Nor Jeff Bezos. In fact, both seem very much more rooted and based than the critic here:
Elon Musk is inspired by Iain Banks’s utopian sci-fi novels – but he doesn’t understand them
The billionaire says he’s ‘a utopian anarchist of the kind described by Iain M Banks’ – but what of Banks’s socialist and anti-wealth views?
Ah, yes:
As with Consider Phlebas and the eight Culture books to follow – the final published a year before Banks’s death – the story revolves around a “post-scarcity” human society in the far future. The Culture is a civilisation without want or need
Quite so, very Marxist, very communist:
“Let’s be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American libertarianism,” he told PhD researcher Jude Roberts, in a series of interviews published by Strange Horizons magazine. “Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, ‘Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness?’…Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?”
Indeed.
But the Big Q is how do we get from here to there? One answer would be that we change humans. We wait for New Soviet Man to arrive and all will be well. Or, we can do what Marx predicted would happen. Capitalism continues to become ever more productive until we arrive in that post-scarcity society and all will indeed be well. Which is where Banks picks up the point to weave into his tales.
Now, it’s possible to wonder whether Marx was actually right - the very idea of a post-scarcity society doesn’t fit well with the existence of positional goods for example. But why not as the McGuffin for a series of novels? Why not even as a dream about the possible future society?
But as Marx pointed out it is a thought about the future and there is that little step of getting from here to there. And also as Marx pointed out it’s the onward march of capitalist efficiency - driven, obviously, by the entrepreneurs - which will, if it can indeed happen at all, lead us into those sunlit uplands.
To borrow some of the phraseology from those who think too little about this, the objective reality is that Musk and Bezos, along with their class, are the very handmaids of that world to come. If, of course, it does come. For as - to berate the point - Marx himself pointed out, that true communism, that Culture, will only arrive in a post-scarcity society. So, we’ve got to keep making capitalism that ever more efficient until we get there, don’t we?
As Musk, Bezos and their class do.
It’s not Musk and Bezos with the misunderstanding about their place in the onward march of history and the inevitable arrival of the glorious future now, is it?