Latest news with #WorldWideWeb
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'One of the best dramas' now streaming for free as fans say 'it's a must-watch'
All episodes of critically-acclaimed period drama Halt and Catch Fire have just landed on ITVX "One of the best drama series" is now streaming for free as fans say "it's a must-watch". US series Halt and Catch Fire, created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, offers a fictionalised insider's perspective of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, as well as the early days of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The programme's title refers to the phrase used for computer machine code instructions that cause a computer to "cease meaningful operation". The synopsis reads: "It's the early 1980s, and the spirit of innovation in personal computing is about to ignite. "Hot on the trail is a renegade trio - a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy - who risk everything to realise their vision of building a computer that can change the future," reports Surrey Live. The series features Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis, Kerry Bishé, Toby Huss and Aleksa Palladino in leading roles. Recurring stars include Anna Chlumsky, Annette O'Toole, August Emerson, Cooper Andrews and David Wilson Barnes. Halt and Catch Fire first aired on AMC back in 2014, and ran for four seasons with a total of 40 episodes, which concluded with a two-hour series finale in 2017. All episodes of the show have just been added to ITV's free streaming service, ITVX, so UK-based fans can now relive the drama with ads. Eleven years after its release, Halt and Catch Fire currently boasts an impressive 90% critics score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. The show has also resonated with viewers, who have praised its "compelling" storyline and "wonderful" characters, drawing comparisons to the hit period drama Mad Men. "One of the best drama series of all time. Can't remember when I last cried watching a TV series, but Halt and Catch Fire left me sobbing. Wonderful characters. Compelling mixture of fact and fiction. What more could you want?" one person wrote. Another added: "The very best show no one really watched," while a third said: "I love this show. I can't believe how underrated and under the radar it is. What a special show, it should have gotten way more credit." A fourth fan echoed the sentiment, saying: "This show catches the nostalgic momentum that so many of us old school geeks long for," with another similarly sharing: "This is a highly addictive story and the character development is excellent. It's a must watch!!!"
Economic Times
13-06-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
With Google's latest move, internet's becoming less ad-driven search, more user-paid GenAI
wwwhats-up@ As you browse the web, you must have encountered the 404 error, signifying that a web page can't be found. What you haven't seen is a similar code: 402. When Tim Berners- Lee was creating the World Wide Web, 402 was the code for 'payment required'. The original intention was that every visitor had to pay something to view a web page. But the schema was never built. So, there is no standardised encoded way to send or receive money online. In a 2019 podcast, Netscape builder Marc Andreessen explained: 'One would think the most obvious thing to do would be building in the browser the ability to actually spend money, right? You'll notice that didn't happen... we couldn't actually build economics into the core of the internet and so therefore advertising became the primary business model... We tried very hard to build payments into the browser. It was not possible... We made a huge mistake.' In 2014, internet expert Ethan Zuckerman wrote that 'advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.' Arguably, it's this 'original sin' that has made the largest destinations of the web the morass that it has become now. Thus, social networking has morphed into social media, as TikTok and Instagram pivoted to attention-seeking content that is optimised for views and clicks. This is also why Google's famous '10 blue links' are dominated by sponsored and advertiser preferences, rather than the succinct and accurate answer that a user wants. This drove even Berners-Lee to often regret his 'invention' and made him and others dream of a new kind of web - the concept of Web3, conceived to be 'owned' by users rather than advertisers, decentralised rather than concentrated with a handful of powerful tech companies, and, most importantly, have a different business model: that of micropayments. Thus, the user pays for the content she wants to consume, rather than advertiser paying for it, and the payment is also shared with the original the last 20 years, the company around which the existing web has revolved has been Google. While the 'advertiser pays' model was first brought in by companies like Yahoo and MSN, it was Google that perfected it as it made 'search' the way to organise the web. On the internet, if it's free, you're the product. Thus, Google and others sharply targeted and sold your attention, intentions and interest to advertisers who paid handsomely for it. How handsomely? Search contributed $54 bn of Google's $96 bn revenue in the last quarter, and reportedly most of its profitability. But it's also the model that held Google back and made it tiptoe tentatively into the world of GenAI. The search-through-chat business model of AI, which Perplexity or ChatGPT uses, does not lend itself as effectively to the advertising business model. Google experimented with 'AI Overviews' since I/O 2024. This model of AI-generated answers to common topics became popular with users, but reduced click rates on ads. This is the classical 'innovators' dilemma' that Harvard professor Clayton Christensen proposed in 1997, where he posited that great companies lose out to startup innovators, because they do not want to cannibalise their existing profitable business month, Google finally bit the bullet at I/O 2025, announcing that all its US users will be able to activate 'AI mode' in Google search and Chrome browser that will provide a conversational, question-and-answer experience akin to OpenAI's ChatGPT, rather than a traditional list of what happens to the super-profitable search business model? The company is tight-lipped about it, and is reportedly working to insert ads into AI answers. This