A lot of people hate Elon Musk. It isn’t hard to see why. He’s domineering, annoying, trollish, and extremely, extremely rich. He spreads weird conspiracy theories. He’s awkward, like a seven-year-old who is always trying to be cool and who nobody is willing to tell otherwise. He also wields immense social power. Musk bought an entire social media platform, transformed America’s perception of electric cars, and created an aerospace company that was responsible for three-quarters of all objects launched into space last year. He’s done all this with the care and accountability of that same seven year-old playing with a train set on their birthday.
We might think public dislike of Musk is petty. Maybe it’s just a warrantless self-hatred turned outwards at that rare person who has achieved great things. Mere mortals always try to drag the gods down to earth. But public suspicion of Musk is not just shallow ressentiment. Musk is the peak embodiment of a special problem of rule and domination in our immensely wealthy, capitalist societies: the problem of the entrepreneur.
Adventurers and Undertakers
Entrepreneurs are a special kind of elite. They are defined not by a pre-existing class position nor by special influence over political life, but rather by the exercise of qualities and powers that are distinctive to the world of business. Their entrepreneurial virtues are said to be scarcely distributed. Some of their talents mimic the heroic, risk-taking qualities of other elite figures in human history – knights, founders, explorers. Before the French term itself became widely adopted, the most common translations of entrepreneur were ‘adventurer’ and ‘undertaker.’ But entrepreneurs fuse those qualities with the manners and habits of business, so that they embody in a unique way the principles and characteristics of a market society itself. That is how they come to be innovators. They don’t just invent something, they see deeper and further into the desires of the masses than those future consumers see in themselves. The entrepreneur doesn’t just respond, he creates the need, then invents the product to satisfy it. He plays both sides of the demand and supply curves. He is capital personified.
This, some say, makes the entrepreneur unappreciable by those who do not more generally appreciate and love business. And it explains why they ought to enjoy the special powers and prerogatives of entrepreneurship: outsized profits, despotic control over workers and the workplace, prestige, and above all, control over future investment. Even when we despise particular instances, our society glorifies the type. Every college and university has a center for entrepreneurship studies; child-rearing guides teach parents age-appropriate methods for forming young entrepreneurs; the most globally mourned death of recent decades was Steve Jobs, the Good Angel of entrepreneurship to Musk’s Dark Prince. Entrepreneurship has become practically synonymous with human creativity itself.
Part of this admiration for entrepreneurs is that they achieve an elusive kind of freedom. Most people have to play by the rules. They operate within the normal constraints of the economy. You have a boss or assiduously follow one of the narrow paths laid out to become one. You comply with directions, meet established expectations, and, if you’re lucky, slowly climb the ladder. The roles are defined, the possibilities for your own activity are finite.
But entrepreneurs are not, or at least appear not to be, bound by the same constraints. They invest money they haven’t made yet; are given loans to make things that nobody has yet made; their business plans are often hard to distinguish from science fiction; their companies are an extension of their personality; they don’t just rule their business, they seem to get to make up its rules. They cast an image of pure freedom, of the near absence of constraint. Who wouldn’t want that, especially when faced with the alternatives? Platform labor companies, though offering a pale imitation of the real thing, have succeeded in part because they understand and sell this appeal: workers desire the genuine independence that our society affords to the lucky few.
An Anti-Democratic Power
What is so wrong about this? It is not the more familiar problem of wealth in politics. While it’s true that our politics is thoroughly oligarchic, the power afforded entrepreneurs is problematic for separate reason. They rule us without ruling through politics. They rule directly in and through their economic power. The loans they get, the funds they raise, and the capital they wield is a direct power over the future direction of our collective life. Whether they decide to pour billions of dollars into AI or crypto, mushroom coffee or space travel, virtual reality glasses or self-driving cars, they determine the future course of our collective cultural and social development. They really do end up deciding what will be available for us to consume and produce, what our forms of enjoyment are and what our social interactions will be like.
And they make these decisions in an utterly unaccountable way. Precisely because their power is economic, a question of how they spend their immense sums of capital, they decide for us all without it being all that clear that is what they are doing. They are, at most, accountable to their creditors, who they have to pay back – or spin a tale to explain why they need another loan. But in virtue of that dependence on creditors, they can utterly ignore the public itself. That is a special kind of power to rule. It is the anti-democratic power of the entrepreneurial elite. It is their native power, which requires no conversion of wealth into oligarchic domination, no insidious corruption of our democratic procedures or public officials. They can shape the future of society, the trajectory of culture, without passing any laws.
In some sense, that is one of the more insidious features of entrepreneurial culture. It seems wholly compatible with formal democracy. So long as they do what they do directly, in the economic sphere, it appears like there is no specific power they exercise over the public as such. We take notice when they plow their wealth into dark money PACs, private fundraisers, and special audiences, but we rarely even register this more direct use of their economic power to shape our social world.
It is not just their power that is disturbing, but our worship of them. The most important theorist of the entrepreneur, Joseph Schumpeter, called them “men of supernormal will and intellect.” Supernormal because they do not just respond to price signals but act upon prices. As agents who will into existence new relationships of demand and supply, through their application of capital to new enterprises, Schumpeter saw entrepeneurs as nothing less than the switchmen of history. They acted “outside the range of existing practice” and thus represented the “creative response” in history. Where once this creative response was a feature of political leadership, it was now the private domain of these economic leaders. Only a few have these capacities to make history by seizing on value propositions that seem like fantasies to ordinary people: “in most cases only one man or a few men who see the new possibility and are able to cope with the resistances and difficulties which action always meets with outside of the ruts of established practice.” These are the Machiavellis of the Market, founding empires one corporate board at a time.
Despite all the recent anxiety about fascism, it seems to me that we’ve missed where our society is seized by true cults of personality. Our Schumpeterian attitude toward entrepreneurship rules the day. It is our celebration of the despotic, ubermensch of the economy that speaks to something deep and dark in our public culture. They reflect back to us our capacity for invention as childish transgression, our human creativity as necessarily despotic imposition, our freedom as domination.
It isn’t wrong for us to want to create, invent, or free ourselves from unnecessary constraints. An immensely wealthy society like ours creates enormous possibilities for reinvention and self-transformation. But to do that we have to find something to resist the Nietzschean features of our economy and replace entrepreneurship as our model. We have to find ways of collectively determining the shape of a future we share, of understanding creativity as a process of reciprocal self-determination, of exerting control over finance and investment as something we all share in. Otherwise, no matter how pure and pristine our elections, someone else is in control.
