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Panorama: Trump And The Tech Titans (BBC1) Would you trust a robot to do the babysitting? That's how half-baked multi-billionaire Elon Musk is trying to sell us Optimus, his 'autonomous assistant, humanoid friend'. Prototypes of these wasp-waisted mechanical bipeds, with crash dummy torsos and blank shiny faces that would terrify any child, were launched three years ago, though are yet to go on sale. Video of them tottering across a stage, like geriatric Star Wars stormtroopers with dodgy knees, featured in an equally laughable edition of Panorama, as the BBC tried to convince us of a conspiracy to destroy civilisation, cooked up by Donald Trump and a mega-rich cabal of evil geniuses. 'We're not just talking about incredibly wealthy people,' croaked one contributor to Trump And The Tech Titans. 'We're talking about people who are wealthier than anyone has ever been in the history of humankind.' The Beeb despises billionaire Californian corporations, except when it's trying to do a deal to get Disney to fund another series of Doctor Who. And it vacillates between amused disgust and sheer loathing of The Donald. This double helping of hatred blinded Panorama producers to how pathetic the likes of Musk and his American 'tech bros' appear to the British. They're not super-villains. They're just self-obsessed geeks who happen to have ridden a tidal wave of new technology and now have much more money than imagination. They build robots, rockets and self-driving cars because that's what excited them when they were six years old, the point at which their emotional development stopped. Like tycoons and moguls since the age of the alchemists, many of them pour their fortunes into the search for eternal life. I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if the last we see of Musk is his frozen head being loaded onto a starship bound for Mars. Trump makes no effort to hide his affinity for the filthy rich. This documentary made much of his association with Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who envisaged his money-mover app as a Swiss bank account in every pocket. One long segment, including a reconstruction, related how Thiel once talked his way out of a speeding ticket. Such shameless amorality! All this was old news, as was much of the detail in this hour-long programme. The first 20 minutes was largely a history of the internet, dreary padding that could easily have been cut. Bernie Sanders, America's version of Jeremy Corbyn, railed against political corruption. Para- phrasing Abraham Lincoln, he declared America now 'has a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires,' and claimed Musk spent $270m (£205m) on getting Trump elected. My guess is that millions of MAGA voters made up their minds to send their candidate back to the White House before the campaign even started. Don't blame the 'tech titans'... the fault with America's politics lies with the pygmies in opposition.
