Two Boys Who Never Grew Up

The Boy Who Built Magic for Children—and the Boy Who Fed Them to the Machine

Photo by Steve DiMatteo on Unsplash

There was a time in America when the most powerful man in Hollywood was someone who still believed in fairy tales.

Not as marketing strategy or intellectual property to be leveraged across platforms. As truth. As something worth preserving. As the foundation of what made civilization worth building at all.

Walt Disney never stopped being childlike. Imaginative. Curious. Tender. Hopeful in ways that made serious men uncomfortable. He saw a mouse in his garage and imagined him as a person. He watched children at amusement parks and saw their parents standing outside, bored and excluded, and thought: I can build something better. He mortgaged everything he owned—his house, his life insurance policy, his future—to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because he believed animation could be art, that it could move people, that it could matter.

The bankers thought he was insane. His brother Roy begged him to be reasonable. His wife worried they’d lose everything. Walt didn’t care. He had to make the thing he saw in his mind real. The dream itself demanded to exist.

This is what childlikeness preserved in Walt: the capacity to see what isn’t there yet and love it so much you’ll sacrifice everything to make it real. The refusal to accept that wonder is impractical, that making children feel safe is less important than being sensible. The stubborn insistence that imagination matters more than efficiency, that creating comfort for people you’ll never meet is a worthy way to spend a life.

Walt built kingdoms. Not to rule them but to give them away. He made magic and handed it to children and asked nothing in return except that they feel, for a moment, that the world was safe and good and full of possibility. He took his own wounded childhood—the poverty, the abuse from a brutal father, the instability—and transmuted it into healing. For millions of children who would walk through gates into a kingdom where, for a few hours, nothing could hurt them.

Walt wasn’t just an artist or dreamer. He was an inventor. A genuine technological innovator who created tools that had never existed because the beauty he imagined required them. He invented the multiplane camera to create depth that made the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio feel real, pioneered synchronized sound and Technicolor, created Audio-Animatronics to let children believe they were meeting Abraham Lincoln. Every breakthrough served wonder—making impossible dreams visible, building worlds children could inhabit and feel safe within.

The innovation wasn’t the point. Wonder was.

Walt performed to reveal. To show children what wonder looks like. To make beauty visible. To reveal what imagination can create when it serves others.

The America that elevated Walt had cultural infrastructure most of us can barely remember now. Patience for craft—Walt spent years inventing cameras that didn’t exist, and the culture gave him time. Tolerance for risk in service of beauty—Walt nearly bankrupted himself multiple times, and partners trusted that creating wonder was worth the gamble. Long-term thinking that valued what might emerge over decades rather than quarters.

That America invested in Walt Disney. Gave him time. Allowed him to fail and try again. Trusted that creating beauty and comfort was worth doing even when returns were uncertain.

Walt didn’t just build in that America. He helped define it. Main Street USA was a vision of communal life—where strangers are neighbors, where safety is assumed, where children remember what innocence feels like. He built it because he believed America should be that. For someone. For the children.

That’s what generative masculinity looks like. Strength in service of protection. Power used to create rather than control. Performance as revelation rather than concealment.

Walt Disney never grew up. And his eternal boyhood made him humane.

That time is gone. And the new America elevates Elon Musk.

There were two boys who never grew up. Both brilliant, stubborn, visionary. But what they preserved from childhood couldn’t be more different.

Walt’s boyhood innocence became generosity. Musk’s boyhood wound became domination.

One of these men performed to reveal. The other performs to conceal.

Elon Musk’s childhood was hard. Bullied mercilessly. Beaten severely in South African schools. A father whose cruelty shaped him in ways he’s spent his life both fleeing and replicating.

Walt took his wounded childhood and built Disneyland—a place where other wounded children could feel safe.

Elon took his and built an empire where he never has to feel small again.

Walt transmuted pain into healing and revealed that healing to children. Elon transmutes pain into domination and conceals the domination behind disruption.

Walt created Mickey Mouse and gave him to the world—optimism, pluck, the triumph of the small and kind over the big and cruel. Elon creates nothing that doesn’t serve Elon. The companies, the platforms, the children. All exist as extensions of ego.

He treats procreation as potency, not parenthood. Walt spent his career revealing through innovation what love creates. Elon builds systems that fragment attention and extract data—concealing that he cannot love what he cannot control.

Both are innovators. Walt pioneered the multiplane camera, pioneered Technicolor, created Audio-Animatronics. Elon innovates too—electric vehicles, reusable rockets, neural interfaces.

The contrast is between innovation that reveals and innovation that conceals. Walt innovated to reveal beauty, to show children what wonder looks like made real. Elon innovates to conceal—the rockets conceal that genius serves ego, the platform conceals extraction behind free speech performance.

Walt built collaboratively—trusting others to make his dreams better than he alone could. Elon demands absolute control.

This is the tragedy. His boyhood preserved the worst parts of being a boy, and those pathologies metastasized. The insecurity became cruelty. The brittleness became vindictiveness. The grievance weaponized itself into a platform that amplifies Nazis, buries critics, fragments reality for billions.

He uses wealth to punish journalists, platform to mock the vulnerable. He bought the public square to control discourse, then algorithmically suppresses anyone documenting it. All while performing as free speech champion—concealing extraction as liberation.

And he spent a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Appeared at a conservative gathering wielding a chainsaw, celebrating the dismantling of an agency that had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades, as independent analysis published in The Lancet documented. According to epidemiologist Brooke Nichols—whose excess-mortality model is based on WHO data on disease incidence, treatment costs, and mortality rates, using interrupted-services analysis methodology employed in global health crises from Ebola to COVID, and cited by former USAID official Atul Gawande in The New Yorker—the model estimates approximately six hundred thousand deaths, two-thirds children, as direct result of the USAID dismantling. Even conservative estimates of this modeling approach exceed three hundred thousand lives lost. When global health programs collapse, children are always the first to die—because early detection disappears, treatment pathways break, and ordinary infections become lethal again. Children like Jane Sunday in Kakuma refugee camp, desperately ill in a system that broke down because Elon Musk performed with a chainsaw.

Then he walked away.