History Rhymes
A Reflection on Chinatown and the Tesla Bomber
What is it about certain stories that stick with us? Maybe it’s the way they reveal something universal beneath their particulars. Or perhaps it’s the way they seem to repeat, over and over, like a melody we can’t quite place. When the Tesla Bomber story first broke, it felt like a jolt—a sudden, shocking act in a world where shock almost became mundane. But as it unfolded, it felt less like a random tragedy and more like a recognizable pattern.
And that’s when the classic movie Chinatown came to mind.
It is not exactly the movie’s plot, but its mood, themes, and way of taking a single act—seemingly small at first—and widening it into something much bigger.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And this was a rhyme I couldn’t ignore.
The Tesla Bomber as Noir
The Tesla Bomber’s story started simply enough: a man, a Cybertruck, an explosion in front of Trump International in Las Vegas. The headlines framed it as the work of a lone, troubled individual. But the deeper I read, the more it felt like stepping into a noir. Matthew Livelsberger, the bomber, wasn’t just lashing out. His notes revealed something darker—an overwhelming despair about the state of the world, about systems of power and decay he believed were beyond redemption.
Sound familiar? That’s Chinatown. In the film, Jake Gittes is a private investigator who thinks he’s solving a straightforward case. But every answer leads to a darker question, and by the end, he’s staring down corruption so vast that the only conclusion is surrender. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
Livelsberger tragically became a modern Gittes—a man uncovering truths too big to fight. Only this time, the labyrinth wasn’t about water in 1930s Los Angeles but power in 2020s America.
Elon Musk as Noah Cross?
It’s impossible to think about Chinatown without thinking of Noah Cross, the film’s chilling antagonist. Cross is wealth and power personified—a man whose vision of the future consumes everything in its path, leaving devastation in its wake. When I look at Elon Musk through the lens of this tragedy, I can’t help but hear the rhyme.
Musk isn’t a one-to-one analog for Cross, of course. He’s not plotting in the shadows or pulling strings in quite the same way (that we know of). But his ambition feels eerily similar: grand, all-encompassing, and blind to the human costs it leaves behind. Whether it’s electric cars, Mars colonization, neural implants, or political domination, Musk’s empire operates on a scale that dwarfs individual lives, much like Cross’s manipulation of Los Angeles’s water supply.
And just like Cross, Musk has become a symbol. To some, he’s a savior, building a better future. To others, he embodies modern greed—a vision of progress that sacrifices the present for a distant, unreachable utopia.
Powerless
What Chinatown does so brilliantly is reveal how systems—of power, corruption, greed—are so deeply entrenched that fighting them feels futile. Jake Gittes tries to expose the truth, but by the end, he’s powerless to stop the tragedy. The system is too big, too rooted in human ambition and decay.
The Tesla Bomber’s story feels like a modern reflection of that same hopelessness. Livelsberger wasn’t just lashing out at political targets; he was lashing out at a world that felt unchangeable. And maybe that’s why his story, like Chinatown, leaves such an unsettling aftertaste. It’s not just about one man or one act. It’s about the realization that the system endures, no matter how much you resist.
“Forget It, Jake”
By the end of Chinatown, there’s no victory, no catharsis—just a quiet, crushing sense of inevitability. That final line, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” has been ringing in my ears ever since the Tesla Bomber story broke.
This isn’t to say the stories are identical—far from it. But the rhyme is there. The same themes of power, greed, and human cost. The same feeling that, no matter how much we uncover, the machine grinds on.
Maybe these stories stick with us because they remind us of something terrible and true: the world is messy, complicated, and often cruel. Perhaps they also force us to confront the question that lingers long after the credits roll: What do we do, knowing that the house always wins? Forget it, Jake. It’s Vegas.