Lord of the Wrongs: What Musk gets wrong about Tolkien and Orwell

That means Musk’s own net worth, as well as the financial prospects of all of his other companies in turn, relies upon enough investors still believing Elon is a genius. When it comes to maintaining a reputation for brilliance, silence is usually golden – to open your mouth too often is to risk saying something that reveals you to be a mere mortal.

Naturally, Musk does nothing of the sort. He is the main character of X, the social network he built from the ashes of Twitter after its purchase. Most recently, after the killing of a dog walker in Uxbridge, he used a painful Lord of the Rings analogy to explain the need for the people of the UK to recognise Tommy Robinson as our leader.

Musk posted:

“When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away.

“They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.

“What happened to the nice man who was brutally murdered while walking his dog will happen to all of England if the tide of illegal immigration is not turned.

“It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all die.”

It is easy to look like a genius when you post vaguely about artificial intelligence, robotics, or spaceflight. We all know these things are difficult, and almost all of us accept we know basically nothing about them. So, if someone who’s become very rich in those fields makes bold pronouncements about them, most of us will accept that they know more than us. Elon Musk can say pretty much any old stupid shit about these topics, and lots of people will take it as face value.

This doesn’t hold for things like Lord of the Rings. These aren’t mysterious, or especially complex. They are books and movies that millions of Musk’s fans have read or watched, with many joining the world’s obsessive fandom. So if he gets the basics of LOTR wrong, people notice.

And for one short post, Musk gets Tolkien profoundly wrong. There are basic errors of geography around who might be said to be ‘protecting’ the Hobbits and the Shire (it was the rangers, not the men of Gondor). But the post relies on a profound misunderstanding of the fairly simple parable Tolkien was telling. Ambitious and powerful men are easily corrupted by the influence of The One Ring, and of its maker, Sauron.

The good-hearted and generous Hobbits of the Shire are resistant to that corruption, and it’s that selflessness and willingness to sacrifice that eventually saves the ‘hard men’ of Tolkien’s book. Compassion and fellowship – the clue is in the name – prove more powerful than steel. Tolkien, a committed Catholic, always denied his books were analogies, but the parallels with Christianity are not hard to see. 

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Rats in a Sack

Elon Musk’s post makes it very obvious he has not understood a book and movie franchise that most of his fans love. Worse still for the billionaire, it is not a complicated plot: a moderately bright child could fairly easily understand its message better than Musk manages here.

Musk is not alone among the tech bros in misunderstanding Tolkien while supposedly loving him. Peter Thiel famously named his surveillance company Palantir, named for seeing stones used in the world of Lord of the Rings. 

This seems appropriate enough, unless you know the plot: the Palantir are repeatedly used by the forces of evil to corrupt and deceive men who think themselves wise, with almost anyone who thinks themselves able to use them brought down by hubris. That’s an unusual selling point for any modern surveillance tech project.

Musk looked similarly vapid when he wore a “WHAT WOULD ORWELL THINK?” t-shirt as he addressed Tommy Robinson’s London rally by videolink in September. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with George Orwell would know what the author, a committed antifascist who went to fight them personally in the Spanish civil war, would think about Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. Once again, basic reading comprehension seemed beyond the supposed genius.

Getting pop culture wrong is far from the biggest sin of the modern tech oligarchy – but it’s an area in which they should be careful. They want to appear as geniuses, as something greater than the rest of us, but this relies on never letting the mask slip. 

When Elon Musk accidentally reveals that he sucks at the video games he professes to love, or that he can’t follow a simple movie plot, he makes it obvious he’s not the super-genius his fans imagine.

When Musk gets a simple plot like Tolkien’s as wrong as this, he risks two things. The first is that he starts to appear to his fans as a mere, fallible mortal. The second is that to everyone else, he starts to look like someone who was rooting for Sauron as he watched it.