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EVERY FEW days a Falcon 9 rocket takes off to ferry satellites into orbit. You might think it would feel commonplace by now. Not for the crowds gathered at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on December 1st. First came the exhilaration. The sight of the rocket blazing through the sky, then dropping its reusable first stage, with Mary Poppins-like grace, onto the launch site provoked gasps of awe, as did the sonic boom that followed. “It never gets old. It’s like being at an AC/DC concert,” a bystander murmured. Then came the realisation of the accomplishment. This spacecraft had a geopolitical payload: it carried South Korea’s first spy satellite, trying to catch up with North Korea days after the hermit state reportedly put its own spyware into orbit. It also had a scientific one: it took Ireland into the space age, by carrying the country’s first satellite, built by students at University College Dublin.

每隔几天，就会有一枚猎鹰9号火箭升空，将卫星送入轨道。你可能会觉得这已经司空见惯了。但对于12月1日在加利福尼亚范登堡空军基地聚集的人群来说却不是这样。首先是兴奋。火箭在天空中划过的景象，然后将可重复使用的第一级火箭部分优雅地降落在发射场上，引起了惊叹，随后接着的音爆也让人们惊叹不已。“这永远不会过时。就像在乐队AC/DC音乐会上一样，”一个旁观者低声说道。然后人们意识到了，这艘宇宙飞船携带着重要货物：试图在隔了几天之后追赶朝鲜，韩国的第一颗间谍卫星上去了，据报道这个隐士国家已经将自己的间谍卫星送入轨道。它还携带着一个货物：携带着由都柏林大学学生建造的该国第一颗卫星，也将爱尔兰带入了太空时代。

It was lost on no one that they had Elon Musk to thank for the spectacle. At the same time, the almost unwavering reliability of the engineering marvels the founder of SpaceX, the firm behind the Falcon, has fathered—SpaceX has launched and recovered its rockets 250 times—stands in stark contrast with the unhinged, error-prone remarks that in recent weeks have made him sound like a petulant space cadet. These included: appearing to endorse an antisemitic tweet on X, his social-media platform (an act he later called “foolish”); a cringeworthy trip to Israel that he said was to promote peace but looked more like an apology tour; a barrage of “Go fuck yourself”s to advertisers such as Disney at a New York Times summit, after they pulled their ads from X; and crass self-mythologising like his comment that he has “done more for the environment than any single human on Earth”.

没有人会遗忘埃隆·马斯克为这场壮观景象所做的贡献。这位 "猎鹰 "背后的公司 SpaceX 创始人所创造的工程奇迹--SpaceX 已经发射和回收火箭 250 次--可靠性没什么人质疑，与最近几周他发表的精神错乱、容易出错的言论形成了鲜明对比，这让他听起来像一个任性的家伙。其中包括：似乎支持一条反犹太主义推特（后来他称这种行为是“愚蠢的”）；一次令人尴尬的以色列之行；他说此行是为了促进和平，但看起来更像是一次道歉之旅；在纽约时报峰会上对迪士尼等广告商大肆辱骂，从他的社交媒体平台撤回了广告；以及像他声称自己"为环境所做的贡献比地球上任何一个人都多"。这样的的自我夸赞 。

One attendee at the rocket launch sighed that Mr Musk, for all his genius, now reminded him of the messed-up Tony Soprano, from the mobster TV series. But another, a young British physics buff, put his finger on why the entrepreneur still enjoyed a cult following. “He’s clearly a very troubled man. But being strong and turning a troubled past into a successful future is attractive. He’s a mega-leader. He has to make people believe he can walk on water.”

在火箭发射现场的一名参会者叹息道，马斯克先生，尽管才华横溢，但让他想起了电视系列剧《黑道家族》中的托尼·索普拉诺。另一位年轻的英国物理迷却指出了为什么这位企业家仍然受到追捧。“他显然是一个非常麻烦的人。将困难的过去变成成功的未来对人们来讲是很有吸引力的。他是一个超级领袖。他让人们相信他能行“神迹”。”

This points to the quandary at the heart of the Musk phenomenon. Is the braggadocio just the showmanship of a business pioneer? Can a man who has challenged conventions of engineering, energy and economics to revolutionise land and space travel get away with defying rules of human decency because of the importance of his mission? Or has the mission itself gone to his head, creating a saviour complex that could eventually bring him down?

这指出了马斯克现象的问题所在。这种自夸只是一种商业形式的表演吗？一个挑战工程、能源和经济、以改革陆地和太空旅行的人物，这种使命重要性能否凌驾于他人尊严规则之上？或者崇高的使命已经让他冲昏了头脑，产生了一个救世主情结？

The answer is a combination of all three. Mr Musk’s provocative humour, from boyish fart jokes to pranks like smoking pot in public, have helped burnish his reputation as a business maverick. Often he goes too far, riling regulators and raising concerns about the state of his mental health. But his rule-breaking also thrills his fans and, though his main marketing technique has been to sell great products, helps his brands get noticed; until this year, Teslas sold themselves by word of mouth, rather than by advertising. His showmanship has a Willy Wonka quality to it; it is hard to know where the magic ends and the madness begins, but you can hardly tear your eyes away.

