One thing I have found while trolling for possible news leads at sci-tech publications is the high level of dislike and contempt for Elon Musk.

Headline at Gizmodo, just for example: “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Promise New Podcast to Discuss Destruction of U.S. Government.” Well, the U.S. government has been around for about 250 years; destroying it may be a bit ambitious even for Musk…

At Futurism, a hostile article highlights his “ever-growing litter of children.”

At Wired, we learn that his social media platform, X, is a hellscape, a view widely shared by sci-tech writers.

One might have expected people in that industry to be more affected by his role in this type of endeavor:

Some people would say that the explanation is all just politics (he’s a Republican; they’re mostly Democrats). But I sense there is more at work here.

Driving the trend

Hatred of Musk must also be seen against the background of the declining fortunes of — and waning trust in — legacy news organizations. Pew Research Center told us last week that

About one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.

News influencers are most likely to be found on the social media site X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%) …

Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization. America’s News Influencers

In other words, Musk’s approach, “Don’t hate the media, become the media,” is being put into practice at X and elsewhere. As we might expect, the results vary. But traditional media types, prone to gatekeeping, will hardly appreciate Musk for broadening the base of contributors to newsgathering and dissemination.

But there is still something deeper at work here…

Musk wants humans to live on Mars. His thesis is that “I am trying to make life multiplanetary to maximize the probable lifespan of consciousness.” In short, he thinks humans are less likely to be annihilated that way. He hopes to fund such ventures himself.

He has also said, “A new philosophy of the future is needed. I believe it should be curiosity about the Universe – expand humanity to become a multiplanet, then interstellar, species to see what’s out there.”

It’s hardly a new philosophy; just a neglected one. During the Cold War/Space Race, this was not considered an unreasonable type of idea. In fact, it was an expected development. Missions to the outer planets were envisioned as well. Many people took for granted that something like Star Trek would eventually come to pass.

But now fast forward to today… Popular science personality Neil deGrasse Tyson has little use for the idea:

What’s interesting about his approach is that there is little sense of a Mars base as a vision, like the moonwalk. Something has changed in popular science and perhaps Tyson represents that change in part.

One thinks of the recent furore at Scientific American where the editor-in-chief resigned after an unhinged political rant — a rant launched without any apparent recognition that she was the editor-in-chief of a 179-year-old publication that had published many Nobel Prize winners.

I admit that I haven’t yet put my finger on what has changed. But the fact that Musk and similar visionaries are still out there means that the change is not universal and may reverse itself.

You may also wish to read: Woke SciAm editor resigns in post-US election uproar. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and former Scientific American columnist, offers a thoughtful response. Shermer writes, “the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers” and their fervor makes it easier to convince themselves, not others.