is not as easy, however, since GenAI is a probabilistic tech, unlike the deterministic nature of traditional search. Thus, predicting what search result will come and matching advertiser needs to them becomes much more Google has hinted at a change in revenue model, with a $20 subscription for the service, and a $250 subscription for the super-premium version. So, with this monumental change, is the World Wide Web shifting on its axis? And does it take us one step closer to the dreams of a new web - user-owned, more democratic, and where you are finally not the product?Time will tell. But what is clear is that I/O 2025 did not signal just the re-emergence of Google in AI leaders, but also the emergence of a new kind of internet. So far, it was search around which the web was organised and the advertiser-driven model that paid for it. Maybe, we are now inching towards a web organised around GenAI, with subscribers paying for it - and content creators getting ably rewarded too. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. Warren Buffett-fan Pabrai is betting big on Edelweiss' Rashesh Shah. Will it pay off? Coal on one hand and green on the other; this company balances both Yet another battle over neem; this time it's a startup vs. Procter & Gamble Move over tariffs, China wields rare earths in an economic war of a different kind Is Zomato under siege? Quick commerce may be the next telecom 9 stocks from different segments of financial services sector with an upside potential of up to 37% Stock picks of the week: 5 stocks with consistent score improvement and return potential of more than 32% in 1 year Is an oil shock on its way? 14 stocks to watch carefully if the Iran-Israel conflict leads to a sustained rise in crude oil prices
Local France
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Local France
La Belle Vie: France's most important inventions and pastis-flavoured crisps
La Belle Vie is our regular look at the real culture of France – from language to cuisine, manners to films. This newsletter is published weekly and you can receive it directly to your inbox, by going to your newsletter preferences in 'My account'. I'm coming up on my sixth anniversary of moving to France, and sometimes I look back with wonder at the fact that I made such a huge decision right after graduating from university. The first four months were the hardest - I struggled to find an apartment and quickly ate into my savings, opening a bank account was a four-week-long nightmare, and learning French was much harder than I'd expected. Most other foreigners I've met in France can relate to the emotional ups and downs of the first few months, after all, you left behind family, friends, and very likely, a job. As such, I understand the appeal of trying to hold onto the latter, but if you want to live in France and work remotely for US or UK-based clients, there are some important things to consider beforehand. So you want to move to France and work remotely? The internet certainly helps with staying connected to loved ones on the other side of the Channel or the Atlantic Ocean. This might be common knowledge for folks above a certain age, but I was fascinated to learn recently that France invented one of the early predecessors to the internet. Before we had the World Wide Web, there was Minitel , which was owned by the French government and was only finally discontinued in 2012. Advertisement French inventions may have changed your life more than you realise. 12 world-changing inventions that came from France On the other hand, there are some inventions we often associate with the French that are not really French at all. You might be surprised to learn that croissants, the metric system and wine all find their origins outside of France. 22 of the biggest myths about French history One little piece of French history is that tea actually made it to France before Britain. It was the Dutch, another European nation not particularly noted for their tea drinking proclivities, who introduced it to France in the 17th century. While I'm not a huge tea fan myself, I do enjoy a tisane occasionally before bed. I learned quickly that tisane (herbal, non-caffeinated tea) is not the same as thé (caffeinated tea). There are some other small tea peculiarities to be aware of in France. The ultimate guide to tea drinking in France Maybe my British coworkers are having an influence on me, but I have started paying closer attention to the exact size of the glass that my beer is served in. French bars and cafés have more or less decided that a pint ( une pinte ) is symbolic and really should work out to 50cl, instead of the 56.8cl it technically should be. Advertisement This has angered enough of the beer-loving public that a campaign called balance ta pinte (denounce your pint - the slogan taken from balance ton porc , France's version of the MeToo hashtag) has taken hold. The 'pint wars' raging in French bars and cafés And finally, if you want to be more authentic with your drinking habits in France, you could go for a glass of pastis, the aperitif that tastes of aniseed and liquorice. If you want to feel extra French (and you like the taste of pastis), then you can also have it in crisp (chip, for US readers) form. Tartiflette and pastis: The French crisp brand making taste all its own
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Elon and the Genius Trap
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Was Elon Musk ever a genius? Yes, he revolutionized the electric-car industry and space travel. Yes, he once seemed to represent America' 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.[] 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. News clip: A pretty intense back-and-forth between Donald Trump and Elon Musk— News clip: Musk now claiming he won Trump the 2024 election to Trump threatening to cancel Musk's federal contracts— News clip: Elon Musk tweeting within the past one minute: 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That's the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!' 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. [] 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 midterms, 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. [] 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. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
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' 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.
