Musk, MAGA & Me

Sometimes our memories play tricks on us. Mine, thinking it’s Houdini constantly makes things disappear and appear randomly.  Such was the case with an interview I did with Elon Musk back in 1998.  He was then at Zip2, his startup which helped put newspapers across the country – including the NY Times – on the Internet.  At the time the nascent Internet was a sliver of what it is today and not surprisingly, Musk was on the bleeding edge of it. 

After I did the interview I didn’t think about Musk again until sometime around 2004 when I read something about SpaceX. I emailed him but by that time the address I had was dormant and we never connected. 

Then I literally forgot that I’d interviewed him for years, to the point where in 2013 I was a student at Founder Institute’s inaugural Founder’s Lab startup bootcamp in Palo Alto.  The leader of the program was Adeo Ressi, Musk’s roommate at Wharton. Ressi showed us his new Tesla, that Musk had given him because he refused to buy one. Despite this my memory wasn’t jogged about having interviewed Musk. 

It wasn’t until years later that for some reason my mental Houdini reminded me that not only had I interviewed him, but that the guy whose program I attended and who showed us his Tesla was his roommate! In a very George Costanza moment I remember thinking “Gee, what could I have said that would have connected me with the juggernaut that Musk was?”

Whatever I might have come up with, like George, I had missed my opportunity.  But it did cause me to go back and see if I had a copy of the interview.  I eventually found one online.  I read it and two things stood out: Prescience and spirit. The first has to do with knowing that the Internet was going to change the world and knowing that most big companies were clueless about how to harness it. I remember being amazed that the NYT (back when it was a big, somewhat respected newspaper) was using the relatively unknown Zip2 to get online. They were, apparently, clueless about how to do it themselves and that’s the opportunity Musk was exploiting.

As someone who was hyper focused on that space at the time, I kick myself for not recognizing that Musk was at a whole different level in terms of understanding where things were going. In a word, prescient.

The second thing that stands out from that interview is his entrepreneurial spirit. “When it comes to a recommendation for would-be entrepreneurs, Elon suggests that when you get an idea for a business, take a page from Nike and "Just Do It"! "Learn as you go" because there is no better way to learn about business than to get out there get your hands dirty by doing. "Attack the creation of a business enterprise with creativity and intensity." Don’t be scared to take risks, because there is always a fall-back position, (such as getting a regular job or going back to school and getting another degree) especially when you are young.” 

That entrepreneurial spirit has driven the American enterprise for much of her history and been a core driver of a prosperity greater than any in history.   

Fast forward a quarter century and last Monday Musk had a “conversation” with entrepreneur, president and future president Donald Trump.  As I was listening to the conversation I couldn’t help but thinking about how older Musk echoes younger Musk. He told Trump “…there has to be an active process for reducing rules and regulations because otherwise they just keep building up every year, and you get hardening of the arteries and eventually everything’s illegal or takes forever, and then we just ossify as a society, we can’t make any progress, and it’s a really big deal.” Musk correctly articulated that regulations are strangling America’s productivity.  Indeed they are. 

This followed an exchange between the two moments earlier: Musk “Well, I think part of what people in America want to… People in America want to feel excited and inspired about the future. They want to feel like the future’s going to be better than the past, and that America’s going to do things that are greater than we’ve done in the past, reach new heights that make you proud to be an American and excited about the future.” To which Trump responded:  “They want the American Dream back. They want the American dream back, more important than anything else.”

That may not sound like anything extraordinary, but step back for a moment.  On one end of the conversation you have Musk, easily the greatest and most accomplished entrepreneur in a generation if not longer.  On the other you have a man who spent half a century in the trenches building a multibillion dollar empire around the world and the last decade enduring literally constant abuse from the media and political opponents and intellectual elites as he seeks to rescue the country from the Communist Democrat leviathan known as the Swamp.  They set fire to his last year in office, they leveraged Covid to steal the election, they bastardized the judiciary to jail him and they literally shot him… and the guy’s still standing!

So what we had was two extraordinarily accomplished men just talking about the future of the country, both the potential and the roadblocks. And unlike the Democrats who rule America, these two have actually accomplished things, built things, made things work and provided incomes for tens of thousands of Americans.  Virtually no Democrats in America from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to the sainted Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas have ever held a real job in the private sector, have no clue how to run anything, do anything other than incite mobs.  Yet they are in charge of our country.  In one sentence Trump hit the nail squarely on the head:  "These people are lunatics... In many cases the people from within are more dangerous for our country than the Russias and the Chinas..."  That sentence was by far the most powerful in the entire conversation because it demonstrates that unlike almost every other politician in America, Donald Trump understands where the enemy of the Republic is and who they are. 

The ideas covered in the conversation, government regulation, crime, the American dream, and the traitors within are rarely so well communicated directly to the American people.  Usually they’re processed like sausage by the Democrats and the mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy) so that they come out sounding like Nazi propaganda.  Which is exactly why the left is having convulsions over their inability to twist and manipulate and, frankly, lie about the message. 

And that my friends, may be the turning point in this election and in the direction of the country.  In buying Twitter and freeing it from government censors, Musk may finally create a connection between candidates and the American people that cannot be manipulated by the propaganda ministry.  In doing so he’s certainly taking the advice of his younger self: ”Don’t be scared to take risks.” He, like Trump, is risking much, and for both, perhaps more than just money.  But sometimes there’s a calling that goes beyond ourselves.  America is most certainly one such calling and I’m grateful these two men have decided it’s worth the risk.

