frequents the site. It’s best to not engage his posts. He’s not here to participate in a meaningful conversation.
We don’t say these things to remind each other; we say them to remind you. As for confidence, would a scientist die for his belief in gravity? Say what you will about false confidence — there’s plenty to go around, including in religious communities — but you can’t accuse in a blanket fashion those with faith of “not having confidence”.
Or what about the husband that tells his wife every day that he loves her? Is his repetition of a truth he beliefs but cannot scientifically verify a display of “lack of confidence”? Or do you acknowledge that it could be something more?
Provocative article, at a personal level. Three comments here–about boredom, shallow curiosity, and the big questions.
About “boredom,” in 1969 yours truly served on the Navy recovery ship for the first lunar astronauts (Apollo XI and then XII) at the splashdown site(s) in the southern Pacific. As a very junior officer, still had a direct role and moderately fancy title. Six hundred million TV viewers, and even more who would have liked to be there. But, then overheard this comment from some of the on-site crew as we deployed for the second of the two missions: “Why do we have to do THIS again?” Now, THAT is boredom! And, boredom comes from within.
Three years later and as a civilian grad student, I shared a modest house with two others men, including an avid history major. Almost four decades later we reconnected and he looked back on his graduation with honors, and then his failed attempts to get into graduate school. He mused that he made a mistake in his application essays; he had written that his motivation was simply “curiosity.” Not competitive or deep enough. Two days later and with this final thought, he was taken by the final stages of cancer.
Which brings us to Musk’s “what’s the meaning of life,” or what C.S. Lewis termed the “relevant questions” (in the “Screwtape Letters,” a mentoring exchange with understudy Wormwood). In a library only a few years after the very historic Apollo missions, yours truly ran across a sobering commentary in “Life Magazine” by playwright and novelist Saul Bellow… Said he of the entire lunar project: “the Protestant Ethic with nowhere else left to go…”
Well, why not Mars, or wherever? Almost as preoccupying as professional athletics.
“But neither religion nor science, Isaacson notes, gave Musk a solid answer to the great “why” of the universe.”
You mean the biggest question of all hasn’t been answered yet, not even by a brand new species that’s only been around 200,000 years or so?? Nonsense!
This article lauds Elon Musk on the basis that he “at least dared to dream of a bigger and better future for humanity.”
Wasn’t there a time when we Catholics only cared about the “bigger and better future for humanity” planned out for us by Our Lord Jesus Christ, and by his Father, and by the Holy Spirit?
Now we must bow obsequiously to, or at least make a tip of the hat to, billionaires, especially if they oppose Woke-ism (and so seem to be allies to followers of Christ, even if they flatly and firmly dismiss the miracles of Christ as mythology).
And recall, plenty of others have or have had “dared to dream of a bigger and better future for humanity”:
*Alexander the Great
*Napoleon Bonaparte
*Karl Marx
*Adolf Hitler
*L. Ron Hubbard
*Ayn Rand
*Osama Bin Laden
So, I see no reason to be impressed by billionaire prophets or other supposed prophets with big plans for the planet.
Jesus wasn’t a billionaire, wasn’t a Caesar or a Napoleon, and wasn’t a libertarian tech bro, but plenty of good people have found Him to be the greatest genius of the universe.
P.S. What are we to conclude from the fact that this article only refers to Musk’s “controversial posts” on Twitter/X, but makes no statement about the nature or content of those posts? For those who don’t know, Musk explicitly endorsed another person’s Tweet about how the Jewish people (not a few of them but all of them) hate, oppose, and persecute the Caucasian race. Musk has a history of Neo-Nazi statements, and since buying Twitter he has reversed previous content moderation policies and has allowed Neo-Nazi posts to proliferate on Twitter/X. That’s why advertisers are fleeing Twitter/X. Musk used the “f” word against those advertisers for their revulsion at his pro-Neo-Nazi statements. Musk, from the point of Catholic virtue theology, is one sick, twisted soul, who is not deserving of praise, respect, or tech bro fandom. We should be revulsed by Musk. Or are we Catholics now supposed to tolerate a little Neo-Nazism from our billionaire leaders as a means to defeat the rampant Woke-ism? Dude, read history, that tactic has been tried before, and the results were catastrophic. Woke-ism was successfully annihilated (hurray!) in Germany for 12 years, but so was much more.
Frank, do you think Musk is beyond redemption? A hopeless case? Just curious.
He comes across to me as a complicated personality who is searching for something transcendent. I’d take a fallible searcher anyday over someone who believes his redemption is signed, sealed and delivered before the Day of Judgment.
