It doesn’t misread anything, it doesn’t read at all.

I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.

They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies.

Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president.

Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.

With Musks ideas I often think I saw that movie/read that book. For his Mars plans I see the Mars colony from Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger film

Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.

They know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.