Why Elon Musk Is A Less Sympathetic Lex Luthor
Why Elon Musk Is A Less Sympathetic Lex Luthor
Unfortunately, he’s the supervillain who’s real.
Time magazine named Elon Musk its 2021 Person of the Year, describing him as “the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad.” Time gushed, “He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable.” It’s like how a fictional magazine might cluelessly applaud an obvious supervillain: In a 2004 episode of Smallville, Forbes declares a young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) the savior of his family business, LuthorCorp, but his father Lionel (John Glover) punctures his ego: “They dubbed Mussolini a savior and look what happened to him.”
Elon Musk has a lot in common with Smallville’s Lex Luthor. Comedian Patton Oswalt took this observation even further during an appearance on Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast.
“Your portrayal of Lex Luthor completely anticipated what we’re going through now with people like Elon and all these damaged tech bro millionaires who have all the money and all the power and they just want to be cool and liked, and they will destroy the world if they’re not,” Oswalt said. (Watch below.)
Money doesn’t make the great man
Unlike his comic book counterpart or the Clancy Brown version from the Bruce Timm cartoons, Lex Luthor on Smallville is not a super genius. He didn’t even build his empire from scratch but instead wrested it from his father after growing up in his shadow. Musk was also born into privilege, the son of wealthy businessman Errol Musk, although like many rich kids, Musk has claimed poverty when convenient for his mythical backstory: “I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt,” he tweeted in 2019.
Lex desperately seeks approval, from his father, from the Kents, from the people of Smallville, and eventually the entire world. The emptiness inside him is not something he’s capable of filling legitimately. Musk’s estranged daughter, whose humanity he’s failed to recognize, has said he’s “desperate for attention and validation.”
In the 2006 episode “Reunion,” we learn that a teenage Lex believed he could blackmail his prep school bullies into “acting” like his friends so he “can have some respect in this place.” When the closest thing he has to an actual friend refuses to go along, he beats him so bad he almost dies. He believes he deserves more than harsh reality, even if the alternative is a coerced lie. He’d sink even lower when he falsely convinces Lana Lang she’s pregnant so that she’ll marry him.
Lionel savagely dismantles Lex’s transparent motivations for seeking political office in the show’s fifth season: “This isn’t about serving the greater good,” he tells him, “or even about power. It’s about you changing the way people perceive you, isn’t it? … Even if you were president of the United States, you think that’s gonna make any difference? Because the people who are close to you will always know what’s truly in your heart. That’s why Lana Lang will never love you.”
Lex can only stand there silent and stunned in the face of what, deep down, he knows is true.
Rosenbaum’s Lex was “a type that hadn’t really existed up until that point,” Oswalt said. “There had always been the evil, confident tech billionaire, but we’d never seen the ones” like Musk, who briefly played a version of his idealized self in Iron Man 2. Musk wishes he were Tony Stark’s peer, but he’s more like the film’s villain, Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell, who can actually dance)
“He’s the kid whose dad owns the rec center and he wants to be invited there to play foosball,” Oswalt continued. “He knows he can just walk in but no one has invited him there, and that’s what he wants. Lex is friends with this farm boy [Tom Welling’s Clark Kent] who is actually sure of himself or at least happy. It’s just very weird and eerie to re-watch those [Smallville] episodes and realize this is Elon before we knew what Elon was.”
Lex’s motivation for world conquest is not that different from when he thought he could force his unwilling classmates to like him. He states in 2005’s “Lexmas” that the “secret to living happily ever after is power … money and power. Once you have those two things, you can secure everything else and keep it that way.” He believes if he can win the Kansas Senate race, no matter the cost, he’ll command the same respect and admiration as his opponent Jonathan Kent, but what Lex wants most he can never purchase or steal outright. Time unironically describes what truly drives Musk: He’s “spent a lifetime defying the haters; now, it seems, he’s finally in position to put them in their place.” That’s a hollow pursuit for a hollow man.
Lex and Elon vs. the ‘freaks’
Lex and Musk both wage war on people who are different, perhaps assuming it gives their empty lives a grander purpose. Lex targets what he calls “meteor freaks,” people with special powers and abilities. He claims his goal is knowledge, then he insists he’s defending the human race. Musk lacks any veneer of intellectual curiosity. He believes he’s defending humanity from what he calls “the woke mind virus.” Typical of a supervillain, he doesn’t blame himself for wrecking his relationship with his child. Instead, he claims his daughter, who he continues to misgender, was “killed” by the “woke mind virus” that somehow made her trans.
So far, Musk doesn’t share Lex’s political aspirations. He doesn’t want to hold elected office himself, preferring for now to prop up his favored “anti-woke” candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and, of course, Donald Trump, who himself was the model for John Byrne’s 1980s version of Lex Luthor.
Lex is probably more overtly sympathetic than Musk, as Smallville’s first few seasons details Lex’s slow then sudden descent into true villainy. We even see him demonstrate moments of compassion and consideration for others. Rosenbaum’s Lex had embraced his dark side well before the first tweet was sent in 2006. There’s little evidence, though that Musk was less awful prior to opening a Twitter account. His company, Tesla, was sued for fostering a racist environment at its California manufacturing plant. Last weekend, he posted on social media that “civil war is inevitable” when incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation.”
“You want to like him,” Oswalt observed about Rosenbaum’s Lex, “but then you realize you have to make him think he’s awesome every second of his life or he will turn on you and burn the world down.”
Both men took desperate measures against those who they believe make them feel inferior. In the comics and Smallville, Lex purchases The Daily Planet. It’s his way of controlling the narrative and reshaping public opinion in his favor. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which he renamed “X,” had a similar impact, but perhaps even more pathetic motivations. Musk resented that Twitter had become a global online town square that he irrationally believed excluded him, so he spent $44 billion to dominate the conversation. He became consumed with the supposed “status” the blue check mark badge granted prominent users — so much so that he wrecked the verification system and gave the badge to anyone willing to pay for it, while stripping the badge from those who weren’t. The result was chaos, and he eventually had to back down or risk losing the users who actually drew people to the site. Like Lex, Musk couldn’t force people to associate with him or even like his tweets. Perhaps that’s why Musk still longs to colonize Mars. If he can’t command respect on Earth, he’ll try another planet.
“You play [Lex] very confident,” Oswalt told Rosenbaum, “but there’s that underlying thing of like ‘You’d better laugh at every joke I make’ … It’s very eerie how this very intelligent, very cool post-modern superhero show called the situation that we’re all living in now.”
Lex is superficially suave and charming, but Rosenbaum keeps his inherent awkwardness just below the surface. He can never truly fit in with normal, decent people, no matter how hard he tries, how much money he spends, and eventually how many lives he ruins. Of course, this was a WB/CW show so Lex never displays Musk’s outright goofiness. Yet, Musk might very well help topple democracy, and that’s not a comic book plot.
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True story, when I first mentioned the name Elon Musk to my wife she thought it could not possibly be real because it sounded like the name of a Bond villain.
As with many villains in the superhero genre, their back stories often give us a glimpse of the humanity they once had. Musk doesn’t have even an ounce of that. He’s just a xitty human being.