Hugh Linehan: Billionaire has been telling Michael Milken about everything from AI to space travel to decline and fall of western civilisationSir Francis Galton was the very definition of an eminent Victorian polymath. A first cousin of Charles Darwin, he was an innovator in the then new fields of statistics, social science and psychology. The founder of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map.
You can draw a direct line from this potent fusion of pseudo-history, bad science and racist catastrophism to the worst crimes of the 20th century, from the killing fields of the Belgian Congo to the bloodlands of central and eastern Europe. What’s noteworthy – although not surprising – is that Musk, who has expressed his sympathy for demonstrators, many of whom espouse the racist “great replacement theory”, and who hasinflammatory and misleading memes about racial tensions in the United States, is more than happy to set himself up as the Francis Galton of his generation. The brilliant polymath unconstrained by narrow academic disciplines.