Elon and the Genius Trap

Was Elon Musk ever a genius? Yes, he revolutionized the electric-car industry and space travel. Yes, he once seemed to represent America's...he restored American confidence in its ability to innovate at the cutting edge of technology. But Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and he doesn't regularly appear in headlines as a prominent tech genius. In fact, many well-informed people probably don't even know his name. So what makes one man merely wildly accomplished and another a genius? And which descriptor makes a man more likely to engage in an ego-crushing battle with the president?
In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Explaining how Musk tanked his reputation has many ways: First, he alienated environmentalists by teaming up with Trump, and then he alienated Trump fans by insulting their hero. Another way is clear by looking at American culture's historical relationship with 'genius,' and how it tends to go wrong. Genius, it turns out, is less a series of accomplishments than a form of addiction. It traps the men who indulge it, and they often end up, like Musk, depleted. We talk with Lewis about what Musk has in common with Thomas Edison, how the psychedelics fit into the archetype, and what the possible paths are for Musk moving forward.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[ Music ]
News clip: The bromance is over. President Trump and Elon Musk trading barbs today over Republicans' 'big, beautiful bill.'
Hanna Rosin: Well, last week, something no one could have expected to happen finally happened. The president of the United States and the richest man in the world had a spectacular falling out.
Rosin: The feud between Trump and Musk escalated at a bewildering pace.
Donald Trump: Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if it went well anymore. I was surprised.
Rosin: Trump may have been surprised, but to a lot of us watching, a partnership of two egos this huge was doomed to break up. This week, Musk has tried to patch things up, saying he regrets some of what he said, without specifying what exactly. But Trump is more or less not engaging, and it looks like, for the moment at least, Musk's reputation has hit rock bottom.
I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.
Today, we consider the long arc of Elon Musk in the context of other historical figures who, like him, were given the revered title of 'genius.' Not that long ago, Musk was considered a visionary by Americans across the political spectrum, an inventor solving climate change, space exploration, and, really, whatever he set his mind to.
But as we all know, the last few years have seen his reputation crater on the left: His support of Trump, his buyout of Twitter, his online presence, loaded with memes and conspiracy theories. Basically, anything to troll the libs, many of whom had been his fans. Now his fallout with the president is making him suspect on the right, leaving him a constituency of no one.
So how do we understand the arc of Musk, someone who could have gone down in history as one of the great tech geniuses but, instead, used his reputation to get himself more and more attention and, in the process, seems to have torched that very reputation?
As it so happens, staff writer Helen Lewis has a very timely book out next week that helps explain this pattern. It's titled The Genius Myth, and Musk is its quintessential modern example.
As Lewis argues, societies build myths of individual geniuses, and often those geniuses overstay their welcome, having second or third acts as they try to be experts in every field or to simply keep the attention they're accustomed to.
I asked her to put the week's Musk news into a wider picture, and to explain why she thinks we should avoid the label 'genius' altogether. Here's our conversation.
[ Music ]
Rosin: Helen, welcome to the show.
Helen Lewis: Thank you.
Rosin: Sure. So I wanna start before this feud between Trump and Musk, maybe even before Musk bought Twitter. So let's say it's 2020, and this is when Trump publicly calls Musk 'one of our great geniuses' and compares him to Thomas Edison.
What is it about Musk that qualifies him for that rarefied public title of genius?
Lewis: At the time, I think the assumption was that he had revolutionized not just one but two industries, which is very rare. You know, in driving down the cost of space parts, he undoubtedly challenged, essentially, the kind of government-funded monopoly and the slow way that space exploration was going.
You know, there was this humbling period for America, where it couldn't even get its own astronauts up into space. It had to rely on, you know, hitching a ride with the Russians. And he managed to, in that sense, restore a kind of American pride in itself. And then, obviously, you have Tesla and its electric vehicles, and turning electric vehicles away from their previous reputation, which was the Toyota Prius, which is a sort of thing you bought as a kind of hair shirt, right— a hair shirt with wheels on to say, I'm sorry for killing the planet —into the idea that an electric car was something you might have because it was cool and it was a good car.
And both of those really did remind me actually of Thomas Edison, because both of them are kind of—the nickname that Edison had was the 'American Prometheus.' They were both about an idea of America as a place that still is at the white-hot edge of technology. You know, a place you can still build things and do things.
Rosin: Okay, so Elon has these amazing accomplishments. He restores a certain kind of American confidence in itself. But is a genius just someone who accomplishes great things? Like, in the book, you make a really interesting comparison to Tim Berners-Lee, who's thought of as the actual inventor of the World Wide Web.
So why does one get to be a genius, and the other is a man who just does a lot of amazing accomplishments?
Lewis: Well, you have to also, I think, be prepared to play the role of the genius in public and inhabit that role. And you know, Tim Berners-Lee has had a lot of acclaim. He's got a knighthood here in Britain. He's an honorary fellow in lots of places. But he doesn't swagger about like he's a kind of special sort of human, a class apart, which is I think what Musk, you know, has accepted for himself—that, you know, and has again, like Thomas Edison done, driven a lot of that mythology himself.
You know, Thomas Edison notoriously worked through the nights at the laboratory in Menlo Park with his team. And Elon Musk had a similar mythology, which is all about the fact that, you know, he never sleeps. You know, he would have a sleeping bag on the floor of the factory because he was so dedicated. And, like, he was just relentless, and everybody had to be 'extremely hardcore.'
So the argument in the book is that achievements are one thing, but we're also into this idea of a kind of mythology around a person. There's this kind of embrace of specialness.
