A humanist and a free speech champion: why I love Elon Musk

For some he's an all-too-powerful hate figure but for others, his contribution is essential

- Evgeny Lebedev

THE real battle is between the extinctionists and the humanists," wrote the world's richest man, Elon Musk, on Tuesday afternoon. "Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, the owner of X and Tesla made his point more strongly. “If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists,” he said, “its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”

Like many a thinking man thriving on X — and I’m told, by friends who know him well, he is a deep thinker — Musk has mastered the art of the intellectual leapfrog, coining -isms to advance outlandish conclusions under the veil of academic breakthroughs. “If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is humans should die out,” he said. I imagine his fans nodding obediently, incensed by the idea of an AI extinctionist having the nerve to think most people are awful and plotting the end of the world.

Musk does not want humans to die out; he wants them to dominate. Which makes sense when his own life reads like a parable on human potential. With that potential comes idealism: Musk’s hope for an “everything app” won’t be dashed by the sorry state of X’s commercial decline, thank you very much. Though X’s advertising revenues have halved, his followers are more loyal than ever. For Musk, that is most important. His goal was utopian from the start: taking one of the world’s biggest social media platforms private, in the name of free expression. What could possibly go wrong? Answer: lots. And yet I think the criticism directed towards him is unfair.