Elon Musk and Giorgia Meloni, a courtship of interests and ideology

There is a photo that better than others helps to understand the political meaning of Elon Musk’s visit to Rome. Less known than the one in which he embraces the premier Giorgia Meloni, or the one on the terrace of the interview with Nicola Porro. Musk is inside the Colosseum.

Look, smartphone in hand, at the terraces of the amphitheater. The sun sets in front of him. Look against the light to immortalize that greatness, the great beauty that man has built for millennia, even when stained with blood. Who shared it on Twitter, the Italian computer scientist Andrea Stroppa, who accompanied him through the corridors of Palazzo Chigi, added a text: “Per Aspera ad Astra”. Through the bumps, up to the stars. A perfect caption of Musk’s Roman mission.

In watermark you can read the entrepreneur’s political thought, his sense of history and what he believes to be his role in today’s world. Save humanity. Putting man back at the centre. Free it from the chains in which rules, controls and controllers have entangled it. And then the fight against the falling birth rate, shields against the advent of intelligent machines, a lighter approach to combating climate change. Seek Musk political allies. And the Italian government has become one. “Forward towards the common challenges that bring us together,” Meloni tweeted after the meeting. But which ones?

Freedom of speech as an ideology. “It is the market of ideas that decides”

Musk is an entrepreneur. The end of his visit to Italy is certainly economic. But not only. The first he met yesterday was Minister Antonio Tajani. A foreign minister. Tajani, entering Palazzo Chigi, listed to reporters the topics of the discussion he had just had with Musk. Even before talking about industrial policy and investments, Tajani said that among the topics discussed were information security, Twitter and the issue of freedom. The Digital Service Act will enter into force on 28 August. The European regulation for large technological platforms. One of the obligations established by Brussels for social media is to draw up a report on the fight against hate speech every six months.

Twitter refuses to do that. The social network with Musk has changed line. And the line for Musk is that there must be no bans or obligations, except in rare exceptions. “Musk believes that civilization dies if it has too many rules to follow. Because it needs maximum freedom to be able to evolve. Every idea is valid, it’s up to the market of ideas to decide which is more valid, which less”. Fabio Chiusi is a researcher. He is among the most attentive observers of the digital world. He knows Musk well and how he thought of him. He retraced his parable in a book, The man who wants to solve the future (Borlati Boringhieri).

Chiusi has no doubts. “He came to Italy for two dossiers. The one on Artificial Intelligence and the one on Dsa. Obviously he will try to bring grist to his mill ”. It is not known in detail what Musk and the government said to each other. But many today read his visit as an attempt to gain allies to put a spanner in the works of the European DSA. And a way to prevent the rules on artificial intelligence are not as he would like and are not geared enough to avoid the worst possible catastrophe for him: the extinction of humanity.

Falling birth rate, climate change, fight against political correctness

“Musk talks to the Italian government because he has ideological closeness with them. There are economic interests, they must have talked about business. But he has already demonstrated total consonance with both the American and Italian right ”, reasons Chiusi. Affinities that concern freedom of expression on social media. The fight against the falling birth rate (“Italy risks disappearing”, Musk tweeted after the Istat data on the collapse of births in Italy).

The need for a milder approach to the fight against climate change (“The problem exists, but at the moment the answer seems exaggerated to me”, wrote the entrepreneur again last March). Keep your guard up to protect yourself from the ideas of ‘Woke’, the US movement that fights against social discrimination and protects the recognition of rights, anyone who claims them. “It has become an obsession for him. He believes that those kinds of claims can lead to the extinction of humanity,” adds the researcher.

“The truth is that I don’t think anyone in Palazzo Chigi has the slightest idea of ​​who Elon Musk really is, what he really thinks, how much he has managed to become a divisive figure, at the forefront of an extremist culture war, imbued with a vision of the world that fears the imminent destruction of humanity by something and that we must fight against that something to protect future generations, humanity itself”. Vision that takes the name of ‘long termism’.

“But Musk is a powerful ally. Economically and politically powerful. It is convenient for the government to have him on his side ”. Musk is an undisputed media powerhouse. He is followed by hundreds of millions of people around the world. It was enough that yesterday near Palazzo Chigi the word spread that Musk was there, that dozens, hundreds of people, tourists, began to tread the perimeter of the buildings around Piazza Colonna. A singular secular liturgy that went on until his flight in a white Tesla, chased by a small group in which reporters were in a clear minority.

The conservative thinking of Musk, the innovator who would like a “Silla”

Popularity aside, Musk has to fight today. He is going through the “bumps” of him. The American dem government, the skeptical approach of Europe, determined to trace a perimeter of action for companies like Twitter. He and his companies are threatened by blockages, sanctions, fines. Asperities that can be crossed. And, with the right moves and allies, reach “to the stars”.

That an entrepreneur at the forefront of the most advanced frontiers of innovation – electric cars, robots and rockets that take us to space – may have become a conservative, need not sound contradictory. “More than a conservative, he has a conservative vision of the future. But he is very connected to technology. The West has established its dominance over the world thanks to its technology”, continues Chiusi.

Conquest of continents, machines, industrial production, finance, digital. “And for him this progress must continue. Man, guided by his reason, by the physical and mathematical sciences, must continue his expansion. Have many children and go to Mars, maybe conquer the solar system”. And move, after the difficulties, towards the other stars. Seen from this point of view, Musk is the thread that binds the Colosseum to Mars.

He is the man who wants to put humanity back at the center. Enhance it, as the brain chips of its Neuralink promise. Do not limit it, as the norms of democracy sometimes impose. The end is man. The indeterminate extent of his greatness. Capable of breaking the chains that hold back Gulliver, overcoming the rules, the norms, the European ones and, if necessary, those of the forms envisaged by democracies. “Maybe we need a new Silla,” he wrote yesterday on Twitter. Cornelius Sulla. Roman soldier and dictator. Died only a few years before the Colosseum hosted his first gory show.

@arcamasilum