And the line that I give that's the, kind of, classic example of this is, you know, Elon Musk currently has—where are we now? I mean, who knows by the time this comes out how many acknowledged children we have, but I think we're currently at 14, and they're called things like Romulus and X Æ A-12. And, you know, Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called Alice and Ben, right?
Rosin: (Laughs.)
Lewis: This, to me, is just, like: One of you is just a normal person who happens to have done some cool stuff, and one of you has decided I'm gonna try and, like, optimize everything in my life to be a really great story to sound special.
Rosin: Right. So the key ingredient of genius is that you're willing to step into the role or mythology of genius. You're willing to sort of lean into the story about yourself as a public genius.
Lewis: Right. And you also become a symbol of something bigger. That's what I mean about—becoming a national symbol is a very obvious version of this. William Shakespeare is not just a brilliant playwright—I think that's unarguable—but he became, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, an argument for the English language at a time that Britain was expanding its ambitions abroad. You know, this was the kind of high point of the British empire and, therefore, we needed a playwright to match.
And I think you can actually see a similar thing with maybe someone like Chinua Achebe, who becomes a kind of symbol of the nation, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Nigeria now. You know, she's writing novels that are concerned with the Nigerian experience or the Nigerian American experience, inhabiting that bigger role than just being another writer.
Rosin: So when you think of Musk in these terms, like how he has successfully styled himself as this very special category of person—the genius—how did that play into his relationship with Trump?
Lewis: Well, if you have two people who are both convinced that they're geniuses, it doesn't usually work well. And actually, maybe this is something that Musk should have known, because the car company he owns—obviously, Tesla—is named after Nikola Tesla. And Nikola Tesla, an absolutely brilliant engineer, walked out of working there. He just couldn't get on with Thomas Edison. The story goes that he had a bet, and he won it, and Edison refused to pay up, which bizarrely has an analog in the story that Sam Harris, the former member of the 'Intellectual Dark Web,' tells about having a bet about COVID deaths with Elon Musk. And Sam Harris won, and Elon failed to pay up.
So, you know, I think the trouble is genius is always a story about ego, and I don't think I was alone in predicting that the Trump-Musk relationship would at some point explode, because you have two giant silverback-gorilla egos wrestling for dominance, and that is a tension that simply can't be sustained.
Rosin: Right, right. And it is true that Trump called himself a genius. He doesn't call many people geniuses, but he did refer to himself as a genius.
In the book, you write about how if we declare someone a genius, we believe they have magical powers to do anything, as opposed to, say, specialized skills to do a few specific things. I was wondering if that contributed to Musk's downfall—this idea (that maybe Trump had also) that he could fix any problem, like inefficiencies in the government, just whatever. You set the genius loose and the genius fixes everything.
Lewis: Yeah, DOGE is a story of enormous hubris. I think everyone would agree that the American government, like all governments, has a certain amount of waste and inefficiency built into it. But the idea that you could do what Musk did—which is go in with a small cadre of lieutenants, lock everybody else out, and start deleting things based on simple-keyword searches—and that this would not have any negative or unintended consequences is laughable.
And the reason that I think Musk thought that worked is that, to some extent, it had worked, particularly at Twitter—which, in the book Character Limit, his takeover there is chronicled. And he did exactly what would then become the DOGE playbook there: you know, brought in his lieutenants, cut the head count, told everyone that they were lazy and that only super, 'extremely hardcore' people could stay. And, you know, sure enough: Twitter is not what it once was. And I thought his tenure at Twitter would be a disaster, and I think probably in economic terms it has been.
But what it did was it bought him the attention of Donald Trump. And that looked like it was a very good bet because he was then in a position to make sure he had extremely preferential access to the government in terms of his contracts. That's now a more questionable outcome, given the falling out between him and Donald Trump.
Rosin: It's very interesting how you describe the history of Twitter, given your book, because even though his management of Twitter was not genius-level successful, it does seem to have increased his mythology as a genius. Like, he sort of spread the word and myth about himself via Twitter, even as he was doing, you know, less-than-genius things at the actual company.
Lewis: The original title for the book, working title, for a long time was The Selfish Genius, which I liked as a pun and, it turned out, no one else got. But it did go to this idea that you are more likely to be held as a genius if you run a kind of election campaign for it.
So, you know, one of my examples would be Isaac Newton, undoubtedly a brilliant mathematician but also extremely keen that he got the credit for calculus rather than his German rival, Gottfried Leibniz. You know, these things don't necessarily happen by accident. Often, the genius themselves or their fans, you know, run a kind of publicity campaign for this idea of them as a genius.
Rosin: Right. Part of being 'the genius,' like, with quotes around it, is being your own PR around the genius. Like, you just have to be good at that.
Lewis: Yeah. Or you have to go and sit in obscurity and kind of let other people create the mythology for you.
Rosin: Right. And I guess Musk does both. I mean, he's able to rally an army of fans, stans, and to also do his own PR.
Lewis: And there's a phrase that Manvir Singh, the anthropologist, uses about shamans in traditional society, which is that they cultivate an air of 'charismatic otherness.' And I think that also very helpfully describes what geniuses do, or the people around geniuses do. I can't remember who it was who said that every Silicon Valley startup essentially functions like a cult. You know, there's this mission, and there's this one guy at the top of it who's leading everybody on the mission.
And I think probably, in the case of Musk's earlier businesses, when he was trying to, essentially, solve climate change and solve space exploration, people did want to join the Elon cult. It's just when the mission is Let's turn Twitter into a more effective vehicle for racism and videos of people losing their shit on street corners, who wants to join that mission? Who wants to, you know, sacrifice their weekends to believe in that?
