Elon Musk, Karl Marx, and the commodification of "virtue"
How Elon Musk leverages his wealth to market himself as a paragon of excellence, and how some Path of Exile 2 gamers helped expose him
One pet peeve I have is when people passionately claim that Elon Musk is some kind of “genius” or “innovator” who deserves respect and adoration. When faced with pushback or criticism against their personal hero, his defenders insist that he has done so much good for the world. What good, lowly peon, have you done for humanity? Have you designed an electric car or built a spaceship? No? When Elon has, and you must just be jealous of his success! Other times, they wrongly assume I only dislike him now that he’s a conservative, but loved him when he was just making electric cars (on the contrary, he always bothered me as all tech plutocrats do). At the core, Musk represents a tendency I find particularly harmful in our modern economy, which is the capacity for the wealthy to present themselves as paragons of virtue and genius when they are anything but. And as with other similar cases, it can be useful to turn to capitalism’s most tenacious critic to understand what’s going on.
Virtue as a Commodity
In 1844, the German revolutionary philosopher and communist theorist Karl Marx wrote a series of manuscripts that were never published in his lifetime. When they were posthumously published in the 1930s, these manuscripts went a long way in clarifying how Marx arrived at the viewpoint expressed later in his Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867). Importantly, they give insights into the deeper ethical and humanistic themes that motivated his later commitment to economic revolution. One of the central concerns Marx explores in these early manuscripts was the way in which capitalism tended to turn everything into a mere commodity, even the virtues which we ascribe to individuals. Of particular interest is his short meditation “The Power of Money”.
As Marx construes money in this text, it is a uniquely powerful commodity in that it can be exchanged for anything in the marketplace. This makes it the universal commodity in Marx’s words. When we use money to buy a good or service, we gain ownership over that good or service. It becomes our property. I have 15,000 dollars, and by going to a used car salesman I can turn that money into a car. I could also turn it into 6 months of rent in Tampa, or 2 months of rent in San Francisco. I could use it to buy a fraction of a Bitcoin, or maybe use it as a down payment on a tractor, or procure a bunch of collectible trading cards. Whatever the case, I’ve used that money to obtain the property for myself. As Marx explains:
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.
In other words, through its power of exchange, money has the capacity to mediate between an individual and anything he desires, so long as someone is selling it. If it can be sold, it probably will be sold if the person selling needs the money and the person buying has enough to make the sale worth it. As Marx quotes Shakespeare’s lesser-known play Timon of Athens:
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.
Here, it is called the “common whore of mankind” because it is the universal medium of exchange, whereby sufficient amounts of it allow the possessor of money to subvert or alter any social circumstances that inconvenience them. Yet the defender of money would interject, surely this is a good thing. It allows us to buy goods and services, which we need to survive! Certainly, we ought not dismiss the positive social function of money.
Yet there is more to it. As Marx explains, money doesn’t only allow individuals to obtain objects they desire. It also allows them to appropriate the capacities of others. In other words, it allows the individual with money to take ownership over the virtues of others and claim those virtues for themselves. If you are a billionaire idiot, all you have to do is hire a brilliant engineer and now you, too, are an engineer because you have ownership over their engineering output:
That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
The ugly person with money can leverage their money to obtain beautiful women as if they were handsome. Notably, Marx extends this to bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, or stupid people too. If they have sufficient money, they no longer suffer the social consequences of dishonesty, badness, a lack of scruples, or stupidity. Rather, they now have ownership over the virtues that are contrary to those states. Hence, the one with the money to control clever people becomes “more clever than the clever”.
This should be no surprise to anyone who has observed American “justice” with a critical eye. As is well known, a sufficiently wealthy person (be they OJ “The Juice” Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, Ethan Couch, etc) can hire lawyers good enough to escape justice. In a sense, the wealthy can buy “innocence” even if they are guilty. Of course, this has limits - the greater the evidence of one’s guilt, the better the lawyer has to be. Epstein could avoid meaningful punishment for raping children the first time, but obviously failed the second time. Yet only the most naive individual can argue that the justice system is blind when wealth allows one to pay for superior legal representation.
