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.

The project abandoned with eight months left. Two hundred thousand federal workers fired. Six hundred thousand dead. He left when the performative spectacle was over. Performance concealing mass death behind optimization. The children remained dead. Concealed behind the performance of the disruptor.

And when he resists power, it’s not principle but wounded ego. When Trump humiliated him publicly, Musk attacked—on X, threatening a third party, accusing Trump of hiding Epstein files.

The concealment dropped. The wound showed through. Not conviction but brittleness.

Trump threatened his government contracts. Six months later, Musk returned to the White House. Tuxedo at a Saudi prince’s dinner. As if six hundred thousand people hadn’t died.

Trump dismissed it: “He had a bad spell. A stupid moment in his life. Very stupid. But I like Elon, and I suspect I’ll always like him.”

The accusations forgotten. Musk back—attending DOGE reunions to reminisce about the wrecking ball.

The resistance was never real. The wound was.

One cannot imagine Walt Disney reconciling after such humiliation. One cannot imagine Walt wielding chainsaws while children died, then walking away.

Because Walt performed to reveal. Elon performs to conceal.

By “infrastructure,” I don’t mean roads and bridges—I mean the cultural operating system: venture capital that rewards velocity over craft, platforms that reward outrage over beauty, media ecosystems that amplify spectacle over meaning, and political incentives that reward grievance over responsibility. The America that could incubate a Walt Disney had different defaults—patience for slow work, reverence for children, communal cultural narratives, and a belief that beauty deserved investment. The America that elevates Musk rewards extraction, optimization, cruelty, and speed.

Infrastructure shapes souls.

This infrastructure produces men whose performance conceals rather than reveals. It elevates Elons and shapes Igers.

In September 2025, Bob Iger suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened license revocation. Hours later, Disney capitulated. Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED.”

Public backlash stopped it. Five days later, Iger reversed.

Bloomberg‘s Beth Kowit revealed what submission had concealed: “This shouldn’t be confused for Disney suddenly rediscovering their moral high ground. Instead, it’s a realization that submitting may come with a higher price than pushing back.”

Not conviction but calculation.

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner asked: “Where has all the leadership gone? If not for corporate chief executives standing up against bullies, who then will step up for the first amendment?”

Walt built because wonder mattered. Iger calculated.

Walt would have refused.

Walt’s America was flawed. And so was Walt. He brutally fought unions, saw the 1941 animator strike as personal betrayal by a “family” that should have trusted his benevolent paternalism. He cooperated with the FBI’s surveillance apparatus, testified before HUAC driven by anti-communist convictions that mixed legitimate concern with personal grievance. His early films contained racist stereotypes that were inexcusable then and remain inexcusable now. He ran his company with authoritarian control, believing he knew what was best and brooking little dissent.

Walt Disney was a conservative romantic of his time—patriotic in the post-war American mode, anti-communist, culturally traditionalist, a civic optimist who believed in technological progress and shared moral culture. He blended Eisenhower Republicanism with Norman Rockwell Americana, small-town nostalgia with technophilia, sentimental patriotism with genuine faith that America could improve through imagination and engineering and decency.

These aren’t minor blemishes. They’re serious moral failures that demand acknowledgment.

But the question I’m asking isn’t whether Walt was personally virtuous. It’s what his innovation served. It’s the direction of his creative effort—what his genius ultimately built toward, even when he failed along the way.

Even with his flaws, Walt built for wonder. Even his control served revelation—he demanded perfection not to dominate but to show children beauty, to make the Blue Fairy feel real, to create safety visible. Even his paternalism oriented toward protection—however misguided his methods, he genuinely wanted children to feel safe, wanted to build worlds where they could remember innocence. Even when he failed, he failed toward revelation—trying to show children what imagination creates when it serves them.

His politics were protective, not punitive. Hopeful, not apocalyptic. Civic, not extractive. His conservatism sought continuity through beauty, not domination through power. His control, however authoritarian in practice, served wonder rather than ego. He was a builder, not a punisher.

The contrast with Musk isn’t personal virtue but directional purpose. These flaws matter—but they do not redefine the direction of Walt’s moral gravity. One man’s genius, however flawed in its exercise, oriented toward creating comfort for children. The other’s genius, whatever its technical achievements, orients toward extraction and control. One man’s failures were failures toward something worth building. The other’s successes are successes toward something monstrous.

