Dev Patnaik
We need more people who care enough to change the future, and more people who can change the future who care enough to make it better.
On Thursday night, a small crowd gathered at the SpaceX rocket testing facility in McGregor, Texas. In front of them stood a giant circular ramp that rose into the sky like a child’s Hot Wheels track come to life. Elon Musk stood a safe distance away with two of his most trusted execs from Tesla. They were obviously excited. And more than a little bit nervous. “Success is not guaranteed,” he warned the audience. A giant screen started a countdown from ten.
At T-minus zero seconds, a gleaming white prototype of the new Tesla Roadster came into view. Slowly, it began to climb the ramp, until it was hanging upside down like a roller coaster. Then it backed down and made another run. This time, the car launched off the end of the ramp. The car fired compressed-air jets from its bottom and side panels and corkscrewed through the air. A second later, the Roadster was on the ground again, having returned to earth like one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets. The crowd erupted in applause, chanting Elon’s name. Musk grinned, “Well, it worked.”
Onlookers watched the demonstration in amazement. The engineers had combined a powerful suction system that allowed the car to cling to the ramp with compressed-air thrusters borrowed from SpaceX rocket technology. In its next demonstration, the Roadster accelerated from zero to sixty miles per hour in .81 seconds.
Of course, the Tesla Roadster is still a prototype. The vehicle was autonomous, if only to protect the life of any human driver. There are plenty of questions about when customers will actually be able to buy something similar. But for a few moments on Thursday night, the world witnessed something that belonged in a science fiction movie. It’s hard to think of another entrepreneur who would even attempt something so outrageous, much less assemble the talent and resources required to make it happen.
And yet, this weekend, audiences will fill theaters to watch a movie about the darker consequences of Elon Musk’s influence. Musk is a four-hour documentary that examines his corruption, his perfidy, and the damage he’s caused to the world. That is what makes Elon Musk such a confounding figure. Few people have done more to make improbable futures real. And few have forced us to question so deeply why we celebrate people like him at all.
The Problem with Elon
For the past few years, I’ve been writing about what it means to be future focused. That idea grew out of something I’ve observed throughout my career: successful companies that don’t focus on the future can get blindsided by changes in the world around them. These are often well-run businesses, filled with talented people making sensible decisions. But they’re so focused on today’s performance that they fail to recognize the forces that will reshape their world tomorrow. And by the time those forces are impossible to ignore, it’s often too late.
Future-focused leaders think differently from the rest of us. Over the last thirty years, I’ve had the chance to learn from extraordinary leaders like Richard Branson, Lucian Grainge, and Ratan Tata. These leaders have imagined possibilities that most people couldn’t see. They look beyond what’s happening right now, consider what might happen next, and build a bridge from the Now to the Next. But then there’s Elon.
By every measure that I might use, I am forced to concede that Elon Musk is one of the most future-focused leaders of our generation. And yet, so much of his personal behavior and public impact has been reprehensible enough to cause me to question the very premise of being future focused.
At the dawn of the internet, Elon Musk helped build the company that became PayPal. When most automakers regarded electric vehicles as a niche curiosity, he helped make Tesla the company that forced the industry to take them seriously. SpaceX developed rockets that could return to Earth and fly again, changing the economics of spaceflight. Starlink now connects people in remote places, while Neuralink is helping people with paralysis control computers with their thoughts.
Musk enters virgin territory, attracts extraordinarily talented people, and keeps investing when the prospects look ridiculous. Many of his predictions have been wildly optimistic, and some ventures have failed. But he’s repeatedly turned things that once belonged in science fiction into reality.
Still, one must question the reality that he sees. In 2023, he endorsed an antisemitic post invoking the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. This January, an analysis by The Guardian found that he posted about threats to white people or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracies on 26 of 31 days. Under the Trump administration, his influence has extended well beyond business. His so-called Department of Government Efficiency slashed meaningful programs while producing negligible savings. Musk drove the dismantling of USAID, disrupting humanitarian aid to the most vulnerable communities. A peer-reviewed study in The Lancet estimates that continued cuts will lead to more than 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030. Many of them will be children.
