After being invited to a live stream; actually, from my personal perspective, Elon Musk is a classical capitalist. This demarcation point is defined at the time when Martin Luther and his followers initiated the Protestant Reformation. Those fervent Protestants believed in understanding everything God created through reason, so they were willing to undertake asymmetric risks for exploration.
Each believer had to face God directly, which elevated the responsibility of the individual to the level of faith. Early Puritans viewed commercial success as evidence of glorifying God, so taking risks was not gambling, but solving puzzles, exploring the natural laws set by God. Musk building rockets, digging tunnels, that kind of obsession of staking his entire fortune is essentially not about betting on probabilities, but executing a kind of cognitive piety. His calmness when losing money is because he is a martyr, not a modern professional manager.
Taking on asymmetric risks to gain asymmetric returns, this is the most classical capitalism; today's capitalism seeks to minimize risks and maximize profits as much as possible, which is actually decadent capitalism. Therefore, whether it's the classical capitalism that followed the Protestant Reformation, or the destructive creation described by Schumpeter, or the creative destruction as defined by Cathie Wood, all of the above are just variations. The core point is that, in a sense, Musk is a classicist.
Modern financial capital pursues risk-free arbitrage, transferring risks to society through information asymmetry, monopoly, and leverage, while privatizing the profits. This violates the original ethical contract of capitalism, where risk-takers get the rewards. When risks are infinitely sliced and hidden, capital loses its soul and becomes a pure mathematical game. So Musk's contempt for Wall Street is essentially a 16th-century nobleman looking at a 21st-century casino dealer.
A fellow stock investor once asked me, if stock trading is so good, why not do it full-time? I replied that stock trading doesn't create value; he replied, but it creates personal wealth. Actually, from this perspective, you can see the public's orientation: chasing wealth while forgetting the original purpose. Money is a means, not an end. Many people, in the process of earning, even forget that their original purpose for earning money was to improve their lives, and instead, their lives get worse.
A classicist like Musk must intervene in the physical world to build cars, generate electricity, and launch rockets, because only by changing the form of matter does it meet the definition of creation. Money should be a byproduct of exploring the world, not the purpose of the exploration itself. On this point, I completely understand and admire Musk.