Rosin: Well, this is such an interesting moment because as the breakup is happening—and we're in the middle of it, so we don't know where it will land and what will happen to Musk's reputation, but—the language and the reputation is shifting in real time. So Trump has now reportedly referred to Musk as part genius, part child—he adds the word child —but also crazy.
And I'm just wondering if there's some moment where, you know, it's the one drop in the milk that curdles the milk—like, some line where what people used to perceive as eccentricities of the so-called genius suddenly seem like, you know, real negatives, not fake, charismatic negatives, but actual negatives—and if you've been tracing that line.
Lewis: The danger for Elon Musk now is that, having alienated basically anyone on the broad left of politics, you know, his original constituency—back when he was a Democratic donor and he was talking about electric vehicles as necessary for combating climate change—they're all gone. He's now alienating anybody on the right who is loyal to Trump, which is, on the surface, everybody.
You know, who knows how they feel in the secrets of their hearts, but ostensibly the Republican Party is the Trump party, so he doesn't really have a kind of caucus who want to advance him as an argument. This is what I mean in the book, about genius being an argument for something. Calling someone a genius is often a way of making an argument. And the argument that Elon Musk, as lionizing him, was making, is the idea of: Government is slow and sclerotic and holds back innovation. You know, You need to let Tesla do its thing. You need to let SpaceX do its thing. That's the only way we get to the future.
And of course, that's a partial story. Tesla makes a lot of money by trading carbon credits to other car companies. It makes a lot of money from government subsidies from electric cars. You know, these stories are very rarely as rugged and 'Randian' as they appear on the surface. But, you know, Elon Musk was used as an argument for the singular innovative genius, and that's a right-wing argument predominantly in America as it currently stands.
But having lost the left, he's now just quite spectacularly lost the right, and you look at his approval ratings, and they are in the Mariana Trench—I mean, just could not be lower.
Rosin: When we're back, I ask Helen what happens when a reputation craters like Musk's has, and what the myth of genius can leave out of the story. That's when we're back.
[Break]
Rosin: And so that's what we are witnessing in real time now with Elon Musk, the kind of deconstruction of whatever mythology he had built around himself, and we just still don't know how it will play out. So once he no longer effectively represents that argument, maybe the sort of glow fades like he's not a genius anymore, because genius needs a purpose—like, a political or social purpose, the label 'genius.' And when he's not doing it effectively, Trump is less interested.
Lewis: Well, yeah. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Musk is no longer as useful to Trump. Not least, I think the biggest thing that he did that was a mistake was to give his interview to Mishal Husain of Bloomberg and say, I'm not going to give any more money in the midterm s, at which point, your reason for stifling your doubts about why this guy is toting his kid around and, you know, jumping in the air, and doing mad posts, and all that stuff is just taken away, right? There was a lot of Shut up and, like, We need his money. And as soon as you say, I'm cutting off the money, then people are free to air the opinions that they've clearly always held in the background anyway.
Rosin: Right. Like, the news about Musk's drug use, which had been bubbling up but is now pretty voluminous—although, we should say that Musk recently said he's not taking drugs and simply tried prescription ketamine a few years ago. That said, I could imagine a world where, previously, people would look at his reported psychedelic use and kind of excuse that as the habits of an eccentric genius. And now they look at it more—now that the 'genius' label is fading—as more just genuinely dysfunctional.
Lewis: Yes. I mean, you are right to mention, you know, the drug use, because it's interesting that, again, genius is a sort of connection with the divine in a secular society. It's a promise of something superhuman. And so it's not surprising, to me, that you see lots of these tech guys talking about going to Burning Man, talking about doing ayahuasca, talking about altered states of consciousness—because that, again, positions them as modern shamans. You know, they're in connection with something that is outside of the experience of ordinary mortals.
I have this line in the book that genius transmutes oddness into specialness. And I think what happens is a lot of reverse engineering, where somebody gets anointed a genius, and then their whole biography is kind of combed through for things that confirm the theory. So it can be, you know, Oh, look at his childhood.
In the case of Elon Musk, the things we hear about his childhood was that he would have these reveries, where he would drift off, and that he was badly bullied. And those are, funnily enough, the same things that you hear about Thomas Edison's childhood. He was deaf and seemed to be spending a lot of time in the world of his own.
Now, that's true of lots of children, most of whom don't go on to greater achievements. But because you've put this label on someone, we look back and read everything through that prism.
Rosin: Right. Okay. So what does the template leave out then? Like, in the case of Elon, you know, there's a template. It leads to your rise in success. What parts are not told? What people get left out of a story like this?
Lewis: I mean, all the support staff, really, and all the people who kind of grease the wheels for the great man get slowly downgraded—you know, all the collaborators. You know, I still regularly catch myself and copy wanting to write 'Elon Musk, founder of Tesla.' And, of course, he wasn't, right? It was founded by two other guys, and he took it over. I mean, he was an early investor, but he got the title co-founder as part of a legal settlement. You know, and the fact that X—you know, he was forced out of PayPal by Peter Thiel and the board. You know, he had failures along the way too. All of that stuff kind of gets hastily kind of airbrushed away.
Like, I always think of it a bit kind of like a scaffolding around the kind of statue of David, right? And we knock away the scaffolding, and then we just got the perfect statue. And that's the way that we tend to look at geniuses. You know, all of that kind of stuff.
And, you know, I have a chapter in the book, obviously, about wives. You know, having somebody who is both your kind of domestic partner and somebody who is maybe a muse or maybe your kind of collaborator, but happy to take a secondary role, that's a huge, huge advantage to you.
