Elon's Values
Three Things #152: January 12, 2025
This issue isn’t actually about Elon Musk, but Elon stands for a certain set of values and a certain set of political beliefs that are resurgent in this moment. A lot of people disagree with and, indeed, dislike Elon intensely, but it would do them good to understand the values behind his statements and his actions. These three things are, as I understand them, some of Elon’s values. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I do agree very strongly with these values.
I recently wrote a bit about the recent presidential election, about why I think it’s a big deal and why I’m optimistic about what comes next. This week I want to explore one of the reasons I’m optimistic: because these values are important, and correct, and have been underemphasized for a long time. I’m excited to see that they’re ascendant again.
Understanding these values, which are shared quite broadly in Silicon Valley circles, also helps us understand the bigger political and economic picture. The perspective you see most often in the media, and indeed one that I hear people express quite often, is that this was a “billionaire’s election” that shows how politics in America is rigged by the wealthy. I’m not disputing those claims, but I think a second, more meaningful, more useful interpretation is that a particular set of values took the day, and that set of values happens to coincide with, and be especially popular among, billionaires, Silicon Valley elites, and builders and business people more generally.
If you’ve read Atlas Shrugged, all of this should feel quite familiar. If not, I’d suggest reading that book immediately as it’s extraordinarily important and influential, and it will help you understand a lot of what’s going on in the country and in the world today. It will help you get inside Elon’s head, and inside the heads of the builders and Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and investors who feel that the country has been going in the wrong direction, and who feel that this election was, hopefully, a positive turning point.
Thing #1: Builders 🧱
“Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?” - Marc Andreessen, It’s Time to Build
Builders are the most important, valuable people we have. Elon, the most prolific builder of our time, clearly believes this, and he shares this belief with with Silicon Valley visionaries like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, and Garry Tan. I share this belief.
Roughly speaking, you can divide all people, and all occupations, in the world into two buckets: those who build and those who don’t, those who create and those who don’t. Builders are responsible for basically all progress. All of our infrastructure, our technology, our great companies, and the innovations that drive society forward and improve the quality of our lives, the food we eat: all of that is down to inspiration and hard work on the part of the builders. Engineers are builders, yes, but there are many other types of builders and creators. The group includes designers, farmers, doctors, artists, real writers, and in some cases investors: in short, people responsible for the creative and primary industries. As Andreessen put it, building includes “building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building.”
The key difference between builders and non-builders is that only builders appreciate how difficult it is to build things: to marshal the necessary resources, to get the right people in the room, to develop alliances and get the right people on your side, to cut through massive red tape, to design something that works and, ultimately, to ship it, to operate it, and to maintain it. These are all impossibly hard things, a fact that non-builders simply can’t appreciate or understand because they’ve never tried to do it.
For this reason, non-builders don’t have appreciation for builders. Non-builders live in the realm of words, of spreadsheets, of social media and marketing campaigns. Non-builders include politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, accountants, journalists, most investors, and everyone else who makes a living by doing something that doesn’t involve creating things. In other words, non-builders are downstream of builders and profit indirectly from their labor.
To a non-builder, everything seems easy, since they’re just used to pushing words around a page or numbers around a spreadsheet. They’ve literally never had to make something novel from scratch, and have zero appreciation for both how important and how difficult the task is. If something isn’t getting built, or is taking longer than expected, non-builders always assume the issue is that someone’s being lazy or not doing their job. They cannot appreciate the massive challenges inherent in marshaling resources, design, and engineering.
Non-builders imagine that they run the world, and they think that they’re the most important people in the world. Indeed, they get the vast majority of attention since they’re good at communicating with words, rather than with things, like builders, but they’re wrong about their importance relative to builders. Non-builders also have very little understanding of how the real world works: how modern technology works, yes, but also how companies are built, how jobs are created, how international trade works, how products are designed and built, and how the economy works in general, because they’ve never had to build a company or a product or hire someone.
