I hear this constantly from kids. If there’s a problem, the person who can solve it is not Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or even their teacher: It’s Elon Musk. “Why don’t you just have Elon Musk buy the team?” I heard one kid tell another at a Little League practice the other day. “We’ll get to play baseball on the moon!” There is no issue that cannot be solved by a billionaire coming in on his spaceship. This strikes me as regression, the idea that resolutions cannot be found in dedication to a common purpose, but instead only by the deus ex machina of a rich guy with a magic wand. “Billionaires” was not a term I’d even fathomed us as a kid. Now they’re the omnipresent being in the clouds who will fix everything. They’re God. American society has always held up the ultra-wealthy as North Stars. We hate them, we want to be them, we envy them, we worship them, we love to see them crash and burn. But it strikes me as a very bad sign that, to our kids, they’re not just figures to emulate: To kids, they’re our saviors.They’re the only ones who can get anything done. But why wouldn’t kids think this? They see how terrible everything is, and how lousy a job the rest of us are at doing anything about it. Maybe they can help. Maybe Elon Musk help. The bad news is, of course, the billionaires will be no help to us — they are, in many ways, the problem. And Elon Musk, in particular, is no Tony Stark. They may need him to be, though, at least emotionally. They can sense our unease. Our unease will someday become theirs. No need to show them the real Elon, and the real Any Of Us, until we have to. Let them enjoy being kids, and having the fantasy of someone looking out for them. They’ll find out the truth soon enough.