Silicon Valley, Mecca of the Tech Entrepreneur
Aside from the unequal administration of justice, we can see the pattern Marx identifies quite clearly in the ethos of Silicon Valley. Any number of tech “geniuses” in Silicon Valley are not engineers or inventors, but rather businessmen who hire engineers and inventors. This is true of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and many others. Some of them, like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Dorsey, did have a background in programming and initially contributed to the rise of their technology empires, although once they found themselves at the top they no longer had time to deal with the technical details of their platforms and technologies. Once they reach a certain point in their careers as CEOs, investors, and plutocrats, all the technology they sell are the inventions of their employees.
Importantly, however, these tech “geniuses” all continue to gain credit for these inventions as products of their own intellect and vision. I still remember as a teenager watching how Steve Jobs would introduce a new phone or tablet to a crowd of adoring tech fans eager to consume the next Apple invention. Of course, Jobs did have some role in pushing particular projects onto his teams, but he was not doing the technological heavy lifting that made smartphones, tablets, and MacBooks possible (even early on, his colleague Wozniak was responsible for much of Apple’s success). Rather, that was done by an army of nameless engineers and developers whose responsibility for these brilliant creations was concealed behind the fog of the corporate institution. The person we saw introducing that technology was their employer Jobs, whose reputation as an individual profited immensely from their hard work. As we saw Marx write, “Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever?”
Elon Musk, founder?
This pattern reached its most absurd proportions once a certain South African son of an Emerald magnate hit the world stage. Initially, Elon Musk gained some prominence in the technology world through his work on a few startups like Paypal. Yet it was his eventual intervention in Tesla that truly brought him fame.
Notably, Tesla was not founded by Elon Musk but by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. They were concerned with climate change and wanted to offer a battery-powered alternative to internal combustion engines for the high end consumers in places like Silicon Valley, at least initially. As outlined by Eberhard, Tesla’s marketing strategy was organized on three principles:
1) an electric car should not be a compromise. With the right technological choices, it is possible to build electric cars that are actually better cars than their competition.
2) Battery technology is key to a successful electric car. Lithium-ion batteries are not only suitable of automotive use; they are game-changing, making decent driving range a reality.
3) If designed right, electric cars can appeal to even the most serious car enthusiast, as electric drive is capable of seriously outperforming internal combustion engines.
Whatever we think of this marketing strategy, he was a part of the original engineering team working on this new automobile and was an electrical engineer. Yet his new company needed capital to sustain itself, and Elon Musk was happy to come on board as an investor.
Eventually, Elon Musk would leverage his investment to become chairman of the board and squeeze Eberhard out (ironic parallels to Edison and Tesla, for the Nikolai stans out there). Though Eberhard signed an NDA on the matter, he does not seem particularly enthusiastic about this turn of events. Importantly, over this process Elon Musk won the right to call himself a “founder” through a lawsuit with Eberhard.
Since then, Elon Musk has leveraged this wealth to market himself as the “founder”, and thereby the tech “genius”, behind Tesla. The media and the public lapped it up, keen to find a Steve Jobs for green cars. This also conveniently served as a way for Musk to present himself as an environmentalist who was going to save the globe from human devastation. Yet Elon Musk was not an automotive engineer nor was he a notable environmentalist. Rather, he was the beneficiary of an army of engineers who were forced to realize whatever idea he had, no matter how ill-conceived (as exhibit A, I point to the Cybertruck).
Musk can claim more credit as the initial investor in SpaceX. Yet even if he can call himself a “founder” with more justification, he is not a rocket scientist. Once again, he leveraged his wealth to hire teams of talented rocket engineers who designed his fleet of launchers. His main role was making bold and profoundly unrealizable statements about landing people on Mars by 2021 and by getting a million people to colonize it by 2050. No matter that it would take a fleet of thousands of rockets to accomplish, he’s a “genius” so he must know what he’s talking about, so buy his stock!
With Twitter, too, he was able to leverage his wealth to pivot as a “free speech” warrior by driving out censorious elements in the social media platform (before later using the platform to censor all sorts of people from Ken Klippenstein to Laura Loomer and even his former ally Matt Taibi).
