Elon Musk is a fan of Ernst Jünger. This news must hit the many world-improving admirers of the green capitalist entrepreneurial idol like a hydrogen bomb. The fact that the richest man in the world - just like the failed social democratic candidate for chancellor Martin Schulz or the internationally successful painter Neo Rauch - reveals himself to be an avid reader of the controversial author is surprising and can only lead to considerable fluctuations in the price of the successful Tesla stock. In a tweet addressed to the militarily historically ambitious podcaster Dan Carlin, Musk recently enthusiastically praised Jünger's “Stahlgewitter” as a “great book” in front of his 62 million followers.
This is not just another facet in the dazzling aura costume of the South African college dropout who earned his first hundred million dollars with the online payment service PayPal, only to become the world-conquering revolutionary of the auto industry. It leads deeper into Musk's intellectual drive structure. He, who sees himself as a pioneer of a future lifeworld, not least with a gigantic spaceship program and neurotechnological experiments, he who embodies that futuristic inventive spirit who wants to radically free himself from the eternal return of the same by striving for the unattainable, finds the reading from Jünger's war diary published in 1920 "intensive",because in it he also encounters a “craving for the extraordinary” and a fascination for the effect of technology.
Suggestion of the tabula rasa
Jünger's tough portrayal, alternating between horror and epochal enthusiasm, of the “planetary” event when a generation of young men experienced World War I stimulates the tech giant Musk to identify with it.
He, too, sees himself as a "shock troop leader" who breaks away from historical familiarity and creates opportunities to do everything completely new.
It is the suggestion of such a tabula rasa that connects the author of the “steel storms” and the inventor of Tesla.
Between them lies a century shaken by the horrors of battles, in which the “warrior” was replaced by the entrepreneur as a representative of the turning point of an era.
The goal, however, has remained the same: "It was about the possession of the world", as it was called in Jünger's original text.
But the variation weakened in the Stuttgart edition of his “Complete Works” goes well with Elon Musk: “It was about the future of the world.”