Elon and the Genius Trap

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The bromance is over.

President Trump and Elon Musk trading barbs today over Republicans' big beautiful bill.

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.

A pretty intense back and forth between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Musk now claiming he won Trump the 2024 election to Trump threatening to cancel Musk's federal contracts.

Elon Musk tweeting within the past one minute,

time to drop the really big bomb at real Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.

That's the real reason they have not been made public.

Have a nice day, DJT exclamation point.

The feud between Trump and Musk escalated at a bewildering pace.

Elon and I had a great relationship.

I don't know if we're well anymore.

I was surprised.

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 tried to patch things up a bit, 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 Hannah Rosen.

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 then in the last few years, his reputation cratered 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 lips, 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, Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis has a very timely book out next week that helps explain this pattern.

It's called the Genius Myth, and Musk is its quintessential modern example.

As Lewis argues, societies build myths around individual geniuses.

And often those geniuses overstay their welcome, having second or third acts as they try to be experts in every field or simply try to hang on to the attention they've gotten as a genius.

I asked her to put this week's news about Musk into this wider picture and explain why she thinks we should avoid the label genius altogether.

Here's our conversation.

Helen, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

So I want to 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?

At the time, I think the assumption was that he had revolutionized not just one but two industries, which is very rare.

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 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 like 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.

Okay, so Elon has these amazing accomplishments.

He restores a certain kind of American confidence in 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?

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 a fellow, an honorary fellow in lots of places.

But he doesn't swagger about like he's a kind of special sort of human, a kind of a class apart, which is, I think, what Musk, you know, has accepted for himself.

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 a factory because he was so dedicated.

And like he was just relentless and everybody had to be extremely hardcore.

So to m you know, the argument in the book is that you can uh 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 of specialness.

And the line that I give that's the kind of classic example of this is, you know, Elon Musk currently has what 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 fourteen and they're called things like Romulus and X A Ash 12 and you know Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called Alice and Ben

right 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 going to try and like optimize everything in my life to be a really great story to sound special right so the key ingredient of genius is that you're willing to step into the role or mythology of genius you're you're willing to sort of lean into the story about yourself as a public genius.

Right.

And you also become a symbol of something bigger.

That's what I mean about becoming a national symbol.

There's 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 Chinura Chebe becomes a kind of symbol of the nation, or Chimamanda Nagozi Dice 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.

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?

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 analogue 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 will, you know, that is a tension that simply can't be sustained.

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.

Yeah, Doge 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, you know, 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 headcount, told everyone that they were lazy and only super, extremely hardcore people could stay.

And, you know, sure enough, Twitter is not

what it once was.

But, you know, 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 in 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.

Aaron Powell, 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

less than genius things at the actual company.

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 kind of, 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.

There are often the genius themselves or their fans, you know, run a kind of publicity campaign for this idea of them as a genius.

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.

Yeah, or you have to go and sit in obscurity and kind of let other people create the mythology for you.

Right.

And I guess Musk does both.

I mean, he's able to, you know, he's able to rally an army of fans, stands, and also do his own PR.

Right.

And there's a phrase that Manvir Singh, the anthropologist, used 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 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, you know, more effective vehicle for racism and videos of people losing their shit on street corners.

Who wants to join that mission?

Who wants to sacrifice their weekends to believe in that?

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.

Like he added the word child and also the word crazy.

And I'm just wondering if there's some moment where, you know, like 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 real negatives.

Not like fake charismatic negatives, but actual negatives.

And if you've been tracing that line.

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 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 a you know, lionising 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 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 he's now, having lost the left, he's now just quite spectacularly lost the right.

And you look at his approval ratings and they are, you know, they are in the Marianas trench.

I mean, it just could not be lower.

When we're back, we discuss what happens when a reputation craters like Musk's has and what the myth of genius can leave out of the story.

That's after the break.

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And so that's what we're 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.

I mean, 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.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: 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 Michelle Hussein 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

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.

Aaron Powell, right.

Like the news about Musk's drug use, which had been bubbling up, but is, you know, is now pretty voluminous.

