Don't be an Elon Musk, be a Dolly Parton

“In a world filled with Elon Musks, be a Dolly Parton.”

Following Dolly Parton’s death on Tuesday, versions of that message circulated widely on X and Bluesky. The phrase contrasted the billionaire’s alignment with U.S. President Donald Trump and right-wing politics with Parton’s support for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ people and workers, as well as her opposition to racism. Many also pointed to her Imagination Library, an initiative founded in 1995 to donate books to children.

In Spain, some people broadened the sentiment to include magician Juan Tamariz, who died last week. Better, surely, to spend a lifetime making people laugh and marvel through magic than, like Musk, backing far-right political campaigns around the world. I’m no expert on Tamariz, but I’d venture to say the idea would never have crossed his mind.

The message comparing Parton and Musk was already making the rounds while she was still alive. People were using it when Musk decided to buy Twitter in 2022, allegedly to... what exactly? Legalize comedy? Eliminate bots? Help return Trump to the White House? Who knows. What people were asking at the time was what the singer might have done with the $44 billion Musk spent on the social network. I wouldn’t dare answer that question. It’s very hard to become that rich without losing touch with planet Earth somewhere along the way.

One possibility we can safely rule out, because it never happened, is that Parton would have used her popularity and influence to help the Trump administration abruptly shut down USAID’s humanitarian aid programs. Elon Musk did exactly that in January 2025 during his brief stint in the White House, presenting the move as a response to alleged corruption that was never proven. But according to several studies, and as The New Yorker reported last month, the decision has been linked to roughly 700,000 deaths worldwide. Another study published in The Lancet estimates it could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of five.

I know the contrast between Musk and Parton, or Tamariz, can seem a little simplistic, even sentimental. And if we were all like them, country music and magic would undoubtedly be enjoying a golden age. But we would also miss the people who make difficult decisions, the ones who drive technological progress, the ones who may one day take us to Mars. And when difficult decisions are made, mistakes sometimes happen.

But perhaps that is precisely the mistake: trying to transform the world by brute force while trusting in one’s own genius. The techno-oligarchy, populism and authoritarianism all assume they can impose sweeping solutions without seriously considering the possibility that things might go wrong, as happened with the closure of USAID.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper warned against this utopian mode of thinking, embraced by those who seek to completely rebuild society. Such projects, he argued, tend to bring with them practical consequences that “are hard to calculate, owing to our limited experiences.” Everything becomes subordinate to faith in a future society, a faith that justifies the miseries of the present. (Don’t worry about climate change, AI will take us to Mars!)

Silicon Valley’s mantra of moving fast and breaking things may make sense when applied to an app with limited reach and reversible consequences. But it makes far less sense when the future of millions of people is at stake. Rather than dreaming of societies built from scratch, it is better to move incrementally, test whether policies work, correct mistakes and seek others’ input.

And that’s why it makes sense to think and act a little more like Dolly Parton and Juan Tamariz, each in their own way: learning, sharing knowledge and helping where they can. But that requires not only enough ego to try, it also requires enough wisdom to keep that ego working in the service of others rather than the other way around. Perhaps that’s what’s really magic.

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