He also claims to love the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book series where technology corporations are absolutely loathed and every AI is either a broken or an asshole or both.
I wonder if he ever read the 5th book, Mostly Harmless. In that book there’s an aside which describes how the people of the planet Golgafrincham tricked all the useless members of their society (management consultants, etc) into thinking the planet was doomed and getting on a ship to escape the planet which they programmed to fly to another salary system and crash into one of the planets there. That part of the book always stuck with me, and more and more I wish there was a way we could do the same to Musk and his billionaire cronies.
Of course I don’t think Musk has actually read any of the HHGTTG novels, especially not the 5th one so maybe there’s still a chance?
Those people ended up dying because the people they got rid of had a use after all, though.
$10 says he loves the wiki brief of the mos def version.
Or he claimed to be hugely into trek and hhgttg to fit in when in uni and now can’t untangle himself from the lie without an ego blow
The more he says about these things, the less I’m convinced he’s ever watched an episode of Star Trek or any version of HHGTTG. He also thought that Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner was named Bladerunner.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-main-character-blade-runner
'The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” ’
Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
And I think he has endorsed The Culture books, which also is kinda Startrek on steroids. Omg that universe is amazing.
He also said the Cybertruck is “what Bladerunner would drive”.
he doesn’t actually know a fucking thing about sci-fi.
Given Musk’s prejudices, that surprises me – especially since in The Culture being transgender is extremely uncontroversial. (Hell, even the spacecraft are permitted to determine their roles and choose their own names; meanwhile Musk is desperately trying to wrench Grok into his own image.)
Musk’s target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.
His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about “traditional Western values” the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.
