Reading · Harrison’s Substack

I have to say something about Elon Musk. I think he may have committed one of the strangest intellectual crimes of our time. Not an actual crime, so nobody call his lawyers. Elon Musk read science fiction and, somewhere along the way, seems to have mistaken some of the warning labels for instructions.

This wouldn’t ordinarily matter. Millions of adolescent boys read Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke and Douglas Adams. Most emerged relatively unharmed. We read Dune without deciding humanity needed an all-powerful messiah. We read 1984 without thinking the telescreens sounded promising. We read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and understood, I thought, that Douglas Adams was making fun of us. But most of us didn’t become the richest person on Earth.

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For years, we cast Musk as Tony Stark, the eccentric billionaire genius who would save humanity through technology. He even appeared in Iron Man 2, standing beside Robert Downey Jr., just in case the metaphor was too subtle. Bezos was taking us into space, Zuckerberg was connecting humanity, the Google guys were organizing all human knowledge. Billionaires weren’t merely rich anymore. They were visionaries, disruptors, superheroes. Somewhere along the way, however, the superheroes started looking suspiciously like supervillains.

George Carlin once asked, “Where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky.” Maybe the same applies to billionaires. We created a culture in which accumulating an unimaginable amount of money somehow became evidence that you must also possess an unimaginable amount of wisdom.

Those aren’t the same thing.

The Man Who Mistook Himself for Tony Stark

With apologies to Oliver Sacks and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which was about something considerably more humane.

The popular Tesla story has Musk inventing the electric-car company and becoming its eccentric genius-founder. The history is messier. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors before Musk joined the company as its major early investor and chairman. The disagreement over who deserved to be called a founder eventually became part of a bitter lawsuit. When the dispute was settled in 2009, Tesla described Musk and Eberhard as two of five co-founders.¹

The Roadster story is better. According to allegations Eberhard made in that lawsuit, he was originally supposed to receive production Roadster No. 1. Musk wanted it. Eberhard agreed to take No. 2. Musk got the first car.² Then, in 2018, Musk strapped his cherry-red Roadster to the inaugural Falcon Heavy and fired it into space.

There was a mannequin named Starman behind the wheel and DON’T PANIC on the dashboard, courtesy of Douglas Adams. Also aboard was a quartz data-storage device designed to survive for millions of years containing Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy. The Arch Mission Foundation says the library remains in the Roadster’s glove compartment, orbiting the Sun.³

This is Comic-Con with a defense budget.

But Foundation matters. Asimov imagined a Galactic Empire in collapse and Hari Seldon, a mathematician who develops “psychohistory,” allowing him to predict the behavior of enormous populations. Seldon cannot prevent the coming dark age, but because he understands where history is going, he believes he can manipulate events to shorten it.

You can see the attraction. Seldon knows where history is going. Most people don’t. And because he knows, he gets to chart the course.

• Science fiction asks: What happens when a tiny group of people determines humanity’s future?
• Silicon Valley apparently heard: Where do we apply?
• Hari Seldon predicts the collapse of civilization.
• Elon Musk puts Foundation in a Tesla and shoots it into space.
• Douglas Adams spends an entire career mocking human self-importance.
• Somehow the billionaires missed that part.

Historian Jill Lepore has recently taken this idea considerably further, arguing that figures such as Musk and Sam Altman have treated science fiction less as a warning than as a blueprint for technological transcendence.⁴ The interesting question isn’t why Musk likes science fiction. Lots of us do. It’s what happens when people with extraordinary resources begin treating speculative futures not as possibilities for society to consider, but as destinations humanity is already headed toward.

The Ordinary Constraints of Human Existence Are Engineering Problems

Maybe the easiest way to understand this worldview is through one idea: the ordinary constraints of human existence are engineering problems. Distance became transportation. Gravity became rockets. Aging becomes cellular rejuvenation. Death becomes longevity research or cryonics. Earth becomes Mars. Human intelligence becomes artificial intelligence. The brain becomes something we can connect to a computer. Reproduction becomes something else to optimize.

At some point, the final engineering problem becomes being human.

I don’t object to the engineering impulse. Much of civilization exists because somebody looked at an apparently immovable constraint and said, That’s ridiculous. We can fix that. If somebody cures Alzheimer’s disease, wonderful. If someone safely extends healthy human life by twenty years, sign me up.

Musk isn’t alone in pushing against ordinary human limits. Silicon Valley money has poured into longevity research. Peter Thiel has supported anti-aging research; Jeff Bezos has been reported among the backers of cellular-rejuvenation company Altos Labs; and Sam Altman put $180 million into Retro Biosciences, whose goal is to extend healthy human lifespan.⁵ ⁶ Bryan Johnson has taken the project to its logical and wonderfully strange conclusion, spending millions measuring and modifying his own body in an attempt to slow biological aging.⁷

Kings built pyramids. Emperors searched for elixirs. Silicon Valley has venture capital.

Extreme wealth, however, introduces an interesting possibility. Most of us spend our lives encountering limits. We can’t buy that. We can’t go there. We can’t make that person do what we want. Eventually reality says no. What happens when reality almost never says no? Perhaps death itself begins looking less like the human condition and more like inadequate product design.

And once technology moves from solving human problems to deciding what a better human should be, we’ve quietly left engineering. We’ve entered ethics and politics.

Who Gets to Build the Humans?

Then there is reproduction. Musk has repeatedly warned about falling birth rates, and his own family has become part of his pronatalist project. Reporting by The Wall Street Journal described at least fourteen children with at least four women and said Musk has privately discussed creating a “legion” of children, with intelligence and the survival of civilization explicitly entering the discussion.⁸

This becomes more interesting than simple pronatalism because the question isn’t merely whether humanity needs more babies. It is: more babies by whom?

Musk’s estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson added an extraordinary wrinkle when she alleged in 2025 that her sex had been deliberately selected through IVF. Vivian Jenna Wilson wrote that her “sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for,” connecting that decision to an expectation that she would be male and masculine.⁹ This remains her allegation about a private reproductive decision, not an independently established fact, and it would be wrong to leap from it to the claim that Musk exclusively selects male embryos.

But once reproduction becomes another optimization problem, uncomfortable questions follow naturally. What are we optimizing? Sex? Intelligence? Height? Disease risk? Temperament? And who defines improvement?

We need more babies is one proposition. We need more babies from particular kinds of people has a considerably longer and darker history.

There’s also something difficult not to notice about the people explaining humanity’s future to us. They’re mostly men. Obviously there are brilliant women throughout computing, biotechnology and AI. That’s not the point. Look instead at this particular cultural pantheon: Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman, Andreessen, Ellison. Men building AI, contemplating Mars, funding life extension, worrying about fertility and speculating about how humanity might need to change.

Where are the female tech bros?

This particular combination of extreme wealth, techno-utopianism, pronatalism, libertarianism and increasingly authoritarian politics is remarkably male. That becomes especially interesting when reproductive politics simultaneously moves toward more traditional gender roles. Women become increasingly important as producers of the next generation at exactly the moment powerful men become increasingly interested in what that generation should look like.

That isn’t evidence of a conspiracy. It’s a pattern worth noticing.

THE MEN WHO MISTOOK SCIENCE FICTION FOR INSTRUCTIONS

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