In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, young Lemuel Gulliver survives a shipwreck and washes up on the island of Lilliput. Despite standing a mere six inches high, the Lilliputians are a vain and self-important race. They are also clever, as Gulliver realizes when he awakens from a long slumber on the grass to find himself securely pinned down with “slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs.” The Lilliputians call Gulliver the “Man-Mountain” and eventually offer him his freedom if he agrees to a number of strict edicts. For example, “the said Man-Mountain shall confine his walks to our principal high roads, and not offer to walk or lie down in a meadow or field of corn.” The Man-Mountain would be allowed to roam, in other words, but only under the strict regulatory gaze of the diminutive Lilliputian officials.
A year after his impulsive acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk finds himself in a position not unlike that of Gulliver. As an entrepreneur, Musk is a Man-Mountain without equal. His start-ups Tesla and SpaceX have rewritten the rules of two global industries and made him—for a time, at least—the richest man on the planet. Some of his ventures in other fields (tunnel boring, brain interfaces) remain long shots. But his growing constellation of Starlink broadband-access satellites looks like another global game-changer, and, for better or worse, that company’s policies are already having a world-historical impact.
So what does Musk have to fear? Two things: The Lilliputians. And himself.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary
______________________
James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images