Paris 2000 & Paris 2024: A Tale of Two Cities...

On New Year’s Eve 1999 I was tending bar at Outback Steakhouse in DC.  As midnight rolled through each time zone celebrations from each city were shown on TV.  At 6:00 I looked up and what I saw would change my life. It was Paris and I was captivated.  Everything seemed to be outlined in lights.  The bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the walks along the river, the Louvre… seemingly everything. I was enchanted and turned to a friend and said “I have to go there…” 

Five months later I was standing on one of those bridges I’d seen on TV.  It was my first visit to the city and it was the most beautiful place I’d ever been.  I remember standing on a bridge near the Louvre, staring at the Eiffel Tower and saying to myself “I have to live here someday.”

The next day I would meet my future bride in the form of my guide in the gardens of Versailles.  I spent a week in the city and easily had the greatest week of my life. I would go on to visit France a dozen times over the next 20 years and experience much of what the city and the country had to offer… and I would eventually live there too.

The celebration that I’d seen on that night in the bar had been a carefully choreographed effort to show the world, on the biggest stage, the beauty of Paris, the glory of France and invite the world to visit.  It worked for me and tens of millions of others. In 2002 France would become the world’s number one tourist destination, a position it has held for most of the quarter century since.  Tens of millions of tourists would visit Paris and France and their billions of Euros make up 10% of France’s GDP.  That celebration might just have been the most effective advertisement in human history.

Now, jump ahead a quarter century when Paris is hosting the Olympics.  The event began ten days ago with what was essentially a three-hour commercial in front of one of the largest worldwide television audiences possible, with upwards of 1.5 billion people watching. 

And what did France do with this once in a lifetime opportunity?  Showcase French culture? Showcase the most beautiful city in the world? Showcase the bridges or the buildings or the sculptures or the parks? The Sun King - Louis XIV, Victor Hugo, or Baron Haussmann, the father of the city we know today?  Umm… not exactly.

While there were tiny glimpses into some of that, the reality is that the opening ceremonies were a celebration of everything but the grandeur of France. From an early ménage à trois hookup in the public library to the despicable mocking of the Last Supper by a cast of deviant trans characters to what looked like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sitting in front of the Eiffel Tower, almost the entire thing was a giant middle finger to face of culture in general and Christianity in particular.  And don’t be fooled by the Olympic Committee’s “apology” if anyone was offended.  Nor by the designer Thomas Jolly’s disingenuous claims that the feast was based on a Greek festival featuring Dionysus, the god of wine and the father of Séquana, the goddess of the river Seine.  In the same piece TheWrap quotes an Olympics producer stating: “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting…Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief … [Jolly] is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to ‘The Simpsons,’ many have done it before him.”

Despite the denials, the opening ceremonies were clearly an attempt to push LGBT deviancy into the mainstream of world consciousness – in a way that it could never have reached viewers in most of the world otherwise – and do so while mocking the faith of Christians, the one faith the left feels safe in mocking. 

Rush Limbaugh used to say “Politics is downstream from culture”. He talked about it in the context of schools, Hollywood and the media acting as the bleeding edge of ideas that the left was trying to inculcate into America, and that eventually legislation would follow.  There is no better example of this than gay marriage a decade ago and today’s trans ideology and its attendant child mutilation demands.

What we saw on Friday was an attempt to use this traditionally – by design – apolitical venue showcasing human achievement, human competition and most of all human spirit, as the camel’s nose in the world’s tent for the homosexual / transsexual agenda. 

And that right there is the crux of the problem.  The mocking of Christianity is of course vile, but a free society thrives on free speech, and that includes mockery and derision. Similarly, the LGBTQXYZ123 agenda, while perhaps unseemly to many, is welcome to take its place in the arena of ideas. That’s not the problem. No, what makes this event so despicable, and frankly, disheartening, is the fact that given the platform and three hours in front of a billion viewers, rather than France showcasing her beauty and elegance and history and culture, someone decided to hand that opportunity over to activists bent on showing France, not as one of the great foundations of western civilization, but rather to be a nation of depravity, sacrilege and deviance.

Make no mistake, while the Olympics are indeed about athletes and competition and spirit, at the end of the day, money is what makes them work. Broadcasters pay many billions of dollars for the right to be able to broadcast the games. Companies pay billions of dollars to be associated with the games for the specific purpose of advertising their offerings. Hosts pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the Olympic Committee and promise to spend billions more on the games, often knowing they are going to lose money in the process, all in hopes of generating money in the long run from tourism.

This Olympic betrayal is not going to destroy tourism to France. People are still going to come, by the tens of millions. The Louvre and the Mona Lisa aren’t going anywhere. The Eiffel Tower isn’t going anywhere and Paris’ spectacular bridges and boulevards aren’t going anywhere.  But what might have been destroyed is the illusion that French culture in the 21^st century is anything resembling or worthy of that which built some of the greatest achievements in western civilization. Does anyone who watched that spectacle imagine that the France of the 21^st century could ever match the glories crafted by the France of history that brought us the Rights of Man, Mont-Saint-Michel or the palace of Versailles?  Of course not. It won’t do anything in the short run but make Paris and France the butt of jokes. In the long run however, that’s a different story.  Cultures rarely die in a grand cataclysms, but rather wither on the vine from neglect, indifference, ingratitude and contempt. That, I think is the message of the 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony in Paris. For a nation I love, that’s a message, I for one would rather not have seen.

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