In all cases, Musk has been very effective in leveraging the intellectual labor of others to present himself as a virtuous and innovative genius indispensible to the tech sector. This isn’t to say he’s a bad investor - clearly his investments have panned out - but it wasn’t his genius which made it possible. On the contrary, the attribution to Musk of this genius is, rather, a form of alienation. It is the genius of many engineers and developers that have been alienated from them and attributed to another. As explained by Marx:
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not – turns it, that is, into its contrary.
The worst thing about this is the fact that it corrupts and manipulates our reverence for virtue and genius. People rightly look up to virtuous individuals and geniuses, and this gives them considerable social power. They are the exemplars who we aspire to emulate. Yet here we’ve granted it to a strange narcissist who is, by all accounts, a deadbeat father who treats his workers like garbage and corrupts the US political system for his own ends.
Moreover, it creates space for absurd speculation that distorts the economy. Tesla produced 1.8 million cars in 2024, which sounds like a lot except Toyota produced over 9 million cars in 2024. Yet the market cap of Toyota (the total value of its shares on the market) was $247 billion compared to Tesla’s $1.37 trillion! This means that Musk can leverage his reputation as a genius to inflate the value of his shares to ab absurd degree. We’ve allowed individuals to buy this recognition, use it to accumulate more assets and market more effectively, and then buy even more of it. It turns virtue into an asset, instead of a genuine attribute of the actual person.
In a society where virtue is not bought on the labor market but is a genuine property of the individual, Marx states that we are capable of truly human relations:
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.
In such a society, we would call upon ourselves and others to develop their real capacities as individuals, instead of buying and selling recognition on the free market. Moreover, we would be driven to develop these capacities ourselves, as we would want recognition for our true qualities instead of mere marketing.
Enter the Gamers
Yet there is hope - this process of leveraging wealth to appear virtuous apparently has its limits. Over the course of the past week, Elon Musk created an unusual scandal for himself when he streamed himself playing Paths of Exile 2. This game has a large and passionate community of gamers behind it, and he wanted to present himself as a pro. He loaded up his exceedingly highl-level character on a “hardcore” server (meaning when the character dies, its gone for good), and proceeded to play. Yet as many fans of the game quickly noted, Musk was playing as a rookie (or, in my time, “n00b”) would play. He filled his inventory with junk (a big no-no in any roleplaying or dungeon crawler game), didn’t seem to fully understand the interface, ignored highly valuable loot while taking valueless loot, and made other errors that anyone with a basic knowledge of the game would avoid.
Now, I have not played Path of Exile 2, although I did play Diablo when I was younger, so I am not able to adjudicate whether Musk made these errors. Nor am I interested in watching a billionaire livestream himself playing a computer game. Luckily for me, there were a bunchf PoE 2 experts who watched the stream and picked it apart, identifying his errors and ridiculing him on their own streams. (This video by Quin69TV has a good breakdown) They quickly recognized that this billionaire (who presumably as CEO of multiple companies) had probably paid someone else to “power level” the character for him so he could impress other gamers. One dead giveaway was the inventory section titled “Elon’s Maps”!
All this is to show that there are limits to one’s ability to pull the wool over people’s eyes and present oneself as a technological genius. Where Musk was usually wowing consumers who only see a man on a stage presenting strange and new technology, now he was claiming expertise in a game with large numbers of devoted fans.
Whatever Musk’s hope was, it turned into embarrassment as the tech nerds he was selling himself to saw he was a liar. This gives me hope that this marketing trick has its limits. Yes, you can buy the social benefits of
virtue, but the experts can tell this virtue isn’t really your own. They know, and they can use their knowledge to liberate us from this trick of alienation. I know that there is, in fact, a highly skilled gamer somewhere, maybe in China or India or even in the US, who can power-level the hell out of PoE 2 in hardcore mode. Whoever this person was, they clearly excelled at the game enough to make it to level 97 without dying. The only other thing I know about them is that they are not Elon Musk.
He’s one of the worst humans to ever set foot on our shores.