In Defense Of Elon Musk

He is under attack. For tweeting the wrong thing, for not making enough cars, for appearing unstable. Some of the criticisms have merit. Much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg. But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity? He is an engineer at heart, a tinkerer, a problem solverthe kind of person Popular Mechanics has always championedand the problems hes trying to solve are hard. Really hard. He could find better ways to spend his money, thats for sure. And yet there he is, trying to build gasless cars and build reusable rockets and build tunnels that make traffic go away. For all his faults and unpredictability, we need him out there doing that. We need people who have ideas. We need people who take risks.

We need people who try.

WE NEED ELON MUSK BECAUSE...

... I WANT TO GO TO MARS

It must have been fun to have been alive when Mark Twain walked the earth. You might have lived in Columbus, and made your own fine living selling barrel hoops. But among your everyday pleasures was included the possibility that when you picked up the newspaper, you might read a serialized report from the sometimes distant travels of Mark Twain, a highly recognizable guy with a contrived-sounding name, who wandered around the country thinking big ideas.

Not everybody liked Twain. They still don’t. He could be scandalous and self-indulgent. He smoked too much. Judgmental. And Twain, a one-time riverboat pilot, made nothing substantial, produced no commodities or goods, except his tales and observations. He took you somewhere. Mark Twain didn’t think for you, you barrel-hoop baron you. But he was out there. Thinking. He spoke past his newspaper editor, directly to the people, to his readers, whether they agreed with him or not. And while he certainly produced outsize, often painful, observations about what we had become as a people, he also offered glaring, satiric propositions concerning what we might want to try to be henceforth. And why.

In person, he could be wily, cold, and unpleasant, but Twain stood out as a man who reliably saw the truth of human purpose beneath the weighty mess of human foibles. He had ambitions for humanity. At the very least, he believed that humanity ought to have ambitions for itself.