The feeling is mutual. Builders also have very little respect and trust for non-builders because they see their contributions as frivolous and “nice to have.” Talk is cheap, as Nassim Taleb would say, and the vast majority of non-builders have little to no skin in the game. Financial advisors aren’t punished for making bad calls. Journalists aren’t punished for being wrong. By contrast, builders are punished when the thing they build doesn’t work, as they should be! Builders despise this asymmetry relative to non-builders. They also resent the way that non-builders get the lion’s share of public attention despite builders doing most of the valuable work.
In truth, both roles are necessary, and both depend upon the other. Building is primary, and building has to come first, because without building we have literally nothing, and all social and economic progress depends first and foremost upon builders and upon things getting built. But communicating about what needs to be built, what’s being built, why, and how, not to mention filling in all of those legal contracts and spreadsheets, all of those things are important occupations as well, if secondary to the primary occupation of building.
How has the country been going in the wrong direction? We’ve put too much emphasis on non-builder careers in America in recent decades, and we’ve given too much money and too much attention to non-builders and not enough to builders. This is something that the Silicon Valley visionaries mentioned above, as well as Trump supporters like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, all understand. It’s become far too hard to build in America for many reasons: environmental concerns, NIMBYism, basic bureaucracy, costs, and an overall skepticism of builders and billionaires.
But our national debt is insanely high and growing higher every day, competitive pressure from China and other places is rapidly growing, and the best way out of the situation is to build, build, build. It’s time to build and I’m optimistic that we’re going to see many more builder friendly policies in the new administration.
Thing #2: Small, Efficient Government 🤏
“My contempt for the state is infinite” - Javier Milei, President of Argentina
Another principle that unites the Elon crowd and Silicon Valley more generally is a mistrust of government. This is because governments play by different rules than companies. In the private sector, businesses are required to compete with one another. (In practice this is often distorted by taxes, tariffs, licenses, etc., thanks to, you guessed it, the government.) This competitive pressure is extremely healthy as it forces businesses to operate effectively and efficiently, to keep their customers and investors happy, etc., or they’ll go out of business. This is a powerful and important force of capitalism known as creative destruction.
Obviously, governments face no such competitive pressure, so their incentives are very different. While I’m sure many individual people who work in government do so out of a love for their state, and in order to help people, the apparatus of government is nonetheless basically a disaster. Nearly everything the government touches or tries to operate turns into a fiasco: you need only step into any DMV, sign up for any government program, or try to access any government website to see what I mean. Government departments and agencies simply aren’t incentivized to hire and retain the most talented people (more on this in a moment), to pay competitive wages, or to invest in technology, they often have poor leadership, they aren’t punished when they go over budget and over schedule or fail to deliver entirely, and they aren’t rewarded for success. For these reasons and others they’re much less efficient and effective than the private sector.
Other things equal, then, almost everything should be in the hands of private companies, not the government. Companies can be bargained with and reasoned with. Companies speak the language of efficiency and profit. Companies can make decisions quickly and can move quickly if they want to, since a single executive can make a decision. Companies are accountable to their shareholders, who can and do replace company leadership if it isn’t performing well.
None of these is true of governments, which tend only to grow in size and inefficiency over time. Laws and regulations are always only added, and are basically never removed. The number of government departments grows steadily over time: today, the US federal government has over 450 departments and agencies, one for every member of Congress, a number that has grown substantially over time. The number of government staff also grows monotonically. Tax laws only become more complicated and more burdensome. All of this inefficiency makes government a drain on society and the economy.
Lots of companies aren’t run efficiently, either, but the market eventually sorts this out. Elon famously fired 80% of the staff at Twitter after he bought the company, and after a few initial hiccups, Twitter continued to run just fine, and indeed has introduced several important improvements and new features. This proved Elon’s point that 20% of the people in any organization do 80% of the work. The same is doubtless true of the government, and Elon intends to prove this point as well through the new Department of Government Efficiency.
I’ve written before about my personal take on government: it should be as small and local as possible. There’s nothing wrong with government, in theory, and there’s a small number of things, like foreign affairs and national defense, basic infrastructure, and maybe some degree of social safety net, that the government should operate (simply because no one else can). But in practice government tends to be extraordinarily slow moving, unresponsive, and incredibly inefficient and outright inept at most of the things it tries to do. For this reason, the vast majority of enterprise should be in private hands. I strongly agree with this principle of Elon’s, and I really hope to see the size of the government decrease, and efficiency increase, under the new administration.
Thing #3: Merit 🎖️
“Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think” - Ayn Rand
In my opinion, meritocracy is one of the founding values of the United States. The country was founded by refugees escaping places where people succeeded or failed on the basis of the family and social class they were born into. By contrast, America was founded as a place where those who were willing to work hard could get ahead and build a better life for themselves and their family, regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, or which family they happened to be born into. Many of the founding fathers, including Jefferson, explicitly called for an end to nobility and a "natural aristocracy" based on "virtue and talents.”
I’m not saying that the country is or ever was a perfect meritocracy, that class doesn’t matter, or that those who work hard always get ahead. But meritocracy is one of our founding principles, and it’s an ideal to work towards.
This is one reason I feel so strongly that wokeism is anti-American. The toxic mindset works against meritocracy. Its founding principle is that certain groups of people, on the basis of arbitrary characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation, are historically disadvantaged and therefore deserve special treatment and greater advantage today. By contrast, the same principle dictates that it’s okay to discriminate against those from backgrounds perceived to be privileged, such as white cisgender males, as long as that discrimination is intended to benefit groups perceived to have less power (and to fail to do so is indeed to be deemed “racist”).
The idea is well intended, and there are real, historical injustices and inequities that still impact modern life in the United States today, but reverse discrimination isn’t the way to address them. In particular, one of wokeism’s biggest failings is that it’s inherently anti meritocratic. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with promoting diversity in the workplace, if that simply means casting a wider net when hiring and considering candidates with “nontraditional” backgrounds. But it must be done without explicit quotas, and without lowering standards. Taken to its logical conclusion, the woke version of DEI means filling positions in both private companies and public offices with people who check certain, arbitrary, identity-related boxes but, other things equal, are less qualified. While there are probably some benefits to DEI initiatives, companies that fail to balance diversity with merit will necessarily underperform their more meritocratic competitors.
This is one of the reasons Elon and his team are so opposed to wokeism and all that it stands for, including the DEI movement. The simple truth is that companies must be meritocratic in order to survive and thrive. They must hire the best, most competent people they can find at the best prices. If they fail to do this, their competition will hire those most competent people instead, and it will hurt their competitiveness. Of course, as discussed above, governments and public institutions don’t face the same competitive pressure as private companies, but we all suffer when candidates are chosen on the basis of anything other than merit and cost.
There are always going to be people who oppose meritocracy. In general, these tend to be people who themselves don’t do well when judged on the basis of merit: people who feel that they deserve a handout because of their identity, a past injustice, or some vague notion of equity. The entire idea of socialism and communism is the elimination of private ownership and private profit, and the belief that people should receive according to their perceived need, not according to their talent or how hard they work.
But, as we’ve seen countless times in countless places, this destroys the basic incentive structure of capitalism, and kills the competitive, entrepreneurial drive. No entrepreneur will toil night and day and take risks if they can’t participate handsomely in the upside of success. All of society suffers when talented people aren’t rewarded for their talent and hard work.
Do you want to live in a society with billionaires who earned their fortune fair and square, and where everyone benefits from their talent and hard work, or do you want to live in a “fairer” society with no billionaires, where the most talented, hardworking people have all left for greener pastures, and where we all have far less as a result? If you prefer the latter, look no further than northern Europe.