“Given how bad I am at poetry, probably Vogon”

 

— Elon Musk, on what kind of alien he’d be

The Vogons are one of British science fiction author Douglas Adams’s most memorable creations. They’re huge, rubbery alien bureaucrats who fly around the galaxy in bulldozer-spaceships, destroying unsuspecting planets to build interstellar freeways through them. They also write very bad poetry. Adams describes Vogon poems as “the third worst in the universe,” and in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy his villains use their wretched verse as a form of psychic torture:

The Vogon began to read – a fetid little passage of his own devising. 

 

“Oh frettled gruntbuggly...” he began. Spasms wracked Ford’s body – this was worse than ever he’d been prepared for.

 

“... thy micturations are to me | As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.”

 

“Aaaaaaarggggghhhhhh!” went Ford Prefect, wrenching his head back as lumps of pain thumped through it. 

Elon Musk compared himself to a Vogon back in 2018—a simpler time, when he hadn’t yet bought Twitter (er, “X”) and melted his frontal lobe with a nonstop stream of racist memes. He still had a little self-awareness then, and could poke fun at himself. But those days are long gone, and last month Musk really let his Vogonity loose. 

On September 18 the world’s (sometimes) richest man tweeted a poem, entirely unprovoked. It looked like this: 

Now, among other things, I’m a poetry critic. I’ve reviewed outstanding poetry for outlets like the Cleveland Review of Books, and helped to get great contemporary poets published right here in Current Affairs. I’ve read extremely bad poetry too, which I was nice enough not to review. For instance, I’ve read every line of Drake’s book “Titles Ruin Everything,” presumably as cosmic punishment for really heinous crimes I committed in a past life. But I’ve only seen a poem as bad as Elon Musk’s on very rare occasions. Like the prisoners in a Vogon battleship, I find his verse almost physically painful. Let me explain why. 

In the first place, the whole thing is just structurally unsound. Typically, a poem has a few important load-bearing elements, meter and rhyme scheme chief among them. Rhyme scheme is simple enough, and Elon has one: three couplets, AABBCC. You could say it’s a little juvenile to rhyme “sad” with “bad” the way he does in the C couplet, but so far this is basically fine. But when we get to meter, things really get shambolic. 

In case it’s been a while since high school English class (or, like many people in the United States, your school was under-funded, over-policed, and you were never given a proper literature education), “meter” is just a fancy word for the pattern of syllables in a poem. Whenever you speak a word in English (or really any language), some syllables are emphasized more than others: NA-tion, in-DEED, etc. Poetic meter works by arranging stressed and unstressed syllables in a regular pattern, like in this famous Shakespeare sonnet:

The syllables with the little “U”s are unstressed; the ones with the slash marks, stressed. They come in a regular pattern, a meter, and that’s why the poem is memorable—it thumps along rhythmically, ba-DUM, ba-DUM. Specifically this is iambic pentameter, a pattern of five “iambs” (units of unstressed-stressed) in each line. Historically it’s been the most popular meter in all of English poetry, largely because Shakespeare and Chaucer liked it. Now, let’s take out our red ink pens and look at the meter on Musk’s poem:

Oh, dear. There are many, many problems here. As you can see, the stressed and unstressed syllables are all over the place; sometimes they kind of form a meter, like with the last three syllables of each line, but mostly not. This is actually the worst of both worlds, because it’s clear there was an attempt to create some kind of regular pattern—this isn’t free verse, which is deliberately loose and meterless throughout. It’s just that the attempt didn’t quite work out. In the second couplet, Musk uses too many syllables on the phrase “childless hedonism,” so he has to fudge the ending, saying “sans” instead of “without” to make the line fit within 8 syllables like the ones before and after it. It sounds horribly stilted and awkward—when was the last time you heard someone say “sans care” in a sentence? But then, unbelievably, he makes the opposite mistake on the poem’s last line, using too few syllables (7 instead of 8), so that line sounds clipped and abrupt. The whole thing is a mess. 

Those are only the formalist complaints, though. We haven’t even started talking about what the poem actually says yet, and the content is just as ugly as the form. In essence, Musk has written a doggerel version of J.D. Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment, mixed with Jordan Peterson’s endless ramblings about why people supposedly need tradition and hierarchy. In other words, conservative sexism with a vaguely pious gloss. Like with Vance, all the whining about “childlessness” reflects the age-old misogynist belief that women only have value as mothers, and that any other lifestyle is just “hedonism sans care” that will lead inevitably to “despair.” (Apparently it’s also a “secular religion,” which is a contradiction in terms, like “dry water” or “reliable Cybertruck.”)

