On Naive Power

On 23 July 2026, The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed Elon Musk. Not long into it, I felt a deep discomfort that remained for the rest of the interview, and became almost painful as Ms Minton Beddoes pressed Mr Musk about his obsession with Europe’s demise and the cure he prescribes in the form of far-right organisations in the UK, Germany, and France.

In defending himself, Mr Musk repeated: “Here are the principles, and tell me which of these sound terrible: that we should have secure borders, that we should have safe cities, that we should have sensible spending.”

My discomfort with the interview started with Mr Musk’s answer to the first question, on the human condition in ten years. He basically said what came to mind on that chair: there will be a lot of AI; today I’m feeling positive about AI; so having a lot of it should result in something very good; let me paint an AI utopia for you. As I realised it was an erratic answer, certainly not thought through enough to explain and model such an eventuality, my discomfort grew from doubts about the usefulness of the interview to doubts about the man himself. When he came out with the “you can’t say my principles are terrible” argument, it was so painfully cringeworthy that I was ready to hit pause.

But precisely because this argument was so juvenile and crude, I must ask myself: why did he make it? Was it out of desperation? Does he really not see its absurdity, not least because the same argument can be taken up by Pol Pot or Hitler? Or did he really believe both that these goals in themselves justified his methods, and that by declaring them the public ought to be convinced by the justification?

In pondering Mr Musk’s interview, my mind wandered to another tech executive, Marissa Mayer, who became CEO of Yahoo in 2012, where I worked for nine years until 2015. The most controversial change she made during her tenure was to introduce the Quarterly Performance Review (QPR) program, through which employees were rated as Greatly Exceeds, Exceeds, Achieves, Occasionally Misses, or Misses Expectations. Each rating had a percentage quota that people managers had to meet. For example, as the quota for Misses was 5%, every quarter, the manager of a team of 20 people had to give at least one of them Misses.

Many employees were unhappy with the program and summarised its ills by calling it a people-stack-ranking system. This assessment should not be controversial: it describes exactly and succinctly how the QPR was designed to be implemented. But Ms Mayer objected to it strongly, and repeated in company meetings that “it is not a stack rank” whenever the topic came up, without ever elaborating on her case against the assessment. Without the benefit of an Economist interview, I will attempt a case on her behalf. On joining Yahoo, Ms Mayer articulated a somewhat trite flywheel for the company: People, Product, Revenue. Of primary importance, Yahoo must have the best people. The QPR was the flagship method to realise this principle, therefore it was of utmost importance and worth the pain. Characterising it as stack-ranking people was an unhelpful distraction, so it needed to be shut down.

This string of logic may sound ruthless or even sinister, but more than anything else it was likelier to be born out of a sort of naivety. Another example, much less known, was her unnecessary vocal endorsement of the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich, a corporate tax avoidance method companies like Google and Apple deployed in the 2000s and 2010s. Yahoo was late to the party and restructured its international entities to make the Sandwich only in 2014. However, at a company meeting in London, Ms Mayer highlighted the efficient tax arrangement Yahoo was able to make through its Dublin presence as a win. The apparent disregard for the potential controversy that a 2.9% corporation tax might be considered grossly unfair, and therefore a reason for withholding self-congratulation, betrayed a naive belief that whatever was good for Yahoo must also be good for its employees and their morale. If the End is legal, as is the Means, how can any Beneficiary object? This laser focus on outcome, to borrow a favourite corporate metaphor, is naively narrow but deliberately uncompromising. Naive because Ms Mayer and Mr Musk do not seem to realise or admit negative consequences that are not directly attributable to the End. Any collateral damage should be mitigated by other people: if tax avoidance is undesirable, then it should be legislated away; if the jobless do not have enough money to buy food, well, they should find a job. Deliberate because they should be familiar with pushback but simply refuse to listen, and as such stubbornness may bring business success so it becomes self-reinforcing.

But this is just not good enough. It goes back to the point Ms Minton Beddoes also brought up in the interview: the likes of Mr Musk wield real power. He can deny states access to Starlink and tilt the result of wars. He can reach hundreds of millions of people on X. Nauseatingly, he is on first-name basis with Demis, Dario, and even Sam. In the interview, he admitted that he went too far with DOGE but denied even the possibility that the funding cuts to USAID caused any unintended suffering or deaths. “Zero”, he emphasised with both an irascible look and mime. It is as if conviction can manifest reality, that repeating something to be so or not-so makes it in fact so or not-so. A forced bell curve is NOT STACK RANKING. The number is ZERO, no matter what you say. The naivety makes it even more dangerous than if we were dealing with someone Machiavellian, who might temper their power from an awareness of that power. This naive power, enormous and wielded by narrow and not-fully-formed minds, is the root of my discomfort. It is like staring into a gun barrel held by a child.