The reflexive cancellation of one of the most consequential builders alive is not a principled stand. It is a case study in how tribalism makes us ignore the warnings we most need to hear.
By Rxan Smith
Let’s start with the thing that makes people on both sides uncomfortable: few individuals alive have done more to reshape transportation, space, communications, and emerging technology than Elon Musk. Before Tesla, “electric car” meant a glorified golf cart with a 40-mile range. After Tesla, it meant a 0-60 in under three seconds and a charging network that actually worked. If you believe climate change is an existential threat — and most progressives say they do — then this one man’s contribution to that cause dwarfs a decade of green policy papers combined.
He co-founded PayPal, which democratized financial access for small businesses who couldn’t afford traditional merchant systems. He built SpaceX, which did what NASA’s contractor ecosystem couldn’t: dramatically reduced the cost of getting to orbit. He launched Starlink, which provided internet to conflict zones, disaster areas, and rural communities the telecom duopoly had decided weren’t profitable enough to serve. He co-founded OpenAI, planting the seed of the modern AI safety conversation.
And yet, if you mention his name in the average progressive conversation right now, the response is a sneer. That sneer is the problem we need to talk about.
The Ledger
Climate / Energy
Tesla + SolarCity
Transformed the auto industry’s EV trajectory. The net effect on adoption curves is measurable in megatons of avoided CO2.
Space Access
SpaceX
Reduced launch costs by roughly 90% via reusable rockets. NASA now depends on it.
Financial Access
PayPal
Let millions of small operators participate in the digital economy before big fintech existed.
Global Connectivity
Starlink
Provided internet to underserved rural regions, Ukrainian military communications, and post-disaster zones abandoned by telecoms.
AI Safety
OpenAI (co-founder)
Helped establish the first major nonprofit AI safety research lab, explicitly because he feared unchecked corporate AI development.
Neuroscience
Neuralink
First BCI company to implant a working device in a human patient, with early applications targeting paralysis and locked-in syndrome.
His record is not one of perfect foresight — Musk has repeatedly overpromised on autonomous vehicles, Mars timelines, and product launches. The point isn’t that he’s always right. It’s that people with an unusual ability to see around corners are often wrong in public more than everyone else precisely because they’re willing to make predictions at all. You can be directionally correct and tactically wrong at the same time.
The Henry Ford Problem
Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing and helped build the American middle class. He was also a virulent anti-Semite whose writings influenced Nazi Germany. Martin Luther King Jr. transformed the moral architecture of American civil rights. He was not a perfect man. Steve Jobs changed how a generation interacts with information and each other. He was, by most accounts, frequently cruel.
Human history is full of people whose contributions and flaws coexist without canceling each other out. The demand that public figures be either heroes or villains is not moral clarity — it is intellectual laziness, and it is a luxury that serious people engaged in serious problems cannot afford. The complexity does not disappear because we need it to.
He Voted Democrat. Twice.
Before discussing why the left is furious with him, let’s establish what Musk actually was politically for most of his public life. He was a registered independent who voted for Barack Obama — twice. He donated to Democratic candidates throughout the 2010s. He openly supported universal basic income, a carbon tax, high-density urban housing, and Medicare expansion. These are on the record.
What changed? By his own account: the Democratic Party changed, specifically around what he describes as ideological rigidity on speech and dissent that he found incompatible with his temperament. You can agree or disagree. But treating him as if he’s always been a right-wing villain is historical revisionism in real time. Every major billionaire in America — the Kochs, Bloomberg, Soros, Zuckerberg, Bezos — has supported both parties over time. The game is simple: when you have that much money and that many regulatory interests, you align with whoever you think won’t hurt you. Singling out Musk for playing a game everyone plays is the definition of motivated reasoning.
Movements often become so focused on ideological purity that they lose the ability to distinguish disagreement from disqualification.
The AI Warning You’re Ignoring
Here is where the tribalist filtering goes from petty to dangerous. For nearly a decade, Musk has been the loudest major voice in American public life warning that artificial intelligence poses an existential risk to human civilization — a structural one building right now, driven by corporations and governments racing each other with essentially no agreed-upon governance framework in place.