We already know that Musk has creepy ideas about women and reproduction; he returns to the theme time and time again, whether he’s posting about wanting to impregnate Taylor Swift (seriously, who makes a joke like that?) or sharing other people’s 4chan posts about how the world should be organized as a “Republic of high status males.” There’s also a racist and eugenic angle to the whole “childless” thing, as Musk frets endlessly about European birth rates, has flirted with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and thinks people he deems “smart” should be the ones encouraged to have kids. His estranged daughter Vivian, who generally seems pretty cool, describes his beliefs as “that weird 14-words breeder shit,” and his poem is just more of the same. 

Meanwhile, the religious component of Musk’s poem is pure, uncut Jordan Peterson. Earlier this year, Musk actually sat down with the Canadian professor for an interview and mutual smug-off, during which he declared himself a “cultural Christian” despite being “not a particularly religious person.” He linked this to his obsession with “childlessness” and reproduction, saying that “when a culture loses its religion, it starts to become antinatalist and decline in numbers.” In other words, he believes in what the conservative writer Ed West dubbed “the New Theism”—the idea “not that religion is true, but that it is useful” since it keeps “the West” running smoothly. (This is also Peterson’s stance, to the extent that he has coherent positions on things.) It doesn’t appear that Musk actually believes in any higher spiritual power or calling, in the way most people of faith do. At least it seems unlikely, given his massive ego and tendency to frame himself as some kind of messianic savior figure. But he thinks other people should be religious, so they’ll behave the way he thinks they ought to. 

This, more than the structural sloppiness, is what makes the poem awful. It’s didactic, which is exactly what a poem shouldn’t be. Lecturing people about what kind of lifestyle you think they should lead is not what poetry is for. As an art form, poetry is supposed to involve a degree of subtlety; it uses imagery, metaphor, evocative language, and a dozen other techniques to evoke a feeling or a moment. (Again, this is high school 101 stuff, or should be.) Poetry is one of our most empathetic art forms, letting you experience what it feels like to be a particular person—whether it’s Pablo Neruda in love, Dorothy Parker having a bad time at a party, or Refaat Alareer contemplating his own death in Gaza. Art, not argument. But Musk’s poem isn’t like that. It’s just a series of thuddingly literal statements, one after another: Here’s what I think. Here’s a second thing I think. And a third. I am very smart. You should all do what I say. 

It’s not even that the basic theme—that some people find value in religion, even in an increasingly secular world—is bad in itself. You could write a perfectly good poem on that theme, if you stripped Musk’s creepy Petersonian internet nonsense away. In fact, the English poet Philip Larkin has one just like that, called “Church Going,” where he writes about visiting a deserted chapel after everyone has left: 

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

This is basically “maybe religion’s not so bad / to keep you from being sad,” but written by someone with actual style and taste. It’s instructive to look at Larkin’s poem next to Musk’s, because although the subject matter is similar, they’re also worlds apart. Larkin doesn’t hector people for being “childless hedonists”; you don’t get the sense that he’s attacking you personally if you don’t see things the way he does. He just uses a few deftly-chosen words to evoke a mood, invites you to share a moment, and lets you do what you will with it. There’s none of the sneering, self-satisfied hostility that exudes from Musk.

In fact, if Musk’s poem has a historic parallel, it’s one that’s widely considered one of the worst poems of all time: “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” by the Victorian poet William McGonagall. When he’s remembered at all, McGonagall is usually invoked as an example of what not to do. His style has been called the “poetry of information,” because it contained no metaphors or symbolism whatsoever, just endless strings of literal statements like these: 

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

I’ll spare you the scansion this time, but you can probably tell that McGonagall’s meter was all over the place, just like Musk’s today. Some lines are wildly longer than others, there are awkward syllable logjams like “1879,” and so on. (The full poem is MUCH longer, and rhymes “buttresses” with “confesses” at one point.) As poets, McGonagall and Musk have a lot in common—except that McGonagall was basically well-intentioned, since he just wanted to write poems about animals (“Hurrah! for the mighty monster whale / which has got 17 feet 4 inches from tip to tip of a tail!”) and memorials for people who died in bridge accidents. He’s kind of charming in his awfulness. Musk is just as bad technically, but he’s also using his drivel to spread noxious far-right social theories, which is far worse. 

It might seem like a waste of time—and more than a little pretentious—to pick apart a single six-line poem written by Elon Musk, which he probably tweeted from the toilet for all I know. And it is a little pretentious, but I don’t think it’s a waste of time. Poetry can give us insight into the people who create it, and when we look at Musk through his verse, what we find is disturbing. For all that he’s been hailed as a genius in the business press, the billionaire’s actual understanding of the human condition is incredibly shallow, petty, and pointlessly mean, and those are worrying qualities in one of the most influential people on earth. I do not trust someone who would write a poem like this—who apparently thinks this is the kind of thing human culture ought to consist of—to run a workplace, let alone to create some kind of spacefaring mega-civilization. It’s worth remembering that being extremely rich does not actually make you smart or interesting—and above all, that no amount of money can buy aesthetic taste.