Cross the River Tamar by train into Cornwall and you ride across an argument that has been settled for 167 years. The Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash still carries the load, exactly as Isambard Kingdom Brunel intended when Prince Albert opened it in 1859 — built by a man with no computer, no stress model, and no way of knowing what would one day run across it, who simply made it far stronger than anything of his era could conceivably require. Every time I make that crossing I find myself thinking about the man most often called his modern heir, and about how completely he has inverted the one principle that kept the bridge standing.

The heir, of course, is Elon Musk. The comparison is half right, which is more than most comparisons manage — and the half where it fails is the half that should worry us.

Begin with what the two men genuinely share, because it is not trivial. Neither could ever bear to supply a mere component. Brunel’s Great Western was never just a railway; it was a complete system — a chosen gauge, the stations, the tunnels, and a steamship waiting at Bristol to carry the passenger onward to New York. Musk’s enterprises have the same totalising shape: SpaceX builds the engines, the rockets, the launch site and the Starlink constellation above them; Tesla the car, its battery packs and increasingly its own cells, the charging network and the software. Both wanted the entire stack, and distrusted anyone who told them a piece of it belonged to someone else.

They share, too, a near-reckless appetite for ruin. Tesla and SpaceX both came within days of collapse in 2008: Musk poured in the last of his fortune, split it between the two rather than let either die, watched the fourth Falcon 1 reach orbit after three straight failures, and closed a Tesla round in the final hour before payroll would have bounced. Brunel lived the same way. The Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, was a commercial catastrophe that bankrupted a succession of her owners — and........

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