Where’s James Bond when you need him?

Our tragi-comic new world seen through the lens of Bond films.

Only a few days into 2025 and the normalisation of the abnormal continues ‘at pace’ – to use a favourite political cliche.

Not so long ago who would have dared to present today’s Elon Musk as real? I am sure I’m far from the only person comparing him to some classic Bond villains, which is both funny and alarming, seeing as he’s real and they’re not.

Two spring to mind, Eliot Carver and Hugo Drax, and a little analysis is maybe thought-provoking as well as providing some dark humour.

Let’s start with Hugo Drax. Like Musk, he has two four-letter words for his somewhat strange name – somehow Steven Smith wouldn’t cut it would it, and Elon is stranger than Hugo. Drax is the villain in Moonraker, a very silly Bond film, who owns Drax Industries, a firm that dominates the space industry, and is so rich that one of his aides tells Bond, ‘What he doesn't own, he doesn't want.’ Hmmm.

That wealth and high tech dominance gives Drax the power to think big and do whatever he wants. Just like Musk. Fortunately for us, while Drax wants to kill most of the human race and then repopulate it with a super race, Musk’s ambitions are less lethal. However, they are certainly ambitious, even revolutionary, using his wealth and technological muscle to change the world. A Mars colony, implants in brains, changing the whole way we interact.

He dreams big, and those dreams can even be seen by some as beneficial, but the point is they are his dreams, not ours. He’s not asking us for buy in as he drives on.

One common factor with most of the Bond villains is the unstated back story – as with Musk, all the villains must have had real talent, drive and vision to get to the point where they had the power to attempt to put their vision into effect. In Bond-world that vision is malign.

But of course, in the real world power and wealth does things to people. It changes them and at its worse, as Lord Acton famously said, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

With Musk, the visionary tech pioneer who most of us sort of admired and respected, the absolute power switch seems to have been thrown following his acquisition of Twitter, now X. As a former broadcaster, I have seen the way the potent drug of public fame can turn seemingly ordinary people into egotistical nightmares. Imagine what having 200m followers on your personal global bully pulpit can do to someone who already has a big ego.

So, if the Musk of Tesla and SpaceX has morphed into the Musk of Twitter/X then we have the perfect Bond villain for him – Elliot Carver, of Tomorrow Never Dies. Carver is the media mogul heading his own Carver Media Group. His ambition, in his own words, is to create events so that, ‘Soon I'll have reached out to and influenced more people than anybody in the history of this planet, save God himself.’

Being a Bond villain, Carver plans for using that influence involves starting a war, something I wouldn’t accuse Musk of planning. However, the scale of Musk’s ambitions for X’s reach do match Carver’s for his Carver Media Group. Musk dismisses so-called ‘legacy media’ and tells his 200m followers ‘You are the media now’ while in reality blatantly manipulating his wholly owned social media outlet for his own purposes, including as his personal campaigning tool.

That campaigning involves Musk feeling he has the right to intervene in other countries domestic affairs. His Bond villain alter ego, Elliot Carver, would agree, having told Bond, ‘Great men have always manipulated the media to save the world.’ Note the word ‘save’.

So, Musk, a US citizen let’s not forget, offered a platform to an extremist German political leader in an openly stated attempt to influence an election, saying of her party, “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

When it comes to Britain, he has a loathing for Keir Starmer that’s somewhat unhinged in its intensity, and among other things posted a poll on X asking whether, ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.’ Of the almost 2m who replied, 58% said yes, although it’s hard to know whether that should alarm us or reflect respondents’ senses of humour.

More seriously, the Financial Times, a ‘legacy media’ outlet that anyone sensible trusts more than X, reported, according to people briefed on it, that Musk has privately discussed with allies how Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election. This might sound bonkers, and is certainly unlikely to succeed, but the fact it’s even something on his agenda is extraordinary – although probably not to Elliot Carver, who would be proud of him.

Our Elliot, when accused of being a bit crazy in seeking to start a war for more ratings, also came up with, “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”

I doubt any Bond scriptwriter would claim it was an original thought to say that the borderline between genius and insanity can be thin, and while genius takes many forms, sometimes it fits. This is especially so when the possible genius has a strong visionary overtone and also sees themselves as a genius.

Insane or just an eccentric oddball, it certainly could fit Musk. Here we have to remind ourselves that the same man who feverishly sends out 200 posts a night on X spouting lies, childish insults and the rest, is also the same man whose drive has created Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and the rest. What line has he crossed?

To return to Carver’s quote, there are mainly two kinds of Bond villains, those who want to use their money to make even more money or take revenge, and those who want world domination in some form. Goldfinger is a prime example of the first, Drax and Carver the second.

Musk’s lifestyle shows money for money’s sake is not his driver. With a relentless schedule, he’s a man on a mission, a man of destiny. It might not amount to planning actual world domination, but it’s not short on scale or ambition, as indicated by a 2022 post where he stated, “I believe a new philosophy of the future is required.”

Right. To be fair, that future apparently involves humanity going interstellar, hence I imagine his plans for a Mars colony. Meantime, while he’s sorting that out, he’s picked some favoured parties to help to rescue us from otherwise certain doom, and his overheated language illuminates the grandiosity of his outlook. ‘Only Reform can SAVE Britain’ is matched by “Only the AfD can SAVE Germany” (my capitalisation). Musk, the saviour of our saviours.

As a history buff, I am fully aware of those in our history whose vision, genius and drive took us forward, sometimes in spite of ourselves. Musk sees himself, and his supporters agree, as one of those people. Bond-villain style we are merely required, in line with the button we click on X pages, to follow.