Walt Disney—conservative romantic, anti-communist, union-buster, FBI cooperator, paternalist—still asked: How can I make children feel safe? Still built to reveal wonder. Still spent his imperfect life creating beauty for children he’d never meet.

Elon Musk, with none of Walt’s mid-century excuse of different times and different understanding, asks: How can I make the world acknowledge my importance? Builds to conceal extraction. Spends his life accumulating children he doesn’t nurture while wielding chainsaws over programs that saved children he’d never meet.

Infrastructure is not destiny. It is accumulated choice—of what we reward, what we tolerate, what we amplify, what we refuse to defend. The culture that made Walt possible was built by millions of small commitments to patience, craft, shared myth, and long-term meaning. The culture that elevates Musk is built by millions of small capitulations to speed, spectacle, optimization, and the algorithmic void.

We are not trapped by this structure. We built it. And we can build something else.

Infrastructure is not steel or code. It is the pattern of our collective attention and the moral logic behind what we reward. And every day—quietly, invisibly—we are choosing between revelation and concealment. Between Walt and Elon. Between building worlds children can trust and building systems that consume them.

So what does choosing revelation look like in practice?

It begins with attention. Attention is the currency of the new world, and the platforms that dominate us are built on the Muskian model: spectacle, grievance, rage, algorithmic acceleration. Revelation cannot survive in that ecosystem. So every moment spent in places that reward understanding over engagement, depth over heat, meaning over metrics—that is infrastructure-building. Supporting journalism that documents reality rather than incites performative outrage. Choosing to read rather than scroll. Choosing to follow people who reveal, not people who conceal behind branding and rage-bait.

It continues with creation. If you build anything—code, art, communities, companies—you are deciding what world comes next. Ask the question Walt asked every day: What does this reveal? Does it reveal beauty, truth, safety, understanding? Or does it conceal extraction, ego, optimization, manipulation? Choosing to build slowly rather than virally, meaningfully rather than maximally, collaboratively rather than autocratically—those are infrastructure decisions. That is how revelation becomes architecture.

It shapes the stories we transmit. Fairy tales aren’t childish; they are moral memory. They carry intergenerational truths about courage, fear, kindness, danger, meaning, and the possibility of goodness in an often cruel world. When we hand our children algorithmically generated sludge because it’s convenient, we are choosing concealment—the flattening of imagination into content. When we choose stories that reveal what humanity can be, we create citizens rather than consumers.

It informs what we reward economically. Every subscription dollar, every movie ticket, every platform we tolerate, every corporate behavior we excuse—these become the incentives of the future. If we reward the Iger-style calculation, we get more calculation. If we reward leaders who refuse to bow when power threatens, who defend the creative mission even at cost, we get more of them. Capital flows toward whatever receives our collective tolerance. It always has.

It guides civic life. Defending institutions that think in decades rather than quarters is a civic act. Supporting leaders who act from conviction rather than expediency is a civic act. Refusing to normalize cruelty, spectacle, chainsaws, ego tantrums, algorithmic fragmentation, and leadership that submits to power—that is civic duty. Not glamorous, not cinematic, but foundational.

It culminates in a single question: Does this strengthen our capacity to see clearly? Or does it diminish it?

Revelation strengthens a culture. Concealment hollows it out.

And a civilization built on concealment—algorithmic, economic, political, aesthetic—ends up exactly where we are drifting: unable to process truth, unable to defend the vulnerable, unable to preserve wonder, unable to remember what childhood is for.

But we can build differently. Not by returning to some imagined past, but by rediscovering what Walt embodied: that wonder is not a luxury, beauty is not frivolous, and making children feel safe is not sentimental—it is the root of civilization.

What we reward, we create. What we tolerate, we normalize. What we nurture, we become.

Revelation is a choice. So is concealment.

The children are watching. Some dying in refugee camps from systems the chainsaw destroyed. Waiting to see which boy we follow.

Two boys who never grew up.

One performed to reveal—wonder, generosity, safety, and the fragile beauty of childhood.

The other performs to conceal—ego, grievance, domination, and the bodies left behind his chainsaw.

One built kingdoms so children could feel safe.

The other builds empires so he never has to feel small.

One gave his genius away.

The other demands the world kneel before his.

We cannot undo what six hundred thousand families already know. But we can decide what kind of boyhood we elevate from here. What kind of power we reward. What kind of performance we believe. What kind of America we want to raise our children inside.

Choose wonder over grievance.

Choose revelation over concealment.

Choose the childlike over the childish.

Choose Walt.

The children are watching.

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