The Reader doesn’t have to wonder at the title of Niall Fergusons’ latest 1,884 word essay in The Dailymail:
Secret obsessions that drive the new Napoleon, by his friend and confidant: NIALL FERGUSON’s VERY revealing insight into the dark forces that forged Elon Musk – and fears for the maverick’s own Waterloo downfall
Mr. Ferguson has a habit of writing about powerful men: Siegmund Warburg and Henry Kissinger, he now adds Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, while assuring his reader that : ‘I have known Elon Musk for more than a decade’. Proximity of one kind or another, to The Great Man is an essential to the gain the ‘trust’ of his readership?
I have known Elon Musk for more than a decade. We have exchanged ideas, drunk whisky together, met one another’s children, and debated everything from the war in Ukraine to the future of American education.
I have long said he is the Napoleon Bonaparte of our times. Walter Isaacson’s new biography, based on two years of shadowing Musk, reaches a similar conclusion.
And at a time when the richest man in the world is being transformed in some quarters from hero to villain, this historical analogy should not be ignored.
In 2017, Musk and I went for a drink in California’s Menlo Park with one of my sons, then 18 and about to embark on a gap year in Africa.
…
Ferguson quotes and riffs on Isaacson
Musk more than once makes Isaacson aware that he identifies with France’s most famous ruler.
‘If they see their general out on the battlefield, they will be more motivated,’ Musk tells his biographer, explaining why he likes to appear without warning on the Tesla and SpaceX factory floors.
‘Wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best,’ Isaacson explains.
The resemblance doesn’t end there.
Hegel – the 19th Century German philosopher – famously said Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback. Elon is the world spirit in a cyber-truck.
Editor: I’ll engage in some self-serving reductionism, of Ferguson’s derivations of Isaacson:
Musk is also a micromanager, another Napoleonic trait.
He is pitiless when he senses that someone is not ‘hardcore’ and reserves respect only for those who are ‘ultra hardcore’.
‘Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart,’ he once told Tesla employees in an email.
Editor: Ferguson as moralizing sexual conformist, who not only underlines, but places in bold font his observation on Musk’s ‘unorthodox family life’. Ferguson’s notorious 1995 Spectator essay on Keynes, demonstrates that sexual conformity is Ferguson territory.
Like Napoleon – who cheated on his first wife (who also cheated on him), then divorced, remarried and had more children by his mistresses than his wives – Musk has an unorthodox family life.
Musk now has 10 children by three different women, most recently twins with Shivon Zilis, the 37-year-old director of operations at Neuralink (his company developing computer chips that can be implanted in the human brain).
Like Napoleon, Musk also has a weakness for imperial overextension.
Like Napoleon, too, Musk has moved politically from Left to Right
Like Napoleon, Elon has accumulated enemies over the years
Musk’s critics now claim he is, perhaps unwittingly, helping the Kremlin.
Like his French role model, Napo-Elon does not seek universal love. Nor does he pretend to be infallible.
Political Observer
For the very patient Reader, here is a link to my:
Niall Ferguson in 4 iterations, Sept. 16 2023, by
StephenKMackSD's Blog 