For me though, it’s not very philosophical for ‘a philosopher of the future’ to keep indulging in silly X spats and slinging out childish insults with anyone who dares disagree with him. Nor would they spew out so many lies, hit the ‘post’ button so often without first engaging brain, demonstrate such ignorance of facts, or disregard for the thoughts of other intelligent people.

Mostly though, deciding whether someone is a good visionary or a dangerous one, it should not be quite so easy for that person to tick so many Bond villain boxes.

Looking more broadly at the canon of Bond villains what other commonalities are there to be added to the ones discussed above with regard to Drax and Carver?

- Extraordinary wealth held by one man to do with as they wish. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself. Bill Gates wants to end malaria, others have created philanthropic foundations, but a prerequisite to changing the world is unimaginable wealth.

- Extreme narcissism and egotism. Tick. No further discussion required.

- Being obsessive oddballs. As with wealth, not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but much more concerning if given free rein

- Being thin-skinned. Bond villains don’t like being contradicted. For example, a critical post from the British Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, gets the all too typical Musk response to criticism that he is a ‘snivelling cretin’. Here, I can’t help feeling Bond’s scriptwriters would do better.

That dislike of being contradicted – on anything – extends to allies and employees. In Bond world, not going along with the villain has dramatic consequences – eaten by piranhas, thrown out of airships. In Musk world, the outcome is not fatal, but like any proper Bond villain his favour and moods are whimsical, and he can turn on a sixpence.

Hence, not long after saying. ‘Only Reform can save Britain’ and happily standing alongside its leader Nigel Farage, the latter dared to disagree with Musk’s comments supporting the appalling Tommy Robinson. Immediately Musk posted, "The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes." Farage has said he’s since mended fences, but it really doesn’t work that way. It’s Musk’s way or the highway. It’s always unwise to rely on Bond villains.

The Achilles heel of Bond villains is hubris – the arrogance, excessive pride, and dangerous overconfidence, that comes before the fall. In film world that fall is delivered by James Bond, but in our world there are no such neat denouements. Musk is not going to suffer (and to be clear, I am not advocating it!) the fate of Drax (ejected into space) or Carver (killed by a drilling machine), and whether his plans will ultimately amount to an example of hubris, is yet to be seen.

And that’s really up to us because there is no James Bond to save our world. So, how do we solve a problem like Musk? Can we?

It starts by recognising him as both a real problem and a new version of an old problem. Never before has someone like Musk wielded so much wealth and power, and, in this age of information, never before has social media been such a transformational and potent weapon, especially when wholly owned and manipulated so blatantly by someone, as with Musk.

The brilliant Tim Snyder summarised a little wisdom from some real philosophers of the past, not a faux one of the future, ‘Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace.’

Wealthy and talented demagogues surrounded by yes men and enablers are not new, but never with such powerful tools. This accounts for the difficulty nations are having in how to respond, especially knowing that behind him for now at least stands his co-President Elect, Donald Trump who, as a fellow mischief-maker, is doing nothing to restrain him and probably enjoying it as well.

The key here is to know what you think on an issue, stake it out, stick with it, and follow through with execution and a clear narrative. You don’t need to get involved in a tit for tat – as the saying goes, ‘Never wrestle with pigs, you both get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.’ Don’t be tempted to seek a halfway house just to make nice. As Farage has found, Musk dictates not debates.

Western politicians have an instinct to compromise, to triangulate and seek consensus, to keep calm and carry on. That doesn’t work with Musk, or in many respects the modern media environment of moving fast and breaking things. This is a battle of narratives not a search for common ground on often shifting sands.

This is especially so with Musk. What he wants can seem unclear. His journey from Tesla hero to a man flirting with fascism and manically playing with his new X toy is startling. But as with any Bond villain he has plan, and to foil it we need to look beyond the noise and chaff emanating from the self-described troll in chief.

For, in pursuit of his vision he is seeking freedom from control – and resents anyone trying to restrict it, as well as enabling anyone he thinks will help him.

In looking for a free hand to do what he wants, he is joined by a fellow if lesser oligarch in Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who having sold his soul to Trump, rates as a henchman rather than full-blown Bond villain. Zuckerberg, in his recent surrender statement to Trump stated he was going to help Trump ‘push back on governments around the world… Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.’

So, here’s the main battleground, freedom from regulation to do whatever they want, and for Musk, if that involves trying to undermine governments, so be it. All of us chafe under government bureaucracy but in the era of exploding advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other tech do we want to put ourselves in the hands of people like Musk?

This was rammed home to me listening to an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel prize-winner regarded as the Godfather of AI. He was asked if there was an existential risk of AI taking over from human beings and whether those leading its development understood that. He answered, ‘That’s a huge risk. Some of them actually do understand that there’s a very significant chance of AI taking control away from people. Elon Musk, who I disagree with about many things, does understand that but nevertheless he wants to go ahead.’

So, hugely wealthy people are playing godlike with technology that could take over from us – and know it. We are in Bond film territory.

Can he be stopped? Sure, if we’re strong enough, firm enough and united enough. When Brazil banned X they faced him down despite his threats and in the end he did what was demanded and paid a hefty fine.

Musk’s novelty shouldn’t disguise what’s not novel – another rich man using his wealth to get his way – and maybe here’s our narrative. We may not like our governments but they’re our governments, we elected them, and no-one elected Musk. Sure, Tesla, SpaceX etc are amazing, but just stick to them, not trying to run the world.

Us against the oligarchs. An old story fit for a Bond film. How will it end?

As for Musk, he’s fond of running polls on X. How about one asking his followers if he’s like a Bond villain?