Although I should say, the 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 that his genius label is fading, they think of it as more genuinely dysfunctional.

Yes.

I mean, you're right to mention the, 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 that 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 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, funny 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.

Right.

Okay.

So, what does the template leave out then?

Like, in the case of Elon, you know, there's a template that leads to your rise and success.

What parts are not told?

What people get left out of a story like this?

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 Rack took it over.

I mean, he was an early investor, but he got the title co-founder as part of a legal settlement.

Right.

You know, and the fact that ex, 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 like the, you know, the kind of like a scaffolding around the kind of statue of David, right?

And we knock away the scaffolding and then we've 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 the 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 the you know 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 the valley built up over the course of you know 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.

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, and so, you know, that's part of the mythology.

Yeah, I mean,

Gertrude Stein had Alice B.

Tocklis, 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 UK.

And there was a quote from the suffragette Hannah Mitchell that said, no cause was one 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, Mary Curie managed it just about, but very few people do.

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 propagation, continued propagation of geniuses as a special class.

How does he fit into that history?

Well, it's the propagation of people like themselves, really.

I think that's the thing.

I love that.

But isn't there also this idea that you can propagate yourself?

That 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.

Yeah, it's hardcore belief in the power of hereditary genius, which is, that's the title of the book, the 19th century book by Francis Galton, the eugenicist, Hereditary Genius, in which he attempted to categorise all of Britain into different classes, which he all gave a different letter to and work out how many people fitted in each one, which, you know, to meet now, that's 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 kind of breeding and its effects 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 super smart people that their children will be super smart.

And actually, statistically, the issue with that is that there is a very common phenomenon known as reversion to the mean, which means that if you're very smart, you're 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, in the exact way that you are.

So, it's to some extent, you know, a delusion, delusion, but it's a very recurrent one.

And this story of the genius sperm bank,

which I'm, there's a book by David Plotts 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 is 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 and read white, European.

And, you know, so he said, you know, 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 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 cancelled 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 the attention attention tap needed to stay on.

And that's something that I think you see with, you know, lots of people who talk about this sort of kind of breeding of geniuses is that they know that they're putting their hand on a, you know, a hob that is still hot.

They know people react enormously strongly to these discussions about race and intelligence.

And therefore, they're just,

they can't stop themselves from dabbling in it.

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?

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 excited.

It was, you know, 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 in it as you say in his later career after his great success you know 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, is that he doesn't have that filtered through a load of newspaper reporters in whose interest it is to present him in the most 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 Keccius Maximus the gladiator, which makes it slightly harder to maintain the kind of genius mystique that you might hope for in those situations.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, I think the phrase you used about Edson 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, it 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.

Right.

He's at a crossroads right now.

And, you know, Joe Rogan, the podcaster, who is a personal 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 stand up 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, that he has two futures ahead of him: one beloved sage who got us to Mars, one

vile shit poster 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 like rocky-style montage where he was at his worst low, and from that he rebuilt.

Because these

are stories, and they're therefore flexible.

And then they can be rewritten.

But you can almost feel you can feel everything bending towards the shape that the story wants to be.

That's how I felt when I was writing this.

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.

Yeah.

All 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?

That's ultimately how I see it.

It's better to talk about moments of inspiration, of, you know, fingertip touches with the divine, if you want to see it like that you know i don't think i won't want to be a killjoy who crushes people's appreciation of you know when i i write in the book about looking at the paintings of van gogh which i just absolutely love and i don't know you know the fact that he melded together impressionism and japanese woodblock prints in this completely new synthesis And the paintings that you can just feel the emotion pouring out of them.

And the brushwork 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, you know, it's just a painting.

My five-year-old could have done that.

No one's better than anyone else.

No, I do think that those paintings are the best of them 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, you know, his posthumous reputation is bolstered by the idea of him as the tortured genius.

And I think you're 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 is 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 that is currently in court 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.

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.

Thank you.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend.

It was edited by Claudine Abade.

We had engineering support from Rob Smirciak and fact-checking by Michelle Soraka.

Claudina Bade 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 theatlantic.com/slash listener.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Talk to you next week.