Oh Shut Up, Elon

The world's richest man doesn't understand a damn thing about America

It was February 28, 2006; the first Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina had wrecked New Orleans. The great city—The Big Easy—felt half-deserted and distinctly uneasy. More than half the population was gone, and only a few tourists had showed up for the festivities.

I remember asking a Black member of the City Council whether he worried that the culture of New Orleans might be changed by the terrible disaster. So many Black residents had been displaced; so many Latino workers had arrived to rebuild. Would something be lost?

He laughed at me. A big, warm, New Orleans laugh.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s just another flavor in the gumbo, man.”

I love that story (I’ve told it before), because I think what that man said was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about our country.

And I understood as soon as he said it: That is America.

We’re not about purity in this country—we’re about mixture. We aren’t obsessively trying to resurrect a dead past—we shape the future. And we don’t make lineage determine a man’s worth—it’s his contribution to the common work of our nation today that counts.

Which is why it is so strange to hear Elon Musk lecturing Americans about saving our culture.

The world’s richest man has lately taken to warning that Western civilization is in decline, that immigration threatens national survival, that American culture rests on some fragile inheritance traceable to particular ancestral roots. And, he’s publicly obsessing about one issue in particular: he’s posted about race almost every day for weeks.

Now—I give Musk a lot of credit. He’s helped to revolutionize the car industry, the space industry, the satellite internet industry, the online-payments business, and on and on. The guy is a business visionary. But that doesn’t make him smart in any other way.

Like many immensely successful businessmen before him, Musk appears convinced that his mastery of markets confers authority over history, society, and human meaning itself.

So Elon Musk has now decided he is here to save “American culture.”

Musk loves to announce portentously and incoherently that Western culture is collapsing, that immigration threatens national survival, and that America rests on some fragile ethnic inheritance stretching back to English and Scots-Irish origins.

His ketamine-fueled grandiosity about all this would be laughable, if he didn’t have so much power. So answer him we must.

It is hard to know where to begin, except maybe here: Elon Musk does not understand the first thing about American culture.

He understands power. He understands markets. He understands engineering problems. But culture—especially American culture—is not a machine you preserve by freezing it in place. It is a living conversation, sometimes an argument. And in this country, what we argue about is not—“What ‘stock’ do you come from?” We argue about ideas—“What is the meaning of liberty?”

Musk’s worldview did not emerge from nowhere. He was born into apartheid South Africa, a society organized explicitly around hierarchy, race, and inherited privilege—a system built on the belief that culture belonged to one group and must be defended against others. His family migrated to South Africa after the apartheid regime had been established in 1948. They left as that order began to collapse.

Like many figures shaped by that world, he seems haunted by the idea that demographic change equals civilizational decline.

You hear it in his posts warning that white populations are disappearing. You see it in his amplification of nationalist figures across Europe. You read it in his insistence that culture is something fixed, ancestral, and under siege.

But that is not our story. That is not the American story. And I believe it is fundamentally unpatriotic and un-American to try to force our story into Musk’s South African worldview. We ain’t you, bub.

America is not an inheritance. It is a a constant process of invention and reinvention.

Every group that has arrived here was once accused of destroying the culture. The Irish were despised. The Germans denigrated. Italians were considered alien. Jews were excluded. Catholics feared. Asians barred. Eastern Europeans mocked. Each wave supposedly marked the end of America as it had been known.

And each wave became America.

What Musk and his allies describe as cultural decline is often just cultural change—the ordinary, sometimes noisy process by which a democratic society renews itself. Their panic, in other words, is ideological, not empirical.

The irony is that Elon Musk claims to admire American greatness while fundamentally misunderstanding its source.

Think: America did not become the greatest nation in the world because we preserved some precious and pristine ethnic core. We became powerful because we rejected all that nonsense.

Our culture is not defined by ancestry but by a creed—the radical proposition that people from anywhere can become Americans, and in doing so change what America is.

Jazz was once scandalous. Rock and roll was denounced as degenerate. Hip-hop was feared. Now they are American exports to the world. Culture here moves forward by absorbing outsiders and unsettling insiders.

That process can feel chaotic. It always has. But the deepest American instinct is not fear of change. It is confidence that we can survive it and make it our own.

So when Elon Musk lectures Americans about defending culture, the proper response is the phrase I tell my children they should not use, but which I employ here, because it is justified:

Shut up, Elon.