The hero’s journey of ancient mythology follows a well-understood and well-documented pattern: The hero receives a call to adventure, overcomes a series of trials, encounters an otherworldly figure who helps them achieve greatness, and finally makes a celebrated return, their adventure complete, to live in peace and freedom.
Silicon Valley has its own version of this story. Usually a young engineer or academic has the spark of an idea—their call to adventure. They are scoffed at, rejected by the establishment and cast out on their own as an entrepreneur to endure a series of trials. Ultimately they have a eureka moment and succeed in their quest. Having been proven right, they are embraced by the establishment that once rejected them and sail into the sunset as philanthropists.
The connection between the hero’s journey and technology runs deep—think about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. And the somewhat miraculous thing is that many founders of iconic Silicon Valley companies really did follow a hero’s trajectory in the early part of their careers. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin fit the mold. So did Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. So did Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (though I know many might fight me on that). So do the founders of Stripe, Doordash and Airbnb.
That’s what makes Elon Musk—conqueror of space, lord of all edgelords and now master of the Twitterverse—so deeply challenging.
Elon as hero is easy to see. His work is deeply inspiring. He is dragging the auto industry kicking and streaming into the future of electric and autonomous transportation and pushing humanity to quite literally expand its horizons. His companies deliver amazing things—Tesla is far from vaporware; I love my Starlink anywhere internet connection. Shockingly, even things that sound like a joke, like The Boring Company, just might work.
He also comes off as a slightly silly loner-outsider, like all heroes. He might have been obsessed with fancy fast cars early in his career and he has owned his share of mansions, but now he brands himself as a monk uninterested in worldly wealth. Like a hero, he goes to war and wins. The brinkmanship he has played with Wall Street for years has been amazing to watch.
At the same time, Elon’s journey itself—that is to say, his form of entrepreneurship—is not about eureka moments and plucking brilliant technical insights from the gods. It’s mostly about capital markets.
He is the world’s greatest capital raiser. He stakes a claim, and then somehow manages to remain solvent enough to see through even his wildest long-term bets. (This explains why he is always battling the Securities and Exchange Commission.) He cynically overpromises. There is no chance he believed his own ridiculous timeline for self-driving cars compared to the odds that he simply leveraged his own manufactured narrative to serve his capital needs. Nor is there any way he believes his timeline for getting to Mars. He knows what to do to keep the capital flowing, regardless of the truth.
He also knows what to do to get the mob frothing. The Dogecoin distraction was a great example of this—not only brilliant PR, but also a wonderful way to get his most ardent followers paid while creating a circus and generally having a good time. Today Dogecoin, with its unlimited supply and zero scalability, is a joke, just as it was intended to be from the beginning. Elon is unconcerned if his PR circus leads to confusion that does more harm than good.
He can be strangely mean and ad hominem in his attacks. “Pedo-gate”—in which Elon referred to one of the rescuers of the Thai soccer team trapped in a cave in 2018 as a “pedo guy”—is just the tip of the iceberg. He isn’t particularly gracious or team first. He takes personal credit for things he didn’t do on his own rather than pushing forward the executives, engineers and other leaders who deliver his branded dreams.
All of this leaves us with a problem. If Elon is the new archetype of the Silicon Valley hero, then Silicon Valley and the world of tech innovation is a far more complicated, occasionally dark and not obviously good place than perhaps we want to believe. To fully accept Elon, Silicon Valley needs to give up on its Promethean ideal.
Perhaps in a sense this new version of the Silicon Valley hero is more honest than the Promethean vision. Thomas Edison was no Prometheus. Neither was Steve Jobs. Nor is Bill Gates.
If this is where we’re going, however, it will be a rough cultural transition. Even as the narrative of the American dream has withered, I would argue that the narrative of the Silicon Valley hero’s journey of technical innovation has stayed largely intact to date. But Elon’s brand of entrepreneurship, mixed with his success and prominence, rewrites the book.
As technology has come to engulf the entire business world, victory and success are no longer about blinding insight from a lone voice. They are about leadership, business management and wrangling a crowd—or a mob.
No longer is the hero the engineer who went out on their own and proved everyone wrong. It is now the capital raiser who stakes a claim, raises unfathomable amounts of capital and delivers a new future, sometimes at a great price.