I had this much in common with Musk’s most fervent fans: I saw him as a mythical figure. But the myth I had in mind was one of my own imagining, in which a perfect simpleton had, out of some unknowable Olympian whim, been singled out by the gods and granted the threefold gifts of intelligence, ingenuity, and money, which gifts he employed in precisely the manner a simpleton would: to pursue a civilization on Mars, for instance, and to launch luxury consumer goods into outer space with a rocket.
