Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Misreading of Science Fiction
Adams was in good company. For more than a century, many science fiction writers had used plots involving founding colonies on other planets as a way to indict imperialism on Earth. (Imperialists, for their part, liked to talk about colonizing space, too: Cecil Rhodes himself said, “I would annex the planets if I could.”) That young Elon Musk read Hitchhiker’s Guide in South Africa and, failing to perceive its indictment of apartheid, took it as a lesson in the importance of asking the right question is hardly surprising. He was a kid. It’s that he stuck to that interpretation into his late middle age that’s odd, especially because much of the book today reads like a spoof of Musk himself. The antihero of Hitchhiker’s Guide is Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed, three-armed megalomaniac, voted “Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time,” inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, once called “the Best Bang since the Big One,” and part-time president of the Imperial Galactic Government, a mere figurehead, chosen not by …
