In the minds of Elon Musk fans

Last year, hospitalized and bedridden for several months as a result of a suicide attempt, Salina Marie Gomez unleashed individual notifications for Elon Musk's tweets. His interest was piqued late 2016, after hearing about Musk at work. She watched and watched an interview – the one where he talks about SpaceX and the challenges she faces as a business. The one where he tears a little. A few months later, while she was stuck in bed, her admiration turned into something more.

"It was the only thing that gave me hope, you know, to keep going," she told me on the phone earlier this month. "I realized, like," That's why I have not made much progress in my own career, my own efforts, because I have not seen the whole situation . I just saw what humanity has done wrong, and not what we did well. "

Today, Gomez, a 39-year-old artist living in Westmont, Illinois, is working on Me tweeting gently, a book illuminated by Musk's tweets. She sees herself more as a fan than a fan, explaining that fandom is for artists. "It's not that I do not consider him an artist," she says. "I consider him one of the best artists, but I would not consider myself a fan because [the word] involves a kind of blind obsession with a celebrity. "She is, however, a fan of what he does." "We are specifically moving away from fossil fuels, moving us away from oil dependency," she says.[He has] a greater and fuller vision of our destination as a species, and help people remember that progress is good, and that it must not be such a terrible thing.

Gomez describes Musk fans as "awake" and not afraid of what's wrong with the world. She believes that Musk makes our planet a better place and that its detractors are just consumers who "do not want to be disturbed". Journalists, she says, "pick" stories to annoy her. "They use them as weapons," she says. "And that's inappropriate, because what it does is disastrous and essential for human survival … sometimes the media is there to really stop what it's doing." Gomez continues: "As a supporter of what he does, [I’ve] become enraged because that is my future too. And that's my planet too. "

Gomez is not alone. She is part of a large global community of people who revere the 46-year-old entrepreneur with a passion better suited to a megachurch pastor than to a tech mogul. With followers like her, Elon Musk – the multibillionaire born in South Africa known for his risky investments such as Tesla (electric cars), SpaceX (travel in the private space), Boring Company (underground journey) and Neuralink ( neurotechnology) – reaped the fruits of a culture where fandom dominates almost everything. While his detractors see him as another rich, inexperienced and disconnected man who can not or will not recognize the damage he and his companies are doing to his fans, Musk is a visionary to save humanity from him. even. They gravitate towards his charisma and his intoxicating beverage of extreme wealth, a grand vision of society – articulated through his businesses, that he has a strange habit of pitching with tweets – and a playful game that sets him apart from the members stodgier of his economy class. Among his more than 22 million followers, all this inspires a level of devotion just rarely glimpsed apart from responses to a tweet from Taylor Swift.

The most vocal of these fans has an impact: they are an army of irregulars waiting to be brought together via a tweet and sent on the digital warpath against anything Musk decides he's doing. do not like, the iron fist in the velvet glove of Musk. They have become known for haranguing people whom they believe to have come across, especially journalists, with unrelenting fervor. The attacks constitute the standard of the social media era: the free bombardment for all on social platforms by people who are not always vitriolic but who nevertheless block the perceived enemy with questions of bad faith.

As is often the case on these platforms, if you are not a cis white man, the harassment will vary in proportion to the distance in which you deviate from this perceived norm. Fans who do the most online harassment are hidden behind anonymous Twitter accounts; they will not talk to reporters and will not let their real names be added to their online behavior because they do not trust the media or because they know that their online behavior is bad. By definition, the worst of them would be difficult, if not impossible, to learn. But I got to know some Musk fans, some typical and some not, and there is a lot to learn from them.

Lately, as Tesla has faced a series of financial challenges and an increasingly skeptical press, the billionaire has attacked those online who have shown some flaws in his corporate strategy, and his fans have nested not. In March, Tesla shares dropped to their lowest level in a year, and Moody's downgraded its credit rating after the fall of one of its autonomous cars and the inability of the society to achieve its production goals. It has also been reported that Tesla is facing $ 1 billion emerging bonds related to the acquisition of SolarCity by debt. Subsequently, Musk connected to Twitter for to assault the media. His devotees continued to hammer those he distinguished for days.

In the words of the fans to whom I spoke, stalkers are outliers in the Musk fandom. Every online community has its toxic faction, they argue, and everyone should expect to be harassed from time to time due to being online. (The number of women saying that Musk's supporters were pursuing them might contradict this statement, but it's true that hostility can easily be masked or misunderstood on the internet.) As I have already heard: "The repression of a man is a harassment."

The enraged fringe faction of a fandom comes first and foremost to be a member of a group. While some CEOs maintain a personality cult of employment and where celebrity fan attacks consist mostly of endless walls of snake emoji, Musk followers differ in their moral righteousness and their emotional defensive. The fringe of Musk is different because the center is morally right, which means that outliers are even more fervent than other fandoms. (Musk is not known to particularly particularly criticize, and sometimes his fans fear him by pointing out that he should perhaps stop responding to random people on the internet.) Beyoncé is a queen and the Beyhive ensures that everyone knows it. Musk offers a future for humanity, and for its fans, there is nothing more important.

Recently, Jim Ocean, a 65-year-old musician and producer, commemorated the inaugural voyage of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket with a song called "The future feels like Elon Musk". He's been hanging around for five or six years since he discovered PayPal's co-founder in "The Pages of Science" (by which he means Phys.org, a scientific newswire). The song, co-written with his friend Brian Whistler and uploaded to YouTube, is a hopeful odyssey that describes Musk's ability to inspire people. "He can tell the future for me and you / He has a nose to know what to do," sings Ocean. (He also wrote songs about Timothy Ferris, Voyager Voyager's Golden Record producer, John Dobson, inventor of the Dobson telescope, and James Lovelock, the scientist who discovered that CFCs created the hole in the ozone layer and theorized Gaia hypothesis.)

"I am not a think that he can not hurt kind of guy, but you know, he reminds me of people from history pages like Ernest Shackleton, "Ocean says, referring to the famous British explorer who has led several expeditions to Antarctica." We need that spirit exploratory in us, especially with young people, because the world is very full, "says Ocean." It's like getting in a car … with too many passengers, and we need to look to the outside world. " outside to feel a liberating feeling of a planet that feels full of people, you know? "

When I talk to him about Musk fans in general, he admits, "I think he's got a group of rapacious fans, [people] While dying of desire to see the human race do something constructive and inventive and adventurous. "While he'd like Musk's products to be a little cheaper -" I wish he'd come out with a Tesla for people who do not have a lot of income "- L & # 39; Musk's exploration spirit largely compensates. "I feel very, very, very seriously [that] we must have this exploratory spirit instilled in us. "The world is already too full.

Of course, not all Musk fans are as fervent as Ocean and Gomez. "I would consider myself a follower, but I would not consider myself, as a fan of devotion, in the sense of Oh, he can not do badExplains Corey Brundige, a 28-year-old computer scientist living just south of Madison, Wisconsin. Brundige was impressed by Musk's first Tesla Powerwall, but it was the same 60 minutes 2012 interview that hooked Gomez who really got Brundige. The video shows Musk ripping as he talks about the time when Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, two of his heroes, testified before Congress against the privatization of space. "It's a kind of devastating thing," says Brundige. "I have lived so many times in my life … this passion [reminded me of] what I felt when I saw Star wars when I was, like, six. "

He has heard of these "pious fans", the "people who say that he can not do wrong and whoever attacks anyone who says otherwise. It's unhealthy for sure, "he says.In a world overflowing with information, he says, he can understand why it might be easier to blindly trust a" unique figurehead "like Elon. "

But he is different. People like Brundige "are looking forward to seeing [Elon’s] innovations "- SolarCity panels, Tesla batteries and cars -" come home much earlier than the traditional space program allows. "The innovations produced by the traditional space program are reaching consumers longer than Musk products." It does not seem relevant that most of these products are so expensive that they are totally out of reach of the average consumer. – the only Tesla Model 3 costs nearly $ 50,000, and even though SpaceX rockets may be cheaper than competitors, it still costs $ 60 million to launch the Falcon 9 – or that all of Musk's current commercial ventures are supported by government grants rather than self-generated profits. Los Angeles Times tried to sum up Tesla, the Solar City now absorbed, and SpaceX taken to the government; the total stands at $ 4.9 billion. During his 15 years of life, Tesla has never made a profit.

Brundige admits that Musk's critics have some valid points. He disagrees with the billionaire on the theme of "basic security and humane treatment", referring to Musk's treatment of his factory workers. But he is still wary of the press that has uncovered these crimes, especially when it comes to titles on the Tesla autopilot. "It gets frustrating," says Brundige, who has worked in media companies like Cygnus Business Media, which publishes commercial media. "I know sometimes the most extreme title … gets more clicks, gets more ad revenue, keeps you in business." (Brundige is right to say that journalism is often backed by advertising – are separate from sales departments to preserve the integrity of the publication.) Most of the Musk fans Brundige has encountered, I have he said, are weighted. He talks to them mostly in person, citing a certain mistrust to let his "bias be introduced" into the larger digital conversation. "I think the online discussions are pretty toxic," he says.

