For an entire year, I was convinced Mark Zuckerberg would be the next President of the United States. I'm not joking.

In 2017, Zuckerberg had Joel Benenson, Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist in 2016; David Plough, President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager; and Charles Ommaney, a photographer for both the Bush and Obama presidential campaigns, on payroll. He was on a year-long “listening tour” to visit all 50 states, beginning with Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan. He even had former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, who ran George Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, on the books. CNBC and Politico were speculating about his political aspirations.

That same year, Zuckerberg gave a commencement address at Harvard that Vanity Fair noted, “seemed less of a commencement address than a stump speech.” Indeed, Zuckerberg touched upon topics such as affordable healthcare, helping people find meaning, and workers losing jobs to automation. I’ve pasted an excerpt that captures the ethos of the speech below:

“So what are we waiting for? It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet, and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place. That makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online, and personalizing education so everyone can learn?”

In a world where Donald Trump had just become President with esteemed champions such as Chris Christie and a man who unironically calls himself “The Mooch,” Zuckerberg seemed to be the logical next step: a more-successful businessman who was more filtered, more PC, and better at getting things done. Facebook had already gotten away with editing the language of news articles to significantly affect human emotion. Indeed, Zuck’s company seemed to have a Trumpian-level teflon: Despite being called out by Forbes, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many others, Facebook had largely escaped public ire.

Remember, before he was someone that both parties disliked, Zuckerberg was seen as a sufficiently-progressive (with a lower-case p) Democrat who was mostly known for suppressing Conservative news. Even then, he mostly escaped Conservative public ire. Forty-seven percent of polled voters had no opinion of him. So, this man had nearly every major news outlet on his platform (and a history of manipulating their content without consequence), nearly every winning and losing Presidential campaign head of the past two decades on staff, a history of asking for forgiveness instead of permission, and a track record of executional success that far exceeded Trump’s– not to mention significantly greater personal wealth. How could he fail?

Well, Cambridge Analytica and his Congressional testimony certainly didn’t help. However, to say that a single scandal ruined Mark Zuckerberg’s political hopes is too simplistic. America changed. Trump sabotaged the idea of political outsiders for the immediate future. Zuckerberg tried to court Conservatives by being more lenient than other social media sites on content moderation, but he just pissed everyone off instead. Not just anyone can lead a company that Nancy Pelosi calls “shameful” and Ted Cruz accuses of “a persuasive pattern of bias and political censorship” in the same year. These are just a few of my personal theories, but I don’t care enough to try to identify the straw that broke the camel’s back, nor am I interested in learning how much any given straw weighs.

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I’m less interested in Mark Zuckerberg’s political future than I am the in the culture that facilitated its swift rise and fall. I’m always interested when titans of industry (the mythical American figures of the early 20th century) flirt with culture by either instigating or imitating politicians (the mythical American figures of the mid-to-late 20th century). Unfortunately, it usually feels like watching the 2018 Knicks run the Triangle Offense: Masters of one craft deliberately choose moves from an outdated playbook that is completely foreign to them.

But why does this trend of public grandstanding in a political fashion persist? My theory is this: Most members of Gen Z would struggle to name one American hero of their lifetime. And, for the first time in American history, I don’t think anyone is looking for American heroes to place on a pedestal. But, for whatever reason, the instinct to exaggerate personal qualities and hyperbolize discourse still remains, and the result is a mismatch between public profile and impact on public discourse.

To businesspeople, playing politician must seem easier and more immediately impactful than building a business. After all, these people (politicians) are in their pockets for mere tens of thousands of dollars. The whole grandstanding and moralizing thing must be easy, certainly no harder than having millions of people willingly give you their money while managing thousands of personalities who work for you!

These days, there’s a certain amount of hubris necessary to try to make the leap from someone known for being rich and successful in a certain field to someone known for being intelligent and worth listening to on most issues. It’s damn-near impossible, in fact. So why do people still try, and how did it become so difficult?

My claim: Tastes have changed. Gen Z is the evolution of Gen X, the skeptical generation obsessed with irony and solipsism that David Foster Wallace labeled the “post-postmodernists.” Gone are the days of our parents’ escapism and our cool uncles’ dry sarcasm, and gone are the days of hoping for a single person to save us. We are too jaded to accept blatantly feel-good media narratives, and we have been burned too much by people who sound straight out of a 90s sitcom when they criticize existing power structures. The celebrities of our youth have all had media-driven falls from grace. The “Yes we can!” and “Political Outsider” fantasies that defined the 2010s are long gone. Our generation is no longer made for hero worship, and, to us, new ideas are not necessarily better ones because they’ve let us down before. We are the post-post-postmodernists: The sardonic meta-commentary of the early 2000s has led to a generation that effortlessly bobs and weaves between apathy and identity crisis.