“AI is a fundamental risk to existence of human civilization. By the time we are reactive, it will be too late.” - Elon Musk, National Governors Association 2017
He co-founded OpenAI for exactly this reason — not to build the most capable AI, but to ensure that if powerful AI got built, it would be built by an organization committed to safety over profit. He has called for regulation covering Tesla’s own AI systems, arguing against his own commercial interest that all advanced AI development should face oversight.
And a large portion of the people who most need to hear it have decided not to — because they don’t like his Twitter feed. Here’s why that matters: the first victims of uncontrolled AI won’t be humanity in some science-fiction reckoning. They’ll be accountants, paralegals, customer service reps, and millions of knowledge workers who assumed automation would stop at the factory floor. This is a question for right now, and it deserves engagement on its merits, not dismissal based on who’s raising it.
The Uncomfortable Verdict
If a progressive activist said everything Musk has said about AI risk and corporate capture of emerging technology, they would be celebrated as visionary. Because Musk says it, it gets dismissed as rich-guy theater. That’s not a principled critique. That’s tribalism with a social justice veneer.
This Disease Is Not Left-Wing
The critique here has been aimed mostly at one direction — but the error belongs to everyone. Many conservatives spent years dismissing climate scientists not because the data was wrong but because they disliked the politics attached to environmentalism. The anti-vax movement cut across partisan lines in ways that exposed the same underlying mechanism: when the messenger becomes politically coded, the message stops being evaluated. The disease is not left-wing or right-wing. It is the belief that agreement determines credibility — that you only have to take seriously the people already on your side.
The people who built the durable policy wins of the last century — labor protections, civil rights law, environmental regulation — had to understand the thinking of people they opposed. They had to take seriously arguments they disagreed with. What has replaced that discipline is a social signaling system: you demonstrate your values by publicly rejecting certain figures. And every person who performs that rejection - who rolls their eyes at the AI warnings, who refuses to acknowledge that Tesla happened - is making themselves not more principled. Stupider.
The Charge Sheet
This piece is not a defense of everything Elon Musk has done. His behavior on X has frequently been reckless. His amplification of far-right figures in Europe — particularly his endorsement of the AfD in Germany — was not a principled free-speech act. It was a choice to legitimize parties with a documented history of nationalist extremism. His labor record at Tesla — fighting union organizing, settling discrimination lawsuits — is a real contradiction for someone who built his reputation as a force for human progress. The concern that his AI company Grok has drifted toward politically motivated outputs is not paranoia. It’s observable.
These are real problems. They deserve to be named and held. But you don’t get to take those failures as permission to pretend his record doesn’t exist, or that his warnings about AI don’t deserve engagement. That’s not accountability. That’s the emotional convenience of having an enemy.
The moment you decide someone is entirely wrong because of who they voted for, you have stopped thinking. You have started performing.
And Finally…
Musk is not your ally. He is also not your enemy. He is something more useful and more uncomfortable than either: a person with an unusual track record of being right about the next thing, who is currently telling you that the next thing — artificial intelligence, built without democratic oversight, in a winner-take-all race between a handful of corporations and governments — is the most consequential danger this civilization has faced since nuclear weapons.
What the cancellation has actually done is shut off a significant portion of the population from one of the most technically sophisticated voices in the conversation about where civilization is going. Canceling him doesn’t weaken him — he is worth more than the GDP of most countries. His rockets are launching. His cars are selling. His AI company is building. What the boycotts have done is ensure the people doing the canceling stop being in the room when the most consequential decisions of the next twenty years are made.
You don’t have to admire him. You don’t have to forgive his politics or his endorsements or his management style. But if you’ve decided you won’t listen to what he says because you don’t like who he voted for, you’ve made yourself exactly the kind of person the powerful are counting on you to be. History is littered with warnings people ignored because they hated who delivered them. The warning doesn’t become less true because the messenger is flawed. It only becomes more expensive to ignore.
The most dangerous thing about ignoring smart people you hate
is that the world they’re warning you about
doesn’t care about your feelings.
Rxan Smith · Uncomfortable · uncomfortable.rxansmithmedia.com
Who Is Rxan Smith
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