And also, material conditions: You know, why did Elon Musk move from South Africa to America? Because he wanted to study at the best university, where people were doing the most interesting stuff. He wanted to get funding from venture capitalists who are based in Silicon Valley. You know, Elon Musk could not have been Elon Musk in Pretoria.
If he'd stayed there, he might have been a very successful businessman, but he wouldn't be who he is today. So this is what I find deeply irritating about the people who think that, you know, it's all them and they're this unique success story. Elon Musk's success story, credit to him—he has a great deal to do with it. But it is also a story of universities, of American culture, of American wealth, of everything that [Silicon] Valley built up over the course of more than half a century. There are a lot of other bit-part players in the story who shouldn't be, you know, downgraded so we can focus only on the protagonist.
Rosin: You know, I deeply appreciated your chapter about wives because one fact that always breaks my brain is how, across the decades and even up until now, we so closely associate the term genius with men. And you created a very simple formula, which is that a genius needs a wife, and it's much less often that a woman has a wife. And so, you know, that's part of the mythology.
Lewis: Yeah, I mean, Gertrude Stein had Alice B. Toklas, and that worked out pretty well for her. But it's been throughout history, yes, I think straight women have particularly suffered. I remembered this from writing Difficult Women, my previous book, which was about feminism. I had a chapter on the suffrage movement in the U.K., and there was a quote from the suffragette Hannah Mitchell that said, No cause was won between dinner and tea —which, to translate that into American meals, that's actually lunch and dinner.
But her point was that if you had domestic responsibilities, your thinking time was disrupted, and actually not just, you know, in sheer volume of hours, but just in the amount of your kind of brain space you could dedicate to having big thoughts. And it's really interesting that so many—you know, look at the MacArthur genius grants now. They are about taking away money worries and domestic concerns, in order that people can excel to their fullest potential.
We all acknowledge that it's really, really hard to manage that kind of big, demanding career as well as being a primary caregiver. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. I mean, Marie Curie managed it, just about, but very few people do.
Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Now, Elon's interest in propagating little Elons—in your book, you describe a long history of geniuses being very interested in the continued propagation of geniuses as a special class. How does he fit into that history?
Lewis: Well, it's the propagation of people like themselves, really. I think that's the thing.
Rosin: But isn't it also this idea that you can propagate yourself? I mean, it's almost like trying to sort of take this idea of the genius and reduce it to some kind of perfect science? Like, you can just replicate it or clone it.
Lewis: Yeah, it's hardcore belief in the power of hereditary genius, which that's the title of the book, the 19th-century book, by Francis Galton, the eugenicist, Hereditary Genius, in which he attempted to categorize all of Britain into different classes, which he all gave a different letter to and worked out how many people fitted in each one.
Which, you know, to me, now that obviously sounds like a sort of deranged plan, but this was at a time when people were obsessed with classification and, also, because of the recent discovery of evolution by natural selection, a real interest in breeding and its effect on animals and, therefore, humans.
And from that, as you say, you do get this horrific legacy of eugenics, as practiced by both the Nazis and in lots of America, including California. But it persists in these soft forms about people wanting to have smart kids. Now, that's something that everybody would like to do at a kind of basic level. But there is this often-recurrent belief among supersmart people that their children will be supersmart.
And actually, statistically, the issue with that is that there is a very common phenomenon known as 'reversion to the mean,' which means that, you know, if you are very smart, you are an outlier—you've probably got the kind of best version of all of the genes that influence intelligence—and that your children are not likely to be outstanding to the exact level that you are and the exact way that you are.
So it's, to some extent, you know, a delusion, but it's a very recurrent one. And the story of the genius sperm bank, which there's a book by David Plotz about it, which I highly recommend to people. Essentially, an eccentric millionaire called Robert K. Graham, who made his money inventing shatterproof plastic lenses for spectacles, decides that he's going to go and collect the sperm of a load of Nobel Prize winners, in order to kind of breed a sort of, you know, better, superior race of Americans because America was getting very degenerate.
I mean, this is the bit that is always—the side adjunct to it is: Why do we need these geniuses? And the answer usually comes back, Modern culture is degraded. Everybody's lazy. Everybody's degenerate. Often that comes with racial overtones. You know, it's no longer pure (read: white European). And you know, so he said that he got three Nobel winners to donate, including William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, and then embarked on an enthusiastic second career as a scientific racist and eugenicist.
And I think, you know, Shockley is an interesting template for a kind of proto-Elon Musk in the 20th century, in that he had an undoubtedly distinguished first half of his career, and then the second half of his career was spent saying increasingly radical things to enormous pushback, which he then presented as him being whatever the 1970s word for 'canceled' was.
You know, as if the reaction itself proved that he was doing something right. And also, in both cases, about a feeling that maybe the creative juice of the career had run dry but, you know, the attention tap needed to stay on. And that's something that I think you see with lots of people who talk about this kind of breeding of geniuses, is that they know that they're putting their hand on, you know, a hob that is still hot. They know people react enormously strongly to these discussions about race and intelligence, and, therefore, they can't stop themselves from dabbling in it.
Rosin: Right. Okay. So that's where we are now with Musk. Now he's a little bit of a different case study than some of the historical geniuses you write about, because he's alternately a genius and a juvenile idiot.
Like, he attracts genius sycophants as much as genius debunkers. What does that mean? Like, none of these other geniuses existed in the age of social media, where you had so much controversy around someone. Do you think that points to a different path for him?
