Takeaways from John Oliver's Deep Dive on Elon Musk

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | December 18, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | December 18, 2023 |

The 10th season finale of Last Week Tonight (ten seasons already? Really?) aired this week, and in it, John Oliver went deep on Elon Musk, “the less fuckable reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic.” It’s a great piece, particularly if you like creative insults of Elon Musk, but it also highlights his global power and the danger he likewise poses.

Yes, there is Twitter, and while the company itself seems to be dying, Musk nevertheless managed to use it to mainstream white nationalism, much to the delight of white nationalists. I don’t think that Twitter is solely responsible (or even primarily responsible), but it is true that “reverse racism” or “racism against white people” wasn’t a thing several years ago, but now half of the white men in America claim to be victims of it. Trump probably injected that into the bloodstream, but Elon Musk’s Twitter pumped it through America’s body.

The problem, as Last Week Tonight posits, is that once the world determined that Elon Musk was a net positive — because he popularized electric cars and streamlined space travel — the world decided it no longer needed to hold Elon Musk accountable. That’s how we ended up in the mess we are in now, where global technologies are often dictated by the whims of one thin-skinned mercurial man who has the U.S. government over a barrel.

It’s not because of Tesla. Tesla sparked the electric car revolution, but it’s evident that Tesla will eventually be overtaken by competitors who did not have to recall 2 million vehicles last week and whose self-driving technology has not resulted in multiple deaths.

The biggest problem, as Last Week Tonight suggests, is how much the United States has outsourced to SpaceX and his companies. “Every day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security, and its energy supply.” Space-X has put more Starlink satellites into orbit than anyone — their satellites now account for half of all active satellites in orbit.

What does that mean? While Disney or Nike can walk away from Twitter when Elon Musk pushes the Great Replacement Theory, the United States government cannot. The U.S. government has to eat Elon Musk’s shit and look the other way on Musk’s antisemitism.

The best example of how much control Musk has over geopolitical events is the war in Ukraine, where Musk’s satellite technology provides the military with access to the Internet. That was great until Musk grew more Russia-friendly and even suggested that Russia should be allowed to access Ukrainian land. In fact, Musk reportedly refused access to the Internet in Crimea so that the Ukrainian military could attack Russian ships because a Russian official warned Musk that it could lead to a nuclear response. One man potentially altered the course of the war, and the Pentagon has often had no choice but to defer to Musk on policy.

“The fact is,” John Oliver concluded, “that whether we like it or not … a huge number of very important things going forward are going to depend on how Elon is feeling, which is a terrifying thing to say about anyone, but especially this guy.”

According to Oliver, nothing can be done about it short of inventing a time travel machine and going back 15 years to change how we operate so that the government doesn’t put so much power in the hands of billionaires. The problem with that, however, is that the only person with the resources to invent a time machine is … Elon Musk.

The one thing about Twitter after Musk bought it is that we have held him accountable. Those of us who don’t like Twitter have fled the social media network along with most of its advertisers. The problem is that there is no equivalent to Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads to the U.S. government. Whether Twitter fails or not, we’re stuck with the guy for the foreseeable future.