So, I don’t hate Elon Musk. In myriad ways, he’s a genius engineer, entrepreneur and marketer. Tesla is a legit EV leader. SpaceX is a transformative company. And Elon himself, for better or worse, is certainly a colorful public figure.
But nonetheless, I am sick of hearing about and from Elon Musk.
This has been the state of affairs for a while. However, it intensified this spring, when Musk disclosed his big stake in Twitter and initiated a bid to take the company private. Suddenly, the perennially attention-mongering Time Person of the Year started monopolizing even more of our collective mental energy.
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Since then, if anything, it’s gotten worse. One day recently, for instance, CNBC’s tech news page contained five out of 11 headlines featuring Musk-related news, including four with headshots. While that was a particularly Musk-heavy day, most times it seems like there are at least two headlines about him.
It’s not just CNBC. A search for “Elon Musk” on Google News produced a staggering 119 million results. It would take someone reading 119 articles a day over 2,700 years to go through all that. That’s also more than 3x the combined total for the four other richest men in the world. (Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates and Gautam Adani.) These days, it’s hard to visit any major tech news site without at least one Elon headshot near the top of the scroll.
It’s enough already. Here’s the three-part case for why it’s time to tune out Elon:
No. 1: You will still hear about Elon Musk even if you try not to.
Think of it like cutting carbs. You will still find carbs in everything you want to eat. Or like ignoring Kim Kardashian and her cohorts. You certainly can try (and I do). But nonetheless, I and everyone else still seem to know all about her hairstyle, ex drama and underwear line.
Anyone who follows tech news will still hear enough mentions of Musk to stay abreast of goings-on in his world even without clicking on a single Elon-related piece of content.
No. 2: Elon Musk is not tech or EVs.
Hearing about what is going on in Elon Musk’s life will not make you smarter or more knowledgeable about electric vehicles, hyperloop transportation, tunnel-boring, AI, brain-computer interfaces, advanced rocketry or living on Mars.
If one is truly interested in these subjects, seek out leading experts and subject-specific media. For mass media, meanwhile, it would be nice to see other headshots associated with these themes. There also are roughly 9 million people employed in the U.S. technology industry alone, and over 55 million globally. Meanwhile, thousands of funded founders are working on these and related areas. Plenty of them would provide a very good return on investment for your attention.
No. 3: Attention is a limited resource.
One of the least productive uses of attention is to direct it toward celebrity drama. Said celebrity won’t be giving you anything in return for your time beyond, perhaps, some fleeting entertainment.
These days, as billionaires and politicians also qualify as celebrities, much of the time we spend perusing political and financial “news” is just another form of following star gossip. It’s unlikely to change who we vote for, whose car we buy, or what stocks we’ll buy or sell.
It’s also time-consuming. And, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what Elon Musk thinks about fertility rates, Crimean sovereignty, Donald Trump or Bill Gates’ physique.
Deleting Musk from my Twitter feed this spring offered a small step toward reclaiming some attention for more productive purposes. Granted, it’s probably been squandered on other time-wasting endeavors. At least, however, it’s something different.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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