Get Z isn’t looking to idealize anyone, nor are we looking for public figures to wholeheartedly endorse. That’s just setting everyone up for disappointment. Rather, we seem to be looking for people to root for in times of triumph whom we can (mostly) dissociate from in times of struggle, the way a local sports team’s logo is worn by many when they’re doing well but only donned by a few year in and year out. We don’t idolize public figures, we merely cheer them on when it’s convenient. Enter: Elon Musk.

Musk is an interesting web of old and new appeal. He’s a (relatively) self-made billionaire who works ungodly hours. He’s done cool shit like making electric cars and building rocket ships. He doesn’t own a newspaper, and he hasn’t been involved in a massive data scandal. He’s also meme-fluent and not particularly elitist. In other words, he has just enough going for him to appear super-human, not superhuman, and he doesn’t have a track record antagonistic enough for most people to care about him when he’s not in the news for something good.

Musk’s faults are largely downplayed in the current media climate. There are only so many adjectives you can use to negatively describe billionaires, and isn’t he less corrupt, less exploitive, less elitist than his still-unscathed contemporaries? There are, in many ways, bigger corporate fish to fry than Elon Musk. This is the liminal space that Musk occupies, and he’s taken full advantage of his cover. We don’t have heroes anymore so much as we have cultural frontmen. And the best frontmen, we all know, are the nondescript ones.

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I started writing this piece before Musk publicly announced his bid to acquire Twitter, and before that bid was accepted. Frankly, I did not think his strong-arm offer would succeed. I thought he’d either be stonewalled by Twitter’s board or disqualified by his own lack of patience. Either way, I viewed it as the new low-risk, high-reward play for a businessman with an agenda: Musk significantly altered public discourse under the guise of what everyone knows he does best, business.

But now he owns Twitter, and he did it in a way that merits a breakdown.

Musk seems to understand one thing well: He is famous for his work and infamous for his rhetoric. It is not, and will never be, the other way around. While many business leaders leverage the social proof of their success, the ability to shift public opinion through work is not strongly correlated with the ability to shift public opinion through will and personality. Icarus died by flying too close to the sun, entrepreneurs die by becoming too much like politicians.

So why did Musk spend his social capital to buy Twitter? And why did he choose inherently political, pro-free-speech rhetoric when he could have probably pointed out the strength of his offer, Twitter’s underperformance relative to most stocks over the past decade, and the fact that most of their Board didn’t even use Twitter regularly?

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My guess: We hate institutions, but still need them. We are inclined to like outsiders but have seen they can be destructively incompetent if they don’t know anything. Who is the highest profile person straddling the line between traditionally successful and complete outsider today? Elon Musk.

In many ways, anything Musk does from here on out will be more in spite of his ethos than because of it, at least in the general public’s eye. He still has to do the dirty work of actually delivering value through the laborious iteration of a large company. And, at this point, he probably won’t be widely praised for it, no matter what happens. He has sacrificed the enviable role of harmless businessman who is an afterthought in most people’s minds. But he seems to understand, perhaps better than any other public figure today, how to take advantage of the space he occupies in the collective consciousness. Musk doesn’t hide behind a PR wall like Zuckerberg, Bezos, or Bill Gates, which makes him both more safe and more vulnerable than they are. He is wrong, often very publicly, but he also pokes fun at himself. Musk’s MO is to regularly switch between serious and satirical, usually making statements that are pretty clearly divisive or almost-platitudinally palatable. And he usually sandwiches these between insights that very few people in the world can offer.

Truth be told, Musk was already starting down the path towards the heat of the spotlight. In buying Twitter, Musk had a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fully leverage the positive effects of his increasingly-polarizing persona to opine on an issue he cares deeply about (censorship) while staying in his perceived wheelhouse enough to not be slaughtered.

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These days, it is too stressful to idealize someone, to carefully weigh their virtues against their vices and risk contradicting the wisdom of the capricious and ever-changing crowd. Pop culture celebrities can dodge this moral gray-area when they are not perceived as significant enough to meaningfully disappoint. Politicians cannot.

Gen Z doesn’t want a suit that provides a worthwhile good or service to fully transform into a talking suit. But, because of the lack of contemporary heroes, businesspeople today can have effects much like the politicians of yesteryear, so long as they stay in their lanes frequently enough to not disrupt the equilibrium of the Information Age.

Elon Musk is the latest attempt to walk the tightrope between businessman and politician. And he seems to be doing the best, probably because he seems to have no actual political aspirations. His peers are dinosaurs, and he’s the newest T-Rex in Jurassic Park. It remains to be seen how this movie ends, but I’ll be watching closely.

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NOTE: I originally wrote this in 2022. I never published it because I was looking for a job and did not want to publish anything controversial. I'm publishing it now in January of 2025 because this draft touches many topics I am still turning over in my head today: The exchange rate between social, monetary, and political capital feels more balanced than ever. The kind of "authenticity" that seems to resonate with Gen Z seems to be hackable. Jeff Bezos has muscles now, Elon is working for The Department of Government Efficiency under the second Trump administration, Zuck talks about shooting deer with crossbows on The Joe Rogan Experience, and we still don't have any universal American heroes.