February 6, 2025
5 min read
Why Elon Musk’s ‘Fork in the Road’ Is Really a Dead End
Elon Musk’s Fork in the Road isn’t just a sculpture—it’s a monument to the tech world’s obsession with civilizational survival, which has its roots in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Unlike the Sistine Chapel-esque utensils in this stock photo, Elon Musk’s Fork in the Road seems more about deliberately misreading history than gaining any sort of divine inspiration.
On December 7, 2024, Elon Musk shared an image of artwork he had commissioned for Tesla HQ titled A Fork in the Road. A colossal piece of flatware planted at the intersection of three roads, it is not subtle—it is, quite literally, a fork in the road.
The sculpture returned to headlines less than two months later when the Trump administration sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” echoing an earlier e-mail Musk had sent to Twitter employees with the same title, both urging mass resignations. News reports suggest that Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were behind the phrase’s resurgence.
The “fork in the road” theme hints at a trend in the tech industry: a preoccupation with existential threats, which finds resonance in cold war–era ideas. In this simplistic binary, the future of humanity can only follow two starkly divergent paths: one notionally leading to nearly limitless prosperity on Earth and beyond, the other leading nowhere besides the collapse of our global civilization and ultimately human extinction. Proponents of this survivalist mindset see it as justifying particular programs of technological escalation at any cost, framing the future as a desperate race against catastrophe rather than a space for multiple thriving possibilities.
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This existential anxiety bubbled to the surface in his December 7 post, when Musk captioned the photo of… continues below…