Lewis: He's certainly a much more unfiltered genius than you've got in the past, but there are precursors to that. One of the reasons Thomas Edison is so famous is that he was operating in Menlo Park in New Jersey, which was a short train ride away from New York, which meant that if you were an enterprising young reporter on a big New York paper, you could get on a very easy train and be there in a couple of hours and stroll into his laboratory—where he would spin you a yarn about the latest thing that he was creating—and go home, write it up, and everybody would be, you know, excited.
Being Thomas Edison correspondent was a good gig. And so you did get a lot of him being publicized by a whole cadre of people whose careers came to depend on him. And as you say, in his later career, after his great success helping the electricity grid be put into New York, he did really run dry. He did some very badly received experiments with ore mining. By that point, he'd moved out of the kind of useful phase of his career into the kind of oracle phase. And people would come, and he would, you know, talk to them about intelligence and the spirit world and his plans for world peace.
And that is the phase—I think you're right—that Elon Musk is currently in. The only difficulty is that he doesn't have that filtered through a load of newspaper reporters in whose interest it is to present him in the best and most interesting possible light, you know, to perpetuate the myth of this kind of savant. What we have, instead, is him posting pictures of himself, like AI-generated images of him as Kekius Maximus, the gladiator, which makes it slightly harder to maintain the kind of genius mystique that you might hope for in those situations.
Rosin: Right, right, right. Yeah. I think the phrase you used about Edison was coasting on the fumes of his own publicity, and it made me see very vividly the possible future paths for Musk. Like, you can see a future where he just goes on and fixes Tesla and, you know, does some useful things for space exploration, as you mentioned. But there's this other path, where he's just increasingly a meme—like, increasingly ridiculous.
Lewis: He's at a crossroads right now. And, you know, Joe Rogan, the podcaster, who is a personal friend of his, said on his show last week, I think Elon needs to put the phone down. And I think at that point, when, you know, your extremely anti-woke friend who says—you know, I watched Joe Rogan do standup for the piece I wrote for The Atlantic last year, and he said, you know, Elon's so intelligent. He makes me feel like a man and his dog when I talk to him —if that friend is the one saying to you probably time to put the phone down, you have to hope that he would listen. But I don't know if he will.
But that is the great paradox of Elon Musk—is that, you know, he has two futures ahead of him: One, beloved sage who got us to Mars; one, vile shitposter who burned away a promising reputation while still maintaining a huge amount of money.
You know, this might be a sort of delightful bump on the road in the Musk story. You know, this might be the sort of Rocky -style montage, where he was at his worst low, and from that he rebuilt. Because these are stories and they're, therefore, you know, flexible.
And, you know, then they could be rewritten. But you can almost feel everything bending towards the shape that the story wants to be. That's how I felt when I was writing this, is that we have these templates and the facts end up being nudged towards them, and people end up acting in ways that do that actively too.
Rosin: Right. Let's move into an alternate universe, which is something that Musk likes to do, where Elon is not subject to the genius myth. How should we think of a person like Musk? Would you be just evaluating accomplishments? Like, would you say something a person did is genius, but you would not step into the trap of calling a person a genius, because that triggers so much else mythology—but it would be reasonable to say, Oh, this company or this decision that a person made was a genius decision? Like, would that be a better way to use that term?
Lewis: That's, ultimately, how I see it. It's better to talk about moments of inspiration, of fingertip touches with a divine, if you want to see it like that. You know, I don't want to be a killjoy who crushes people's appreciation of— you know, I write in the book about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh, which I just absolutely love, and you know, the fact that he melded together impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints in this completely new synthesis. And the paintings, you can just feel the emotion pouring out of them and the brush work is so distinctive. I just—you know, I love them, and I'm bowled over by them.
And I don't want to cheapen that by being, you know, grubby about it and saying, It's just a painting. My 5-year-old could have done that. No one's better than anyone else. No, I do think that those paintings are some of the best expressions of genius, in the sense of being kind of unfathomable. But I do think that the mythology itself is essentially marketing, you know, in the case of Van Gogh, very much created by his sister-in-law.
So his posthumous reputation is bolstered by the idea of him as the tortured genius. And I think you're exactly right. In the case of Musk, it would be more interesting to read an appraisal of Tesla as a company or SpaceX as a company, and just take him out of the equation entirely, because I think that he's there looming over it and maybe, really, clouding people's judgment about those companies.
Tesla is, you know, is paying him vast amounts of money, to the extent that it is currently in court about how much they want to pay him, because they believe that having a genius at the helm is so vital to what they're doing. And that may be profoundly distorting the reality of Tesla's market position. So yeah, I think it would be a healthier story to just try and put aside the mythology and see what's actually happening.
Rosin: Right. Well, that is so helpful, Helen. Thank you so much for helping us understand this moment through the lens of genius. And congratulations on your book.
Lewis: Thank you.