Elon Musk’s management has contributed to toxic workplaces at many of his companies. Allegations of sexual harassment and racism have been a recurring theme in lawsuits filed by former employees. When he took over Twitter, Musk laid off thousands and refused to pay them proper severance.
The new documentary adds a more personal dimension. It includes interviews with his ex-wife and others who describe painful family conflicts and shattered relationships. Musk himself has called the film a hit piece. And while even a nearly four-hour-long documentary can’t tell us everything about a person, those accounts are unsettling to say the least.
So, what are we to make of Elon Musk? He embodies the idea of being future focused as much as anyone, yet the choices he makes are deplorable. That contradiction seems to undermine the very argument for being future focused. Part of the problem may lie in our assumptions about what the future might hold.
The Myth of Progress
In America, we generally think of the future as a place that’s better than the present. There are many examples that would lead one to feel validated in the assumption. Medicine has extended human life. Technological miracles now fit in our pockets. Extreme poverty has declined dramatically. And we have no shortage of popular mythology to reinforce the story of progress. Hollywood has supplied the flying cars and friendly robots, while Silicon Valley promises that each new breakthrough will unlock another era of abundance. After so many rising graphs, progress can start to feel like a law of nature.
And yet, even a cursory review of history tells a different story. The graph of the human condition doesn’t always move up and to the right. In 1250 BCE, bronze-age civilizations suffered a devastating collapse that set us back for centuries. The Western Roman Empire fell after centuries of advances in engineering and government. Countless millions suffered and untold knowledge was lost when the Mongol hordes rolled across Asia. Twentieth-century Germany, among the world’s most scientifically and culturally advanced nations, descended into Nazism and exterminated millions of people.
We tend to use the future and progress almost interchangeably. But the future isn’t necessarily better than the present. It’s simply what comes next.
Silicon Valley has given us more recent reasons to question the mythology of human progress. Mark Zuckerberg believed connecting the world would bring people together, but Facebook and Instagram have also become vehicles for manipulation and division. The most striking evidence comes from Facebook’s own internal research. In 2016, Facebook researchers studying extremist activity in German political groups discovered that 64% of joins to extremist groups were attributable to Facebook’s own recommendation tools. Features like “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” weren’t merely helping people find communities they were already looking for. They were actively helping recruit people to extremist groups.
And Mark Zuckerberg is not alone. Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to be building a better financial system. Elizabeth Holmes promised to transform healthcare. (You can check out her documentary this weekend, too.) Their failures differed, but each exposed the danger of confusing ambition with progress. Now AI promises advances in medicine and productivity, alongside new capabilities for surveillance and harm. What those technologies make possible tells us remarkably little about what people will choose to do with them.
To What End?
When someone imagines extraordinary possibilities and finds a way to make them real, we begin to assume they also have the wisdom to know which possibilities are worth pursuing. We marvel at what they’ve made possible and spend less time asking who will benefit or who might be harmed. Soon someone who builds electric cars and rockets becomes an authority on how the rest of us should live.
Elon Musk deserves gratitude for accelerating the shift to electric vehicles. For transforming spaceflight. And for extending internet access to places that needed it. But intelligence, imagination, and determination don’t automatically confer wisdom or compassion. And that’s the distinction we’ve been missing. Being future focused is an ability, but it is not a virtue. It expands our capacity to envision what might come next without telling us what sort of future is worth creating.
The rest of us have decisions to make: what to fund, what to build, and whose judgment to trust. No one is coming to guarantee us a better future. History has no automatic setting for progress. If the direction matters to us, we have to influence it. Resolving the paradox of Elon Musk should leave us even more convinced of the need to be future focused. And that being future focused alone isn’t enough.
We need more people who care enough to change the future, and more people who can change the future who care enough to make it better. If you care deeply about the world we’re creating for our children, yes, we need you to become more future focused. We need people who can see what might be coming and do the hard work of making it happen. And if you’re already future focused, we need you to become wiser. We need you to think more carefully about whose lives your decisions will affect and recognize that extraordinary accomplishments don’t necessarily make the world a better place.
It’s unclear whether Tesla’s actual roadster will fly when it’s ready for sale to wealthy Muskovites. It’s even less clear whether the rest of us will get a lift.
