As I ride my stationery bike, I have been watching, one episode at a time, the Netflix series, “Killing Eve”. I have just finished watching the first half of the third year of the four year series. I understand that there are major problems with this series (starting with the main premise), and that to say that each of the characters is flawed would be to state a world class understatement, but each of them are so intriguing that I seem to keep watching.

OK, you have no idea what I am talking about. Eve is, at the start, a British bureaucrat who works for what appears to be the British equivalent of the American Secret Service, the agency that guards politicians and others who need to be guarded. She soon loses that job, but is picked up by a branch of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA. The goal is to track down a mysterious assassin who has engaged in a number of seemingly unrelated murders of prominent individuals at various locations in the United Kingdom and Europe. It turns out that the assassin is a Russian woman whose name may be Oksana, but who goes by Villanelle. She is “controlled” by a Russian man named Konstantin, and Eve works under an MI6 veteran named Carolyn. And, oh yes, Konstantin and Carolyn turn out to be old friends. And Villanelle and Eve turn out to have the deepest love of each other and the strongest hate of each other as any conceivable love-hate relationship could hold. And, one more thing: everything that happens seems to relate to a secret organization called The Twelve, who pays the bills for Villanelle and Konstantin, and which is both a target and mystery to Eve and (maybe) to Carolyn.

The murders are all shown on screen, and each one is more gruesome than the others (the most recent I have seen involved a pitchfork on a Polish farm). That in and of itself should make this show off limits for me – I am not a fan of horror movies. But I stay.

My point, though, is not to convince you to watch this series (although you might find it as interesting as I do), but to talk about the characters, who go about their business of chasing killers, and killing themselves, as if it was as normal as getting a cup of coffee. While they all have their own internal struggles of course (and this is crucial to the series), none of those internal struggles involve, say: “Am I doing something wrong here?” These are people who are disconnected in any real sense with any world outside of their own limited world, who totally lack empathy for their fellow human beings, and who just can’t help or control themselves.

Read this last line again. “These are people who are disconnected in any real sense with any world outside of their own limited world, who tally lack empathy for their fellow human beings, and who just can’t help or control themselves.” Does this remind you, as it reminds me, of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (to take two random examples)? Don’t you get the feeling that they would do anything, regardless of its effect on anyone else, without ever feeling a moment’s regret. Don’t you get the feeling that they could easily be Two of The Twelve? I do.

Put Trump aside for a moment. Concentrate on Musk. I have written about him before, you may remember. My question then was (and one of my questions remains) how a man who leads X, SpaceX, and Tesla has time to hang around Donald, and run what might become the most influential government agency of the second Trump term, the Department of Government Efficiency. And, by the way, I now see that, even with that question, I have sold Musk short. I had failed to recognize his role in the new up and coming corporation, XAI, which is going to be challenging Open AI in the race to see who can come up with a way to accidentally destroy civilization first.

The utter brashness with which Musk and his fellow job and money slicer Vivek Ramaswamy describe their plans for DOGE is mind boggling. While it’s easy to brush some of their rhetoric away as overblown, we need to remember who we are dealing with. We are dealing with Konstantin and Villanelle, and they are likely to do anything, ruthless as it might be, and walk away unscathed.

But what about Tesla? Tesla is (duh!) and electric vehicle company bent on controlling that market and the market generally for self-driving vehicles, totally identified with Musk and the basis of his outlandish fortune. Joe Biden is an advocate for electric vehicles. Donald Trump is not. Donald Trump wants to keep gas powered vehicles as the major types of automobiles. The oil business certainly supports this, as perhaps do some members of the UAW. But what about Musk? Isn’t he more in line with Biden than Trump on this issue? How will Tesla weather the Trump campaign against EVs?

And then there is China, against which Trump says he is determined (you note I add the words “says he”) to impose devastatingly strong tariffs. I have read that Tesla has a number of factories in China (four or five, I believe), which make auto parts and full grown Teslas, and that China is Tesla’s second largest market for vehicle sales.

If Tesla can’t make parts in China as it currently does and has to transfer is manufacturing and supply sources elsewhere, won’t that have an adverse effect on Musk? And wouldn’t you imagine that China, which has a number of large domestic manufacturers of electric vehicles, will put the kibosh (is that a word?) on Tesla sales in China?

Maybe, X, SpaceX and XAI are so important to Musk that he is willing to let Tesla go by the wayside. Some have suggested that he might even drop Tesla, sell the company. But he would be selling a company which, for all the reasons stated above (and maybe more), would have a very depressed market value. That doesn’t sound very Musky.

So here I am, watching “Killing Eve”. Am I also watching “Killing Tesla”. But somehow I doubt it. Somehow, whether it’s The Twelve or The Two, I think there are surprising things deep below (okay, if not the Deep State, the Deep Something), that we may never understand. And that, more and more, these are things that will, or at least think they will, control us.