Most of the so-called musketeers that I spoke to came from Twitter, their central battlefield, usually after they responded to one of Musk's more muscular tweets. The others I found through their creative projects that were dedicated to him or because their friends thought that they were big enough fans of Musk to justify putting me in touch with them. The fans who agreed to talk to me were mostly millennia of the middle class who describe themselves as political centrists. They were mostly white men and women who are spread across America, although mostly grouped in liberal enclaves. Like Gomez, they do not identify themselves as "fans", but as "followers", as calm acolytes, deeply inspired by what Musk has accomplished. The way they talk about Musk suggests a paramount belief in the transformative power of consumption.

For some, buying a Tesla is an investment in the future of the world. For ecologists, however, the story is not so simple. Depending on where you live and how energy is generated, Teslas are not this much greener than their petrol compatriots. And if you consider how dirty it is to manufacture the lithium-ion batteries that feed Musk's cars, the story gets darker. according to The Guardian, an average gasoline car costs 5.6 tons of CO2 to manufacture, while an electric car consumes 8.8 tons – half of which is used to produce the battery. The electric car, The Guardian writing, will still be responsible for 80 percent of the gas car during his lifetime.

The main thread that seems to unite Musk fans across demographics is not that they attack everything they see as a threat to him. It is that they claim to value a sanitized idea of ​​logic and rationality above all else. They do not often feel indebted to any ideology or faction, which is a kind of reporting. On the other hand, practicing logicians and philosophers have been within the bounds of reason for decades. There are more than a few famous thought experiments that emphasize the limits of pure logic.

Gomez says that she does not "see a lot of information sources that are pro-logical and pro-reason" – unless you have access to massive amounts of data, she says, then you do not see Have no place to go to find balanced news. "The actual data is always neutral because it's just … it's just, everything is what it is," she says. But after people touch it, "it's no longer neutral because everyone has a different preference." I press on this point.

"It looks like you believe in the existence of an objective truth, that there are things that are true. Right?"

"Yes," she agrees.

"But if someone manipulates data, he becomes skewed?" I ask.

"Potentially", she confirms.

"So, if you do not have access to the data, and you do not believe that the people who are responsible for managing it are trustworthy," I say, "then you believe that the information is false? "

"Yes," said Gomez.

Gomez might be an extreme case of this kind of radical skepticism, but he is present to a lesser degree among other Musk fans. They do not reject media information, but instinctively distrust it. This line of thinking becomes a problem in this post-truth era where the president is actively trying to discredit legitimate information-gathering organizations and the facts are constantly being attacked by powerful ones. In a moment like this, insisting that you do not need to subscribe to a belief system can be dangerous. The performance of neutrality gives way to those who would totally ignore logic if it gave them more power.

Living between these contradictions – social benevolence versus performative capitalism, belief in objective truth versus mistrust of legitimate sources of information, recognition of Tesla's performance as a business and an almost religious belief in his potential – is the mark of a fan of Musk. 2018. It is also a reflection of the American political reality. It's an atmosphere that encourages one to say one thing, to believe another, and to mean a third one that makes it almost impossible to talk about a gap – be it political, social or cultural . Fandom is useful, in part, because it can fill these gaps.

Bonnie Norman is a former 64-year-old Intel executive who invested early in Tesla and says she's a "Trusted friend"From Musk." I've watched the fan base change over the past seven years, and there's good and bad. But it's really fun to watch, "she told me on the phone. She says that she bought a Roadster immediately after testing one. (She owned a Prius before, but "oh my God, what a boring car.")

"I've never seen a business, before that or since then, where every person in the business [had] She added. "I'm used to having to face CEOs on security issues and throughout my career … But I know for a fact that when he was informed of the lack of a lock on the seatbelt in Europe, they made a recall and checked each seat belt. "

When she lived in California, Norman organized an annual party for Tesla owners. They come from everywhere, she says. At first, someone gave him a microphone and asked him to make a speech. "When I bought a Tesla, I bought it for performance and fun, just the pleasure of doing it," she recalls. "I did not buy it, you know, to be green," she continued. "I did not realize I was going to buy a whole community." This group met in person at parties like Norman's, but they also gathered online at Tesla Motor Club.

"There is no meanness," she says of the Roadster sub-forum. But then she admits that the rest of the forum, where the new owners meet, is more toxic. Even as a supporter of Tesla, she was struck by the same type of harassment that featured in the piece of science journalist Erin Biba about being attacked by fans of Elon Musk. (Norman says that Biba's cover has drawn attention to being "negative.") "I literally have two restraining orders in my purse and in my briefcase and a set. in my car in my glove box, [on two men I met on the Tesla forum]. I am never without these two, "says Norman, who was a moderator on the forum for a number of years." That 's not whether you are for Tesla or against Tesla. It is the fact that you are a woman, and you are not in your way.