[ Music ]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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Eight die in hot air balloon accident in Brazil A video posted to social media showed a hot air balloon catching fire in the sky before plummeting to the ground in Brazil. Eight of the 21 people on board died in the incident, according to the local governor. 00:23 - Source: CNN Video shows missiles from Iran streaking skies of Israel CNN's Anderson Cooper reports live from Tel Aviv, as Israel's military says it identified missiles launched from Iran and that defense systems are working to intercept them. The military called on the public to "enter a protected space" and stay there until further notice. Israel has also begun a new wave of attacks in Iran, its military said Saturday. 00:31 - Source: CNN Why Fareed Zakaria thinks Trump has 'FOMO' foreign policy CNN's Fareed Zakaria analyzes what may be motivating President Trump's foreign policy: a fear of missing out. 00:44 - Source: CNN Anderson Cooper reports from a bomb shelter in Israel CNN's Anderson Cooper reports from a bomb shelter in the basement of a hotel in Tel Aviv as Iran fires another round of missiles at Israel. 01:13 - Source: CNN Aftermath of Iranian strike on Haifa CNN's Nic Robertson shows the aftermath of an Iranian strike on Haifa, Israel, less than an hour after it made impact. The strike wounded at least 17 people according to Israeli national emergency service MDA. 00:48 - Source: CNN Iran's foreign minister responds to Trump's call for negotiations After President Trump opened a two-week negotiating window before he decides whether to strike Iran, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says the country is not seeking negotiations with the United States. 00:16 - Source: CNN Iranian missile strikes major Israeli medical center CNN's International Diplomatic Editor, Nic Robertson, reports from Beer Sheva, Israel, where a hospital was struck during an Iranian attack. Iran said it was targeting an Israeli intelligence and command center 'near a hospital.' There have been no reported deaths from the strike. 01:04 - Source: CNN Israel's defense minister: Khamenei cannot 'continue to exist' Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz said Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cannot be allowed to 'continue to exist,' after an Israeli hospital was struck by an Iranian missile on Thursday. 00:13 - Source: CNN CNN correspondent reports on the ground in Tehran Air defense systems had been activated over Tehran overnight, according to a Telegram post from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. CNN's Fred Pleitgen reports on the scene. 01:41 - Source: CNN CNN on the ground in Tehran CNN's Fred Pleitgen is in Iran's capital city of Tehran and is the first western journalist to enter the country since its conflict with Israel started. Hear his first impressions and what he's witnessed as he journeyed across Iran. 01:28 - Source: CNN Trump says decision on Iran will come down to the last second CNN's Kaitlan Collins asks President Trump if he has made a final decision on whether to intervene in the Israel-Iran conflict. 01:12 - Source: CNN This is how the US could get involved in the Israel-Iran conflict CNN's Nick Paton Walsh reports on how the US could get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran while the countries continue trading strikes for a sixth day, with civilians in flashpoint areas facing waves of attacks. 02:14 - Source: CNN Trump open to assisting Israel in conflict with Iran CNN's Kaitlan Collins gives the latest reporting on the White House debating whether to intervene in the Israel-Iran conflict. 00:58 - Source: CNN Woman gives birth to triplets in underground Israeli hospital A woman gave birth to triplets Monday in Israel's Rambam hospital, one of several in the country that have moved some operations underground as Iranian strikes hit the city of Haifa this week, according to Reuters. 00:44 - Source: CNN What Iranian residents are texting to CNN as strikes hit As Israeli strikes zeroed in on Iran's capital city of Tehran, CNN's Clarissa Ward reports from Tel Aviv some of the messages she's received from residents in Iran offering a glimpse into the daily anxieties of living in a country faced with an ever-escalating conflict in the sky. 01:33 - Source: CNN Trump disputes intel chief Tulsi Gabbard on Iran President Donald Trump disputed his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, on how developed Iran's nuclear capabilities are and said Iran was on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon when Israel struck in recent days. 00:26 - Source: CNN Trump tells CNN reporter why he left G7 As President Donald Trump returns to the United States after leaving the G7 summit early, he took questions from journalists aboard Air Force One. Watch his answer to CNN's Chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins' question on why he left early. 00:44 - Source: CNN Trump slams Macron's comment on why he had to leave G7 summit early US President Donald Trump called out French President Emmanuel Macron over his counterpart's suggestion that he left the G7 summit to work on a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. "He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire," Trump wrote on Truth Social. 00:35 - Source: CNN Kaitlan Collins explains why Trump left G7 summit early President Donald Trump is heading back early to Washington from the G7 summit in Canada, as the conflict between Israel and Iran enters its fifth day. CNN's Kaitlan Collins reports on the escalating attacks between the two sides and Trump's warning to civilians in Tehran. 00:55 - Source: CNN Ex-Israeli Defense Minister's message to Trump Benny Gantz, Chairman of Israel's National Unity Party, and the former Minister of Defense speaks to CNN's Anderson Cooper following Israel's attack on Iran. 01:08 - Source: CNN Video shows Pakistani students returning home from Tehran Hundreds of Pakistani students who left their studies in Tehran amid daily strikes on the city by Israel, have crossed back into Pakistan, a local official told CNN. 00:28 - Source: CNN CNN team sees strike damage in Tel Aviv Residents in Tel Aviv, Israel, are reeling after another round of Iranian strikes on the city overnight. CNN's International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson visits a street in the center of the city where buildings were severely damaged and windows blown out by Iranian missiles. 01:28 - Source: CNN What we know about Iran's key nuclear site It's key to Iran's nuclear program: the Fordow plant - in a mountain lair where hundreds of centrifuges, hidden possibly 90 meters underground, enrich uranium to 60%. CNN's Nick Paton Walsh explains what we know about the key site in Israel's crosshairs. 01:00 - Source: CNN CNN asks Israeli official about plans to eliminate Iran's nuclear program Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tells CNN's Bianna Golodryga that it's up to the "free world" to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. 01:14 - Source: CNN Trump slams G7 for kicking out Russia President Donald Trump kicked off his visit to the G7 summit in Canada by criticizing nations for kicking out Russia eleven years ago. 00:36 - Source: CNN Shipping industry navigates Trump's trade war CNN's Kristie Lu Stout gets exclusive access on board a US-bound container ship in Hong Kong's port, the frontlines of China's 'export rush' chaos as the clock ticks down on a 90-day pause on US tariffs imposed on Chinese goods. 01:11 - Source: CNN Iranian state television says it was attacked by Israel The studio complex of Iran's state news channel IRINN was struck by Israel on Monday, according to the country's state news agency. A loud explosion was heard while an anchor was presenting live on air, according to a live feed. 00:19 - Source: CNN

