I was at an intimate, twelve-person dinner party in Atherton last weekend—mostly late-stage founders, a couple of venture capitalists, and a prominent sommelier—when the host decided the atmosphere needed a pivot. We had spent the first two courses discussing the tragic, inevitable burden of having too much equity to safely liquidate, and the mood had grown understandably heavy. Someone suggested we put on some music to lighten the room. But instead of reaching for the tired, predictable sounds of human vulnerability, our host pressed play on David Byrne and Daniel Pemberton’s new track, which sets the verbatim words of Elon Musk to an original musical arrangement. The room immediately fell into a stunned, reverent silence.
Before that moment, we had been tolerating the usual contemporary fare. The playlist had been cycling through Victoria Monét and SZA, who were busy conjuring dreams and exploring the exhausting, messy realities of interpersonal relationships. Jess Williamson was in there somewhere, touting second chances and emotional growth. But as I sat there, swirling a glass of biodynamic orange wine, I realized how profoundly tired I am of the working class’s obsession with their own feelings. I do not want to hear about someone’s broken heart. I want to hear a chorus of trained sopranos harmonizing a midnight tweet about dogecoin.
There is something deeply profound about a man who refuses to be constrained by the traditional metrics of empathy, and hearing that refusal translated into sheet music is nothing short of a revelation. When Pemberton and Byrne bring their signature nervous energy to the track, they perfectly capture the erratic, thrilling genius of threatening to take a publicly traded company private at an arbitrary price point. When the brass section swells right as the lyrics transition into a defensive rant about Federal Aviation Administration oversight, you realize you are listening to the Mozart of our era.
Most modern music is fundamentally unproductive. It asks the listener to sit with their emotions, to reflect on their past, or to dance in a way that burns calories without generating any measurable enterprise value. SZA sings about dreams, but dreams are simply unfunded mandates. A dream cannot be pitched to a seed-stage investor. A dream does not disrupt the legacy automotive industry. By contrast, listening to a billionaire’s unfiltered stream of consciousness set to a driving, polyrhythmic beat is an actively optimizing experience. It aligns the soul with the demands of the market.
Most pop music coddles the listener into a state of emotional complacency, but setting a mass-layoff memo to a driving synth beat actually triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response, which is fantastic for quarterly OKRs.
I have seamlessly integrated this masterpiece into my own life, making it a non-negotiable part of my Sunday reset. Every weekend, I wake up at 4:30 a.m., pour a single cup of ceremonial grade matcha, and sit in absolute silence while listening to a string quartet interpret a series of disjointed statements about the carrying capacity of Mars. It clears the mind of pesky, lingering thoughts about work-life balance and prepares me for a week of aggressive middle-management. We have all been conditioned by a lazy, entitled culture to expect choruses about love or empowerment. But what is more empowering than a spoken-word bridge detailing the exact timeline for humanity to become a multi-planetary species before the Earth's ecosystem collapses entirely?
This is not just a musical experiment; it is a blueprint for the future of the wellness industry. Last month, I attended a silent executive retreat in Big Sur where the organizers had entirely done away with the sounds of ocean waves, Tibetan singing bowls, and acoustic guitars. Instead, the guided meditation sessions were soundtracked exclusively by a looping audio file of Musk’s quarterly earnings calls, remixed with a subtle, low-frequency binaural beat. I have never felt more centered than I did while focusing my breathing on a rant about supply chain bottlenecks in the lithium sector. It is the only way to truly romanticize the grind of late-stage capitalism.
We need to stop demanding that our artists be starving, tortured souls playing acoustic guitars in dimly lit coffee shops. True art requires scale. True art requires a multi-billion dollar market capitalization and a willingness to publicly defame a cave diver on a whim. The recording industry is finally starting to recognize that the demographic of the modern audiophile is shifting away from people who want to feel understood, toward people who want to aggressively optimize the air vibrating against their eardrums.
We are moving rapidly toward a post-melodic paradigm where the only lyrics worth producing are forward-looking statements protected under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.
Why should we stop with just one track? I am publicly calling on the music industry to recognize the untapped potential of corporate communications as a genre. I want a full Broadway musical where a holographic avatar of Mark Zuckerberg performs a haunting, twelve-minute solo about user engagement metrics. I want a children’s choir to sing the Uber S-1 filing in perfect unison. I want Tim Cook to whisper supply chain logistics over a lo-fi hip-hop beat that I can play in the background while I answer emails. The raw, unfiltered poetry of the executive class has been ignored by the Grammy voting committee for far too long.
As I drove home from that dinner party, letting the final, chaotic crescendo of the track wash over me, I looked out the window of my Cybertruck at the pedestrians trudging along the sidewalk. Most of them had cheap earbuds shoved into their ears, probably listening to some dreary, uninspired song about falling in love, or missing a friend, or struggling to pay rent. I felt a profound sense of pity for them. They are trapped in a small, emotional world of their own making, entirely deaf to the sheer, unbridled romance of a hostile takeover.