Money can't buy love, Elon Musk is the latest in Silicon Valley to learn this

In Silicon Valley, people often wonder about this. Why does the rest of the world hate us, they ponder. Every time I am in Silicon Valley and whenever I meet its brilliant engineers, I get this sense. The sentiment runs across the rank and file. From CEOs to product managers, they all wonder why the rest of the world does not love them. Of them all, Elon Musk probably feels it most acutely. So much so that he has often been parodied for his yearning, which the world became aware of after his interview with The Rolling Stones around eight years ago. One such parody is by The Onion, which brings out its 'Please Like Me' article, which it posted on Musk in 2022, almost every week on social media.advertisementPoor Elon. Rich like an African king of yonder days, but poor nevertheless. Last year, after spending some serious money, and giving his time and energy, to help Donald Trump get into the White House again, Musk probably thought that finally he was home. That he was at last liked and loved by people who mattered. He campaigned for, and with, Trump on the US presidential election trail. He was a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, the private residence of Trump and his family. When Trump started giving shape to his administration last year after his win, he did so with the full involvement of Musk. When he moved into the White House, Musk got an office in the White House and control of DOGE, which essentially gave him the ability to put fingers in every pie.advertisementIt seemed that Musk and Trump were a pair inseparable, that theirs was a bond forged into the fires of trials and tribulations. And yet, the affair lasted less than a year.
So, what is the problem? Why can't Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley cohort find love from the rest of the world? It's the story of many Silicon Valley biggies. Mark Zuckerberg ran into it around ten years ago, when he realised that the world didn't love him. First, he tried to throw money at the problem. It didn't get him much love or likes. It's only recently, and that too not all that much, that he has turned into a likeable guy, thanks to his smart PR and a curated image of the guy-next-door. Bill Gates, influential no doubt, is not someone who is loved all that much by the rest of the world. For Jeff Bezos, it is the same. The list is long but the story is short: all that money and yet it doesn't buy the Silicon Valley honchos any love.The problem is that love, metaphorically speaking, is a finicky thing. Salman Rushdie talked of the beginning and end of a love story in his book Two Years, Eight Months. And while he was writing about romantic love, it is true for every kind of affection. 'At the beginning of all love, there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. The voice of doubt is stilled,' he wrote. The love story ends when, after a while in the future, for reasons one, two or many, this 'secret treaty looks like folly.'advertisementThe trick to love is apparently keeping the belief and faith in this secret treaty you make with yourself for as long as you can. And Musk, like most of his Silicon Valley peers, just couldn't. All good lovers know this: Love and truth don't go hand in hand. In loving, there is a bit of looking away involved, lies are part of it and so is the ability to ignore some truth. That is because humans are not rational creatures. This one simple reality throws Musk and his ilk completely off the balance whenever they are dealing with the world.Now, these are driven people. The Silicon Valley people. They are also brilliantly smart in a narrow sense. Even junior engineers in Silicon Valley are the smartest people you will meet. But they are not at all tuned for making and keeping secret treaties that are based on ignoring the truth. The same mind which gives them an advantage when it comes to cooking up products and services that the rest of the world wants to use, is a disadvantage to them in certain other parts of life.advertisementSilicon Valley believes that 2+2 always equals 4. Theirs is an engineer's mind, always logical and always striving to optimise the world. They can't imagine that 2+2 does not always equal 4. In love and life, often it can equal to 3 or 5. And you cannot do anything about it.Confronted with this quandary, the tech bros of Silicon Valley try to brute force their way. They throw money at the problem, they throw more mathematics and logic at it, they collect more data, they employ more compute, they try to bend the universe to their rules of logic, and if they are Elon Musk, they run polls on X asking the crowd to vote in their favour. But it doesn't end in a solution.advertisementInstead, it ends like how Elon Musk's White House affair has ended. Musk is probably a well-meaning guy. I am sure that his actions inflict a lot of misery in a lot of ways, but he also does a fair amount of good in the world in a fair number of ways. More importantly, he seems to be driven in his various endeavours, right or wrong, with a passion and genuineness. Working with the Trump administration too, Musk probably tried to 'save the world' — or rather 'save America' — and he tried to do it in the way he knows best, by brute forcing through the problem. But brute forcing your way through a company that you own is different from taking a bulldozer and running through an uneven world. It was never going to win Musk any love.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Tune InMust Watch

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