Associated Press

20 minutes ago

• Associated Press

Democrats are at odds over the Israel-Iran war as Trump considers intervening

After nearly two years of stark divisions over the war in Gaza and support for Israel, Democrats are now finding themselves at odds over U.S. policy toward Iran as progressives demand unified opposition to President Donald Trump's consideration of a strike against Tehran's nuclear program while party leaders tread more cautiously. U.S. leaders of all stripes have found common ground for two decades on the position that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. The longtime U.S. foe has supported groups that have killed Americans across the Mideast and threatens to destroy Israel. But Trump's public flirtation with joining Israel's offensive against Iran may become the Democratic Party's latest schism, just as it is sharply dividing Trump's isolationist 'Make America Great Again' base from more hawkish conservatives. While progressives have staked out clear opposition to Trump's potential actions, the party leadership is playing the safer ground of demanding a role for Congress before Trump could use force against Iran. Many prominent Democrats with 2028 presidential aspirations are staying silent, so far, on the Israel-Iran war. 'They are sort of hedging their bets,' said Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who served under Democratic President Barack Obama and is now a strategist on foreign policy. 'The beasts of the Democratic Party's constituencies right now are so hostile to Israel's war in Gaza that it's really difficult to come out looking like one would corroborate an unauthorized war that supports Israel without blowback.' Progressive Democrats use Trump's ideas and words Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has called Trump's consideration of an attack 'a defining moment for our party' and has introduced legislation with Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., that calls on the Republican president to 'terminate' the use of U.S. armed forces against Iran unless 'explicitly authorized' by a declaration of war from Congress. Khanna used Trump's own campaign arguments of putting American interests first when the congressman spoke to Theo Von, a comedian who has been supportive of the president and is popular in the 'manosphere.' 'That's going to cost this country a lot of money that should be being spent here at home,' said Khanna, who is said to be among the many Democrats eyeing the party's 2028 primary. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, pointed to Trump's stated goal during his inaugural speech of being known as 'a peacemaker and a unifier.' 'Very fine words. Trump should remember them today. Supporting Netanyahu's war against Iran would be a catastrophic mistake,' Sanders said about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sanders has reintroduced legislation prohibiting the use of federal money for force against Iran, insisted that U.S. military intervention would be unwise and illegal and accused Israel of striking unprovoked. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York signed on to a similar bill from Sanders in 2020, but he is so far holding off this time. Some believe the party should stake out a clear anti-war stance as Trump weighs whether to launch a military offensive that is seemingly counter to the anti-interventionism he promised during his 2024 campaign. 'The leaders of the Democratic Party need to step up and loudly oppose war with Iran and demand a vote in Congress,' said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide, on X. Mainstream Democrats are cautious, while critical The staunch support from the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for Israel's war against Hamas loomed over the party's White House ticket in 2024, even with the criticism of Israel's handling of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Trump exploited the divisions to make inroads with Arab American voters and Orthodox Jews on his way back to the White House. Today, the Israel-Iran war is the latest test for a party struggling to repair its coalition before next year's midterm elections and the quick-to-follow kickoff to the 2028 presidential race. Bridging the divide between an activist base that is skeptical of foreign interventions and already critical of U.S. support for Israel and more traditional Democrats and independents who make up a sizable, if not always vocal, voting bloc. In a statement after Israel's first strikes, Schumer said Israel has a right to defend itself and 'the United States' commitment to Israel's security and defense must be ironclad as they prepare for Iran's response.' Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., was also cautious in responding to the Israeli action and said 'the U.S. must continue to stand with Israel, as it has for decades, at this dangerous moment.' 'It really seems like the Trump and Iran war track is kind of going along like a Formula 1 racetrack, and then the Democrats are in some sort of tricycle or something trying to keep up,' said Ryan Costello, a policy director for the Washington-based National Iranian American Council, which advocates for diplomatic engagement between U.S. and Iran. Other Democrats have condemned Israel's strikes and accused Netanyahu of sabotaging nuclear talks with Iran. They are reminding the public that Trump withdrew in 2018 from a nuclear agreement that limited Tehran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions negotiated during the Obama administration. 'Trump created the problem,' said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on X. 'The single reason Iran was so close to obtaining a nuclear weapon is that Trump destroyed the diplomatic agreement that put major, verifiable constraints on their nuclear program.' The progressives' pushback A Pearson Institute/Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from September 2024 found that about half of Democrats said the U.S. was being 'too supportive' of Israel and about 4 in 10 said their level support was 'about right.' Democrats were more likely than independents and Republicans to say the Israeli government had 'a lot' of responsibility for the continuation of the war between Israel and Hamas. About 6 in 10 Democrats and half of Republicans felt Iran was an adversary with whom the U.S. was in conflict. Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian American from Arizona, said Iranians are unwitting victims in the conflict because there aren't shelters or infrastructure to protect civilians from targeted missiles as there are in Israel. 'The Iranian people are not the regime, and they should not be punished for its actions,' Ansari posted on X, while criticizing Trump for fomenting fear among the Iranian population. 'The Iranian people deserve freedom from the barbaric regime, and Israelis deserve security.' ___ Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report

Hamilton Spectator

22 minutes ago

• Hamilton Spectator

Israel says it's preparing for the possibility of a lengthy war against Iran

