In the late 1970s, when I was five years old, I was convinced that by adulthood I would be driving a flying car and spending my holidays on the Moon. My father, a shy and troubled intellectual, would nod when I told him so. After all, that was the future imagined by the culture of the time — by the media, films, novels, and popular science.
Fifty years later, none of it has come to pass. Yet the narrative remains remarkably unchanged. The only real difference is that its leading storyteller happens to be the first trillionaire in history.
Elon Musk sells stories, and society’s appetite for stories can be measured by the size of his fortune. Progress, it turns out, was never just about technology; it was always about belief. My father understood that, even if he never quite said it.
Tesla does not really sell electric cars; it sells the dream of autonomous mobility. SpaceX does not merely launch rockets or provide internet connectivity; it sells the dream of a multiplanetary future. Even Twitter/X was supposedly acquired not to indulge its owner’s whims, but to defend freedom of expression.
Fifty years from now, nobody will remember any of this. By then, a new set of dreams will have replaced the old ones, promoted by someone who may not even be born yet. The stories will change, the technology will change, the names will change — but the need to believe in a brighter tomorrow will remain exactly the same.
As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in Il Gattopardo: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.”
The Lampedusa close is doing a lot of work, and it almost holds — but notice it actually cuts against your thesis rather than sealing it. Il Gattopardo is about aristocrats engineering change so that power stays put. If you’re invoking it, you’re implying the dream-selling is a deliberate conservation of an existing order. But your essay argues something gentler: that the appetite for dreams is a human constant, refreshed by whoever shows up. Those are different claims. One is about manipulation, the other about anthropology. You’d be stronger picking which fight you’re in.
Where you’re sharpest is the move from “Musk sells stories” to “the size of his fortune measures society’s appetite for them.” That’s a genuinely uncomfortable equation, and you state it without flinching. Good. But it invites a question you dodge: are all dreams equal? Your father’s flying car never arrived. Yet the man selling Mars dreams also landed boosters back on their tails — a thing the 1970s would have called fantasy. The narrative may be unchanged, but the delivery isn’t, and your essay treats both eras as equivalent acts of storytelling. They aren’t. One generation’s dream became another’s reusable hardware. That’s not nothing, and flattening it makes the piece feel more resigned than the evidence warrants.
The real tension you’re circling — and should lean into — is that you clearly find the storytelling both hollow and necessary. “The need to believe in a brighter tomorrow will remain exactly the same” isn’t a complaint; it’s almost tender. You inherited it from a shy, troubled father who nodded at a five-year-old’s Moon holidays. That detail is the essay’s beating heart, and you let it go too quickly. The trillionaire is the easy target. The harder, better subject is the nod — what it costs a disillusioned intellectual to confirm a child’s myth, and why he did it anyway.
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