The Real Elon Musk
TBR Sunday Read
There are two annoying cliches I’d like to ditch in 2025.
The first: “Elon Musk is a Bond villain.”
If you google “Elon Musk” and “Bond villain,” you’ll discover that an astonishing number of media gasbags thought that this was still a novel observation in 2024.
Actually, this hackneyed take dates back to (at least) 2013, when the website for the Canadian TV broadcaster CTV stated, “South African-born Elon Musk has all the qualities required of a larger-than-life Bond villain—all that's missing is a home cunningly concealed inside an active volcano.”
The problem with the Elon-Bond-villain cliché, beyond its corniness, is that it’s patently untrue.
Bond villains drive cool cars, like this:
They do not drive anything that looks remotely like this:
