Time was when a comparison of Henry Ford and Elon Musk would have focused on their respective roles in revolutionizing automaking. Ford manufactured the first cars priced at levels that enabled millions of people to purchase them, with the first factories that could mass-produce such products. Musk manufactured the first electric cars that, while not yet affordable to a truly mass market, were nonetheless built in sufficient quantity to give electric cars a substantial foothold in an economy slowly and tortuously turning away from fossil fuels.
Would that were still the only way in which the two were comparable. Unfortunately, Musk has since joined Ford as the most prominent American employer of his era implacably opposed to unions. He also is recapitulating Ford’s backing of America First politicos while simultaneously committing major resources to manufacturing in a nation (for Ford, Germany; for Musk, China) posing the greatest threat to liberal democracies. Worse yet, Ford’s vociferous antisemitism helped to fuel the rise of German Nazism, while Musk has now gone all in to promote the rise of Germany’s neo-Nazis, who constitute much of the base of the AfD, which, to the alarm of millions of Germans, may finish second in that nation’s upcoming elections.
In different ways, Ford and Musk both transformed much of American life. Ford’s assembly-line mass production, which he began in 1913, converted the nation to a car culture over the next several decades. First, however, he had to create a stable workforce in his factory, since conditions were so dismal and the pay so low that employee turnover posed a challenge he had to overcome. In 1915, he was persuaded to raise worker pay to what was then an unheard-of $5 a day. Turnover dropped, production speed and volume increased, and the increased pay—which other companies eventually felt compelled to match—created a working class that could actually afford to buy the cars and other products they produced (though buying homes remained out of reach for many until the mass production industries were unionized in the 1930s and ’40s). Economic historians came to describe this mass production/mass consumption system as “Fordism.”
There isn’t yet a system we could call Muskism; indeed, Muskism suggests chaos more than system. Musk, however, has extended his chops to companies (SpaceX, Starlink) in multiple industries, as Ford was never eager to do (he had to be persuaded, as World War II came to America, to build airplanes). Industrially, Musk, to use philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s typologies, is a fox (who knows many things) while Ford was a hedgehog (who knows one big thing).