Séamas O’Reilly: Elon Musk got to where he is through ingenuity, but the emerald mine his father owned probably didn’t hurt.

There’s a huge market in preaching male betterment through books, podcasts and YouTube series, but much of it adds little to the common store of human knowledge

‘I don’t think it makes sense for an entire generation of young men to be told they have what it takes to be a Navy Seal’. Picture: Tobias Tullius/Unsplash

There’s an industry in telling people they can achieve anything, and business is booming. You’ll know the type of thing if you’ve ever had the joy of scrolling through the Instagram feed presented to a human male; painfully buff men in three-piece suits, looking out of skyscraper windows; joyless homunculi on private planes, fanning out stacks of cash with captions like “rise and grind”; adoring tributes to Elon Musk as he spaffs a rocket into ...