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel 's military said Saturday it was preparing for the possibility of a lengthy war, and announced it struck an Iranian nuclear research facility overnight and killed three senior Iranian commanders in targeted attacks. The prospect of a wider war threatened, too. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said they would resume attacks on U.S. vessels and warships in the Red Sea if the Trump administration joins Israel's military campaign against Iran. The Houthis paused such attacks in May under a deal with the U.S. The U.S. ambassador to Israel announced the U.S. has begun 'assisted departure flights,' the first such flights from Israel since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza . Inside Iran, smoke rose from an area near a mountain in Isfahan, where the province's deputy governor for security affairs, Akbar Salehi, confirmed the Israeli strikes damaged the facility but caused no casualties. The target was two centrifuge production sites, according to an Israeli military official speaking on condition of anonymity under army guidelines to brief reporters. It was the second attack on Isfahan, which was hit in the first 24 hours of the war as part of Israel's goal to destroy Iran's nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed the latest attack. Iran again launched drones and missiles at Israel but there were no immediate reports of significant damage. The Magen David Adom rescue service said a drone hit a two-story building in northern Israel, with no casualties. The Israeli official called it a 'small barrage' that was largely intercepted by Israel's defenses. The official estimated that Israel's military has taken out more than 50% of Iran's launchers. 'We're making it harder for them to fire toward Israel,' he said. 'Having said all that, I want to say the Iranian regime obviously still has capabilities.' The Israeli military's chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, later said Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told the army to prepare for a 'prolonged campaign.' Iran says US military involvement would be 'dangerous' U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing active U.S. military involvement in the war. On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said 'I think that it would be very, very dangerous for everyone.' He spoke on the sidelines of an Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Turkey. Barring a commando raid or even a nuclear strike, Iran's underground Fordo uranium enrichment facility is considered out of reach to all but America's 'bunker-buster' bombs . Trump said he would put off his decision on military involvement for up to two weeks . The war erupted June 13 , with Israeli airstrikes targeting Iran's nuclear and military sites, top generals and nuclear scientists. At least 722 people, including 285 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 2,500 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group. One Tehran resident, Nasrin, writhed in her hospital bed as she described how a blast threw her against a wall in her apartment. 'I've had five surgeries. I think I have nothing right here that is intact,' she said Saturday. Another patient, Shahram Nourmohammadi, said he had been making deliveries when 'something blew up right in front of me' at an intersection. Iran has retaliated by firing more than 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, according to Israeli army estimates. Israel's multitiered air defenses have shot down most of them, but at least 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds wounded. Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but it is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich uranium up to 60% — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Israel is widely believed to be the only Middle Eastern country with a nuclear weapons program but has never acknowledged it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel's military operation will continue 'for as long as it takes' to eliminate what he called the existential threat of Iran's nuclear program and ballistic missile arsenal. No date set for new talks Talks in Geneva on Friday failed to produce a breakthrough. European officials expressed hope for future discussions. Iran's foreign minister said he was open to further dialogue while emphasizing that Tehran had no interest in negotiating with the U.S. while Israel continues to attack. 'Iran is ready to consider diplomacy once again, and once aggression is stopped and the aggressor is held accountable for the crimes committed,' he told reporters. No date was set for a new round of talks. For many Iranians, updates remained difficult. Internet-access advocacy group said Saturday that limited internet access had again 'collapsed.' A nationwide internet shutdown has been in place for several days. More attacks on Iranian military commanders Israel's opening attack killed three of Iran's top military leaders: one who oversaw the armed forces, Gen. Mohammad Bagheri; one who led the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard , Gen. Hossein Salami; and the head of the Guard's ballistic missile program, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh. Israel's defense minister said Saturday the military has killed a Revolutionary Guard commander who financed and armed Hamas in preparation for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the ongoing 20-month war in Gaza. Iranian officials did not immediately confirm Saeed Izadi's death, but the Qom governor's office said there had been an attack on a four-story apartment building and local media reported two people had been killed. Israel also said it killed the commander of the Quds Force's weapons transfer unit, who it said was responsible for providing weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas. Behnam Shahriyari was killed while traveling in western Iran, the military said. Iran threatens head of UN nuclear watchdog Iranian leaders say IAEA chief Rafael Grossi's statements about the status of Iran's nuclear program have prompted Israel's attack. On Saturday, a senior adviser for Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei, Ali Larijani, said in a social media post, without elaboration, that Iran would make Grossi 'pay' once the war is over. Grossi, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, warned Friday at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council against attacks on Iran's nuclear reactors, particularly its only commercial nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr. 'In case of an attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a direct hit would result in a very high release of radioactivity,' Grossi said, adding: 'This is the nuclear site in Iran where the consequences could be most serious.' Israel has not targeted Iran's nuclear reactors, instead focusing its strikes on the main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, centrifuge workshops near Tehran, laboratories in Isfahan and the country's Arak heavy water reactor southwest of the capital. Iran previously agreed to limit its uranium enrichment and allow international inspectors access to its nuclear sites under a 2015 deal in exchange for sanctions relief. But after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal during his first term, Iran began enriching uranium up to 60% and restricting access to its nuclear facilities. Iran has insisted on its right to enrich uranium — at lower levels — in recent talks over its nuclear program . But Trump, like Israel, has demanded Iran end its enrichment program altogether. ___ Rising reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Mehmet Guzel in Istanbul; Josef Federman in Jerusalem; Samy Magdy in Cairo; Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C.; and Farnoush Amiri and Jon Gambrell in Dubai contributed to this report. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .