Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher run a podcast called Pivot. They are currently taking that podcast on a tour of the U.S. and the opening night was last night New York City. The special guest for the show was Hillary Clinton.
Later in the show, they did a segment called Wins and Fails. Swisher offered some personal wins and then Galloway offered a fail. The fail was what he called the “idolatry of innovators.” “I was talking to the Secretary before this,” he said, referring to Hillary.
if you go up and down the West Coast, you’re going to see literally companies…
The West Coast is littered with multi-t trillion dollar companies. And you get to the Canadian border, it stops. You get to the Mexican border, it stops. And yet, these individuals are quick to credit their grit and their character for their success and blame the government for their failures.
I’ll get to the rest in a moment but Galloway is already saying something really dumb.
Yes, it’s true that we have fantastic wealth creation and tech innovation in America and not so much in Canada or Mexico. But that’s not because, as Galloway is struggling to imply, America’s government is responsible for those companies or that innovation. On the contrary, it’s because we have a free market system that allows massive amounts of money to flow to innovators with promising ideas that benefit everyone.
We not only have more people, which means more smart people, we also are a magnet for smart people from around the world who want to come build things here. And we have an unprecedented density of capital that isn’t a product of the American government. It’s a product of a meritocratic, individualistic, capitalist ethos which exists in Silicon Valley like it does nowhere else in the world.
What Galloway is trying to say is that we give too much credit to the individuals like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But that’s bass-ackwards. The whole point of the system he’s praising is that one person with a great idea can literally change the world. That ethos requires those talented people and doesn’t work at all without them and their ideas. Trillion dollar companies don’t spring out of the soil on their own. Someone creates the seeds and someone else waters them. The genius of the American system is that the government mostly stays out of the way.
And here’s where Galloway suggests executing Elon Musk:
Because if you tell a 35-year-old male who’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you.
The fail is that we have begun believing through this ridiculous, unhealthy, and dangerous idolatry of innovators that they get to live by an entirely different standard.
Elon Musk is a traitor to the west. [Applause]
In the 30s, we had this incredible hero Charles Lindberg an innovator and he felt that we should be on the side of Germany. And a lot of people felt that way we had spent tremendous capital a lot of loss of human life of young men in World War I and we thought you can understand we don’t want to go back right. And he was his view was we should partner with Germany and Hitler.
What if, and this could have very easily happened, he was a hero. What if he’d raised the capital to buy Boeing? He probably could have done it. And then when we lent B17s to run bombing runs over Germany to the RAF, what if he had figured out a guidance for a flight system and then mid 1940 before we were involved in the war decided to throttle back those guidance systems and the Blitzkrieg in London got worse and more homes and more civilians were destroyed and killed respectively. What would we have done to Charles Lindberg?
But it’s uncomfortable and weird because we’ve decided someone who’s a trillionaire and makes a great EV and can land a rocket on scissors is held to a different standard. We lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall.
This is a traitor to the West and he should be held to the same standards as every other traitor in the West.
The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 for being Soviet spies. Contrary to Galloway’s rant, they were not lined up against a wall and shot. They were executed via the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York.
As for Elon Musk, he has personally done more for Ukraine than any single person in the world. Ukraine’s entire defense is based on the communications platform of Starlink. The betrayal Galloway is talking about is Musk’s decision recently to reinstate a speed limit on Starlink so that it could not be used for attacks. This reportedly did interfere with some of Ukraine’s drone interceptors within their own territory, though it should not have had an impact on Starshield, the military version of Starlink controlled by the Pentagon.
In any case, it’s true that we lent B-17 and other equipment to England during WWII. Those negotiations were made between Churchill and FDR. And that’s where Galloway’s case sort of runs off the rails. Ukraine’s use of Starlink for weapons has always been outside the terms of service which don’t allow its use for military equipment. SpaceX has essentially ignored that for a long time and allowed European allies to buy up panels which get used for attacks. But Musk has never been required to continue this practice. And Trump, who is in FDR’s position in this scenario, has never said that Musk did something he didn’t want done. In fact, the evidence (at least in my view) supports the idea that Trump knew either right before or right after the speed limit was set and didn’t stop it. The slowdown also came on the same night the Pentagon reportedly didn’t warn Ukraine about some incoming Russian attacks.
Scott Galloway clearly isn’t a Trump fan, but does he consider Trump a traitor to the west as well? Would he like to see Trump executed? He didn’t say that, probably because he doesn’t want a visit from the Secret Service, but the logic of his arguments suggests the answer is yes.
In the analogy, FDR negotiates a deal and Lindberg then undermines him. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here. Trump was pressing Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries and this move looks like an effort to remind Ukraine how much it depends on the U.S. for all sorts of things.
Personally, I think it was a terrible decision and that Trump is being far too generous to Putin. I’d like to see us expand Starlink based attacks into Moscow. But Trump is the president and I’m not. It’s his call, not mine and not Scott Galloway’s either.
Galloway should retract and apologize or go the whole way and say he wants Trump executed as well. My guess is that’s really what he thinks. Here’s the clip:
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