Elon Musk is possibly the most interesting man in the world, in our opinion. His nobility comes from his past as a founder of PayPal, but his popularity only grows in this era as he seeks to tackle big projects that include the car business, space, mass transit and other subjects. Rarely in an era does one person rise to this height of importance attributed to them by the society and time they live in. As an example, his cameo on the CBS show “The Big Bang Theory” crowned his popularity in 2015. What we’d like to do is look at the rhymes of history to ascertain where we are as the pendulum swings and if there are other symptoms today that are needed to guard our independent thinking as investors. Let’s look back in time at an analogous period of global history.

The Gilded Age of the 19th century produced a large creation of wealth as the United States of America continued to move deeper into its industrialized state. Families like the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Stanfords and the Crockers became names of note coming out of this era for the wealth accumulated during this period. The wealth of this period brought new tastes and interests. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and other popular novels romanticized the idea of going to the poles. The excitement of going to the ends of the earth captured the imagination. Beginning in the 1880’s, people began to explore the heights of Europe and America and dreamed of the North and South Poles. In Edward Larson’s To the Edges of the Earth, this story of global heights and reaches climaxed in the year 1909. On the subject of polar reach, Larson put it like this:

These fashions carried over into the early twentieth century. It was part of a cult of extreme adventure linked to the wealth and leisure flowing from industrialization; a Darwinian sense of struggle against nature; and eased access to once-remote locales due to imperial conquest, steamships, railroads, and telegraphs.