答案是三者的结合。马斯克的幽默风格，从童趣笑话到在公共场合抽大麻等恶作剧，都帮助他树立了作为特立独行者的人设。他经常做得过火，激怒监管机构，引发对他精神健康状况的担忧。但他的违规行为也让他的粉丝兴奋不已，尽管他的主要营销手段是销售优质产品，但这也有助于他的品牌获得关注；直到今年，特斯拉一直是有口皆碑，而不是通过广告营销。他的表演具有一种威利·旺卡的特质；很难分清魔术和疯狂的界限，让你几乎无法移开目光。

To be sure, now that Tesla, worth $750bn, is the most valuable carmaker in the world and SpaceX is reportedly valued at $150bn, his motives for continuing to behave obnoxiously are murkier. An anecdote in Walter Isaacson’s recent biography suggests they may be compulsive. Mr Musk’s friends once took his phone and locked it in a hotel safe to stop him tweeting overnight. At 3am he ordered hotel security to unlock the safe. Yet however toxic his tweets are for X, which lives off ads, they do not matter much to customers and investors of Tesla and SpaceX. Though his X antics have caused periodic drops in Tesla’s share price, over the years it is up spectacularly. If SpaceX goes public, investors will dive in, even if some hold their noses while doing so. For all his flare-ups, it is mostly thanks to his vision and drive that the company has such a head start in both rocketry and satellite communications.

可以肯定的是，现在特斯拉价值7500亿美元，成为全球最有价值的汽车制造商，SpaceX据称价值1500亿美元，他继续表现得令人讨厌。沃尔特·艾萨克森最近的传记中的一个轶事表明，他的行为是这样的。马斯克的朋友曾经拿走他的手机，把它锁在酒店的保险柜里，以阻止他在夜间发推文。凌晨3点，他命令酒店保安打开保险柜。然而，无论他的推文对以广告为生的 X 公司有多大影响，对特斯拉和SpaceX的顾客和投资者影响不大。他的行为偶尔会导致特斯拉股价下跌，但多年来股价却有了上涨得更多。如果SpaceX上市，投资者将会蜂拥而入，即使有些人在这么做时还要捏着鼻子。但正是由于他的远见和行动力，公司在火箭技术和卫星通信方面拥有如此大的领先优势。

Most troubling is the messiah complex. From Tesla and SpaceX to artificial intelligence (AI), Mr Musk acts as if he is on a mission to save humanity, by preventing climate catastrophe, providing an exit route via interplanetary travel, stopping machines from out-thinking man, or averting nuclear Armageddon (last year he stymied Ukraine’s efforts to strike back against Russia by refusing to extend its access to his Starlix satellites to Russian-occupied territory, on the grounds that such an attack might lead Vladimir Putin to retaliate with nukes). At times he sounds like a capricious Greek god who believes he holds the fate of the world in his hands. “Finally the future will look like the future,” he bragged when launching Tesla’s Cybertruck pickup on November 30th.

最令人不安的是救世主情结。从特斯拉和SpaceX到人工智能（AI），马斯克的行为就好像他正在拯救人类，防止气候灾难，通过星际旅行提供一条逃生之路，阻止机器超越人类思维，或者避免核灾难（去年，他通过拒绝向俄罗斯占领的领土提供其星链卫星的接入，阻止了乌克兰对俄罗斯的打击，理由是这样的攻击可能导致弗拉基米尔·普京以核武器进行报复）。有时，他听起来像一个难以捉摸的希腊神，相信自己掌握着世界的命运。他在11月30日推出特斯拉的赛博皮卡时吹嘘道“未来终于变成了未来。”

Saving humanity is in vogue right now. It is a dangerous fetish. Last month a charter to protect the world from the dangers of rogue AI almost destroyed OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. A year ago Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted fraudster, claimed that the disastrous risks he took with his FTX crypto-exchange were in service of humanity. Such missionary zeal is not new in business. It pushed Henry Ford, inventor of the Model T, to raise workers’ living standards. But his saviour complex got the better of him and he ended up spewing antisemitic bile.

拯救人类很时髦。这是一种危险的癖好。上个月，一个旨在保护世界免受人工智能失控危险的宪章几乎毁掉了ChatGPT的OpenAI。一年前，现在已被定罪的欺诈犯山姆·班克曼-弗里德声称，他在FTX加密交易所上承担的灾难性风险是为了造福人类。这种传教士热情在商业界并不新鲜。正是这种热情推动了T型车发明者亨利·福特提高工人的生活水平。但他的救世主情结最终战胜了他，最终他发表了令人反感的反犹言论。

Mr Musk’s hubris, too, may end badly. For all the futuristic twaddle about the Cybertruck, drivers struggled to find its door handles. Yet in the grand scheme of things, his technical accomplishments will probably outweigh his all-too-human imperfections. For pioneering electric cars and reusable rockets, he has earned his place in history. Future generations will probably judge him the way today’s judges Ford: a handful will decry his flawed character; most will remember the majesty of his creations.

马斯克的自负也许会带来不好的结果。尽管对于赛博皮卡的未来主义夸夸其谈。然而，从长远来看，他的技术成就可能会超过他那些人性上的缺陷。他开创了电动汽车和可重复使用火箭，因此他在历史上占据了一席之地。未来的一代人可能会像今天对待福特一样来评判他：少数人会谴责他的缺陷性格，而大多数人会记住他创造的伟大壮举。