Elon Musk despite his unbelief is the most ethical non religious figure in our world today, a fact proven by the almost hysterical opposition by the hyper materialistic idealoges dominant today. His difficult life and exposure to despairing atheistic philosophies has left him with spritual emptiness but with “curiosity” (longing perhaps?) that needs to be filled. The near monopoly of materialistic thought has masked the the quiet development over the last fifty years of new discoveries in physics that strongly point to the existence of God and medical studies of near death experiences which show the existence of the soul and free will. In October of this year Fr.Robert Spitzer,S.J.,Ph.D, whose EWTN show is familiar to many, published a remarkable book “Science at the doorstep of God” which in details this revolution in scientific and spiritual thought. These developments can satisfy the “curiosity” of Musk and many other empty souls. We must pray often that this weakening of materialism brings about their conversion.
Elon Musk is (generally) a good guy to have on your side, but he also is quite the whackadoddle at times, and I certainly pay him no mind except when convenient (see first 10 words of this reply).
Musk can surely be helped by some sessions of “philosophical counseling” eventually moving into “spiritual direction” with Bishop Barron.
When God created the universe He created science. How could the human race exercise real dominion over the Earth if its physical processes didn’t function in a rational manner. God is Logos. The second creation story with the creating and naming of the animals was a cooperative process between God and Adam where Adam was discovering his place in God’s created order. An early proto-science. Taxonomy to be specific.
*
The miracles of the Bible were the way by which God demonstrated His dominion over His creation. This was what God was proving in the plagues during Exodus. That He, and not the pagan gods of Egypt, was/is the one and only true God. If God can create a universe then miracles should not be beyond His powers.
With Asperger Syndrome, is it any wonder that Musk thinks he is on the wrong planet? And yet, wherever we go, we bring ourselves (and our AI;)
In this season of the Incarnation, we can praise God for having pity on our fallen, pitiful pursuits of pleasures, etc., outside of ourselves. And we can thank God for His gift of peace, beyond all understanding. Luke 17:21
“Late have I loved You, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved You! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for You. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which You created. You were with me, but I was not with You. Created things kept me from You; yet if they had not been in You they would have not been at all. You called, You shouted, and You broke through my deafness. You flashed, You shone, and You dispelled my blindness. You breathed Your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for You. I have tasted You, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.” Confessions of St. Augustine
Becklo’s triad of evil is too apparent for someone with the intellect of Musk, and his ethical predilection not to be aware of, which would hopefully eventually tie in with the best of Catholic thought.
If he realizes existentially the absolute contradiction of utter depravity to goodness he will, I’m convinced come to the conclusion that this good must possess its own apex. That culmination of good is evident for all to perceive in the historical Jesus of Nazareth [by historical I mean the Jesus of the Gospel’s, not the fictionalized imposter touted by some prominent Catholic apostates].
Today’s piece at The Catholic Thing:
Why We Return to Augustine, by Michael R. Gonzalez:
Excerpts:
Despite the rise of “Nones” (the non-Church-affiliated), Augustine’s Confessions tends to attract college-age readers. Christians generally turn to Augustine in troubled times, intuiting that he probably offers prophetic guidance for us somewhere in his voluminous corpus. But it isn’t just Christians who find something to connect with in the Confessions. My secular and religious students alike consistently hold up this text as one of the two most helpful texts they are assigned in a Great Books course. The other is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
[Later, links omitted]
Elon Musk, admired by many of my secular Augustine-sympathizing students, recently described his soul as an unhappy storm. Is it likely that Musk’s efforts to relieve the human condition by radically transforming our nature will lead to happiness? Or is the manifestation of this technological restlessness a source of greater pain? It is no accident that the idols of Silicon Valley depend on psychedelic drugs. The gods are enslaved to their own creations – and to their own fantastic hopes of avoiding unhappiness by altering human consciousness.
Thankful I am for this engaging discussion of Elon Musk’s life philosophy, which I was actually curious about for some time, Author Mr. Becklos. Still I desire to tell Mr. Musk that I will continue to pray for him- that he find his heart’s greatest secret desire- life’s Truth, the comfort of the Paraclete, the charism of the JOY of the Holy Trinity’s Third Person, a fruit of the Holy Ghost (GAL. 5:22-23), (The Holy Bible D-R Version), which we humans cannot live- happily- without. It is the existential fulfilling awareness of Our Creator’s intelligent design and love, purpose and mission of pure goodness for we His beloved children into eternity🙏
Glad for the mostly scintillating repartee, Gentlemen, with a couple of laughs out loud, Fr. Morello, PhD, which I was sorely in need of.
To all a Merry Christmas!:
“God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.
Remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day,
To save us all from Satan’s power when we had gone astray.
Oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy . . .” 🎶Melodie