To enter hall at TED, the world’s leading advertiser of future optimism, is to step into what feels like a bubble floating in space: a multi-story theater built inside a huge ballroom, dark and filled with reds and blues. , pink and purple, at the center are a series of extraordinary people telling extraordinary stories of extraordinary achievements against extraordinary disparities.
Even in the midst of this procession of heroes — and many of them true heroes — Elon Musk dictates a particular kind of worship among TED members. It’s not hard to see why. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX embodies TED’s fascination with big dreams and utopias. And his interview at the final session of the conference on April 14 certainly reinforced that devotion. After asking Musk about Recommend to buy Twitter and the prospect of fighting climate change, TED curator Chris Anderson created a video clip of Musk on Saturday night live mocking himself for his placid, casual influence as “first with Asperger” to host the show, and asked him what it was like growing up with the syndrome.
Choreographed as carefully as the moment seemed, it worked. The world’s richest man has described a lonely childhood in which he struggled to grasp social cues and hidden meanings. “Other people can intuitively understand what something means,” he says. “I just take things literally, that the words spoken are exactly what they mean.” Hiding from puzzling human duplication, he became “absolutely obsessed with truth”, and pursued research in physics, computer science, and information theory “in an effort to understand the truth.” the truth of the universe.” In another part of the interview, Musk said, “Truth is important to me…it’s almost pathological to me.”
Floating inside the TED bubble, I suddenly felt a sense of empathy. I’m no Asperger, but I was also a lonely kid who didn’t understand others and instead sought the truth in science and computers. Undoubtedly, many of the over-enthusiastic experts attending TED can also identify.
But there are facts about the universe, and there are facts about Musk. As for what he didn’t want to do, he rewrote history in the interview, asserting that a notorious 2018 tweet in which he claimed to have “secured funding” to make Tesla the private, and from which he had to withdraw after an SEC investigation, is true anyway; he was “forced” to withdraw and settle with the SEC to keep the money flowing from Tesla’s banks and stop short sellers. He talks about 3 years of “sleeping on the floor” in the Tesla factory to show his solidarity with employees, recounting frequent stories about his verbal abuse and accusations of racism at the factory in California.
And his vision for Twitter, as he pauses to sketch on stage, is a platform on which not truth, but freedom is the most important value. “Speech must be ‘as free as possible,'” he said, and aside from speech that may be illegal, such as directly inciting violence, he is vaguely aware of where the line should lie. For Musk, this freedom is no more than an existential need, he said: “Having a public platform of maximum trust and inclusion is critically important to the future of civilization, ” he said.