All followers of Elon Musk do not stay his fans. Martin Tripp was a fan once before he was fired from his job as a technician at the Tesla Gigafactory Battery Factory, and then sued by the company for alleged hacking and theft of secrets. d & # 39; company. As The Washington Post reported, Tripp left his job with a medical device business and moved his family to Nevada to work for Tesla. "I looked up at Elon, I looked at Tesla, I was always talking about the Teslas and I wanted to buy one," he told the newspaper. "And I live the mission: accelerate the transition of the world towards sustainable energy." It changed after working for Musk. He said at To post this He was disillusioned after first-hand witnessing the company's waste, unsustainable business practices and Musk's deceptive statements to investors. "I wanted to leave the world better for my son, and I felt that I was doing everything but that," said Tripp. Now, he believes that Musk "cares only about himself".

Andrew Sanders, a 30-year-old marketing writer from Massachusetts, has gone through a similar – albeit less dramatic – transition. "Before last month, I was a big fan of Elon Musk. I own a replica model of the Falcon 9, and I bought my brother a hat from the Boring Company for Christmas," he said. he wrote in an email. "I think you'll find that I'm typical of Musk fans that you could interview: white, relatively rich, and a unironic nerd."

Sanders fell for Musk initially when he began naming his rocket landing infrastructure after the ships of Iain M. Banks & # 39; Culture novels, one of Sanders' favorite science fiction series. "I learned more, of course.It was hard to ignore the number of injuries in the Tesla factories, as well as anti-union sentiments," he wrote. But he rationalized, "Climate change has a way to prejudge the arguments of social justice.If the world burns and spits at once, no one will care if your workers have collective bargaining power."

Now, he says, he ended up excusing all of this. "When I first learned about him, he was building a future that I had never read." Now he's obviously a racist buffoon with thin skin that's high on his own farts. "His behavior is such that not only do I love him anymore, I am ashamed of having loved him in the first place," wrote Sanders, when I called him at phone, he added, "Loving it nowadays is more of a self-own than it is not." I asked Sanders to clarify his jester comment.

"I would say" thin "because he's constantly looking for himself and meets everyone with the most casual criticism of him, blocking people, and not seeming to care what his suite starts to knock on people "responded by email. "Racist," mainly because of the "whole" thing.Who do you think is leading the media& # 39; Note, although it is possible that this has been misinterpreted?

Sanders continues: "Buffoon" because of trends that, closely examined, look more like those of a carnival hunter. Still waiting for your model 3? Look there, I made a flamethrower! Concerned about work accidents? Let's focus on how I'm going to make bricks for some reason! etc. "

Among the fans to whom I have spoken, a major thread has emerged: a mistrust of information and the feeling that trying to find the truth is a quest that, at the better, is quinteuse. Who can you really trust? they seemed to ask. It is a question as good as any for the current political moment of America. In this perspective, Musk seems to be a savior, a Christian figure sent from above to save the world. What this means, however, is that, for better or for worse, it represents something that is lacking in the broader contemporary discourse. His vast fan base is a symptom of greater social decay. The successful information warfare campaign that has been conducted since the late 1990s, largely by leading conservative media organizations, has distorted the definition of news and shifted the boundaries of what people see as as worthy of interest. Who can forget the chilling quote later attributed to Karl Rove, then principal advisor to the president, who gave birth to the phrase "reality-based community"?

"It's no longer as well as the world works," Rove told a reporter from the New York Times Magazine in 2004. "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, and as you study this reality – wisely, as you will – we will act again, creating new realities." that you will be able to study too, and that is how things will be settled, we are the actors in history … and you, all of you, will be left to simply study what we are doing. "

Twelve years later, the writer, Maria Bustillos, would build Rove's comments into a Punch She explores the concept of "dismediation," which she elegantly describes as "a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which she travels, like a computer virus that brick the entire machine." After years of Assault, the slot machine the weight of a decade of lies from politicians and stakeholders. In his strange light, Musk seems to his fans as the guy you can trust. He's smart and well spoken, and he knows how the game is played. After all, he's been in the valley for ages and knows how to get people to believe in his ideas.

But the rockets land, the cars circulate and the contracts to dig tunnels are signed. For the most part, Musk does the things that he says he's going to do. He does especially what he wants to do. It does not matter if the cars do not always do what they promise, if the rockets sometimes fail, or if the tunnels seem impossible to build for the proposed budgets. These things exist. They are tangible. Her fans are also tangible because they recognize how rare it is for a public figure to do what she says she's going to do. They recognize how difficult it is to do anything. Even if Tesla fails and the government contracts that finance SpaceX dry up, they will have always existed, and they will have made electric cars that were real for people and have begun to humanize the stars. It will have existed, though, like Ozymandias, only the legs of the companies that he built remain.