Is Musk Writing His Own Super-Hero Story?

Posted on | February 17, 2025 | 4 Comments

Mike Magee

A lot can happen in the blink of an eye. You can lose everything. Your name, your reputation. But they can be replaced… by determination, strength, empathy, faith… A renewed sense of how blessed you are just to be alive. To have people who love you, care for you, but that only happens if you don’t leave before the miracle. When you realize that tomorrow is a new day. That tomorrow brings hope, and hope is where we find redemption.

Wally West (The Flash), September, 2011

________________________________________________________

Susan Kirtley PhD is the Director of Comic Studies at Portland State University. She says that comics “inspire many of us to believe in ourselves and our visions for the future, despite any naysayers. It’s not necessary to have a superpower to be a superhero, but rather faith and commitment.” 

Elon Musk clearly shares her religious zeal and is a true believer. His outfits alone deserve graphic novel treatment. Eight years before he showed up in the Oval Office in a long length, villain inspired, black overcoat hunched over with four year old “X” on his shoulder as he decimated the employee ranks of the federal government, he said, “I read all the comics I could buy or that they let me read in the bookstore before chasing me away.”

Aaron Day Lewis, author of “American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion,” draws straight lines between 1980’s comic heroes and their stark attitudes on good vs. evil, science fiction, societal calamity, and visions of afterlife. The heroes are often “cutting-edge inventors and futurists” or “vigilante billionaires” that morph into “genius detectives…I have to imagine Musk absorbed this idea that there’s this heroism to being smart and innovative… Maybe that inspired him to envision himself as a potential superhero, to write his own superhero story.””

In comic world, science and science fiction confidently blend and blur. In ranking the most powerful super heroes of all time, comic book aficionado Maverick Heart (aka aeromaxxx 777)  lists “Flash” as the clear winner, stating “Not only does he have super-speed, but once he reaches terminal velocity, he has shown other incredible powers. During an attempt to measure his top speed, he strained every muscle in his body to run at about 10 Roemers, which is 10 times the speed of light.”

“Roemers?” That’s a reference to Ole Roemer (1644-1710), a Danish uber-scientist, whose seminal discovery of the “speed of light” was celebrated on his 340th anniversary in 2016 with the Google doodle above. Details aside (the Earth’s timing of orbits around our sun were measured against Jupiter moon Io’s orbit around the distant planet), he detected a discrepancy in the measurements of the eclipses which amounted to 11 minutes. He attributed the lag to a speed of light he calculated to be 140,000 miles per second, not infinite as was commonly thought at the time.

Ole was the Elon of his day – tutoring France’s King Louis XIV eldest son one day, serving as Denmark’s royal mathematician the next, and still finding time to meddle in politics – getting himself appointed judicial magistrate, tax collector, chief of police, and mayor of Copenhagen. He was apparently as quick as Elon to downsize the manning table, reportedly firing the entire police force because “their morale was too low.” Not long on empathy, he was also known to target “beggars, poor people, unemployed, and prostitutes” – and not in a good way.

He was also science mentor of choice for up-and-comers in physics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. And that is why Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), a 22 year old equally ambitious scientist and instrument maker sought him out in 1708, two years before Ole’s demise and burial in the Copenhagen Cathedral. 

The road that led to that meeting however was bumpy. At age 15, Fahrenheit  lost both his parents to an accidental mushroom poisoning. His guardian then arranged a four-year merchant trade apprenticeship in Amsterdam. But when he completed the program at the age of 20 in 1706, he escaped an agreed upon further commitment with the Dutch East India company and his guardians sought an arrest warrant. When he arrived at Mayor Romer’s doorstep two years later, he was seeking business guidance and a pardon from further legal action. He achieved both. 

Ole Romer explained that there was currently intense interest in high quality instruments that could measure temperature. For nearly a century, everyone from Galileo to Huygens to Halley had been working on it. He himself had invented one in 1676 while convalescing from a broken leg, but there was great room for technical improvements.

 The challenges were threefold – physical construction, the creation of a standard measurement scale, and reproducible accuracy. He spent the next four years refining his glass blowing skills, discovered that mercury was a more reliable reference liquid than alcohol, and realized he could improve on Romer’s scale – which he did, renaming it the Fahrenheit scale in 1717 in a publication, Acta Editorum.

The famous scale was pegged on three different reference points. The first was the point at which a mixture of ice, water and salt reached equilibrium, which he identified as 0 degrees. The second was the temperature at which ice was just beginning to form on still water. This would be 32 degrees. And the final measure was the temperature when the thermometer was placed under the arm or in the mouth. This became 96 degrees. The span between 0 and 96 allowed Fahrenheit to create a dozen divisions with each subdivided into 8 parts. (12 X 8 = 96)

Fahrenheit thermometers were well-crafted and popular in their day. Their success carried  the Fahrenheit scale into two centuries of dominance. But in his day, the unpatented invention did not make him rich. He died at age 50, a virtual pauper. In September of 1736, he was granted a “fourth-class funeral of one who is classified as destitute” at the the Cloister or Monastery Church.

Just two decades later, in 1745, another scientist name  Anders Celsius arrived on the scene with a new scale. It would be a slow-burn, taking approximately two centuries to officially supersede the Fahrenheit scale everywhere in the world except (not surprisingly) the United States. Built on a scale of 0 to 100, the Celsius scale is also called the centigrade scale.

American scientific hubris has forced America’s math students to memorize conversion formulas and engage in what management guru, Tom Peters, would call unnecessary “non-real work.”

A down and dirty one: F -30 /2 = C.

Or more accurately: (F-32)/1.8 = C

In the meantime, comic book fantasists with a taste for standard-fare wild tales can purchase the “Trump Trading Card – Assassination Attempt- Gem 10 Graded – Trump Collectible Card” on Amazon Prime with a  17% discount for $19.99. 

But for you Trump voters with an unhealthy taste for the supernatural and unknown, Elon is more likely the “Ole” unlikely to disappoint. As Jeffrey J. Kripal, Professor of Religion, Rice University, and reviewer of “American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion” wrote, “We are not who we think we are. Like the superheroes themselves, we each have a secret identity (or identities). The conscious ego or unitary self is a useful construction, but also an illusion.”

Professor Kripal does leave us with some hope for redemption, with futures not yet fully determined or decided.  In fact, these comic circumstances may unveil “super-selves that can become an important part of a new soul-making practice that will result in future selves and future stories in which to live and flourish. Our afterlives… are constantly being rewritten, redrawn, and seen anew. By us, as super.”

In God we pray. Amen

Comments

"Available Everywhere Now"
"Code Blue INDEX online"

 

  Ralph Snyderman
Prospective Health Blog
BIOGRAPHY   Meredith Magee Donnelly
Homegrown Friends
BIOGRAPHY   Eric Dishman
NIH Precision Medicine
BIOGRAPHY   Barbara Ficarra
Health in 30
BIOGRAPHY   William L. (Larry) Minnix, Jr.
Larry's Letters
BIOGRAPHY     Eric Dishman
Precision Medicine, Euthanasia, Abortion, Communism, Trillions of Dollars, Losing Freedom, and Town Hall Mobs BIOGRAPHY   Michael Millenson
Yearning for Universal Coverage Is Not Universal
BIOGRAPHY