This past weekend, some 1,500 people packed into a Marriott ballroom in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, seeking advice. Many of them wore red MAGA hats, but this wasn’t purely a campaign event. Though the world’s richest man had come as a surrogate for Donald Trump, Elon Musk was received as a mash-up of Tony Stark and Tony Robbins.
After an hour-long delay spent watching the Penn State football game — the crowd cheered the Trump ads and jeered the Kamala Harris ones — Musk walked out to a Jock Jams–style soundtrack and rapturous cheers. He then delivered a brief, rambling monologue that expressed concern he would be targeted by assassins, declared “journalism is dead,” mused about terraforming Mars, where “we will be illegal aliens,” and said at one point, “You really have to hand it to the ancient Sumerians” in reference to their invention of writing. At another, he punctuated his remarks with the apt statement, “Wild times, man, wild times.” There was not really a pitch to support Trump, although he did encourage people to vote early in person and return their outstanding absentee ballots.
His speech was merely the prelude to a two-hour question-and-answer segment. The crowd was awestruck that someone worth a quarter-trillion dollars would come to Lancaster, of all places. People like Grant Nagle of Reading had lined up for hours to meet him, asking how to inspire their children’s curiosity and pitching him technological innovations. “Just trying to get to Mars is really cool. I think having a........