Within forty-eight hours last week, America witnessed two historic events that have generated an avalanche of commentary, almost all of it framing the two moments as a moral fable. The good guy and the bad guy, the giver and the taker, the humble servant-leader and the rapacious lone wolf. Oh, how I feel the temptation of this interpretation in my bones — as a long-suffering Knicks fan for all 53 years since our last championship and as a classical liberal who sees how income inequality, government capture, oligarchy, and crony capitalism have so damaged our body politic. The temptation is understandable.
But the take is wrong — or at least, it’s not nearly interesting enough.
On Friday, June 12th, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, his net worth crossing $1 trillion on the back of SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO. On Saturday night, Jalen Brunson scored 45 points to lead the New York Knicks to their first NBA championship in 53 years — a team built in part because Brunson voluntarily left $113 million on the table so the franchise could surround him with talent, including two of his closest friends from their Villanova championship years together.
The commentary practically wrote itself. Brunson the selfless, communal, humble, respectful family man, a giver, versus Musk the extractive, isolated, ego-without-limit, promiscuous taker and even racist. One the avatar of everything we want to get back and the other the avatar of everything wrong with where we’re headed. I actually began to write a piece unpacking this moralistic take. I soon realized the story is more demanding than a morality play.
What Brunson and Musk actually represent are two genuinely different theories of how greatness is constituted. Not good versus evil, but two visions of human excellence that have coexisted in tension throughout American (and human) history, and that are now erupting simultaneously as cultural archetypes at a moment when our country is desperately searching for orientation.
Call them the relational theory and the singular theory of greatness.
The relational theory of greatness holds that the greatest things human beings accomplish emerge from covenant — from binding ourselves to others, subordinating ego to something larger, and building through trust accumulated over time. Brunson embodies this almost mythically. He, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges have been friends for more than a decade. They won the NCAA championship together at Villanova in 2016 and 2018. They chose each other again across franchises and free agency decisions. Brunson’s $113 million sacrifice wasn’t charity; it was a wager that what they could build together was worth more than what he could accumulate alone. Yes, Brunson operated within the constraints of the NBA’s salary cap system, but character is revealed precisely under constraint, not despite it. He could have taken the money. He didn’t. Saturday night proved him right.
By contrast, the singular theory of greatness holds that greatness is the product of an exceptional individual will — a person who sees what others cannot, tolerates what others will not, and bends reality through sheer force of vision, appetite for risk, and often dark transgressions of moral boundaries. There is something irreducibly human about the person who sees what the crowd cannot and bears the cost of that vision. The history of human achievement cannot be written without them. After all, Eve broke boundaries to eat from the tree of knowledge to launch our story. Whatever one thinks of Musk personally — and I am genuinely horrified by his behavior — this description is not caricature. He did help catalyze a revolution in commercial space flight. He has built companies that most serious people thought were impossible.
These are two theories about how greatness is made, with genuine philosophical pedigrees and mythic archetypes. Think Prometheus — the figure who steals fire alone, ascends beyond what the gods or the crowd permits, and bears the cost of that transgression in isolation — sometimes punished, sometimes deified, always idiosyncratic and set apart. And there is the ideal of the Round Table — excellence achieved only in fellowship, where a knight’s virtue requires equals who can see it, test it, be bound to it, and where the highest human good cannot even be perceived, let alone practiced, without genuine friendship.
Or think of the two Adams in Genesis as described, in The Lonely Man of Faith, by Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Adam I is the builder, inventor, and conqueror who asks, “How can I master the world?” He is technological, ambitious, and productive, concerned with dignity through achievement. Adam II is the covenanted one who asks, “To whom and for what am I responsible?” He is relational, vulnerable, ethical, and concerned with redemption rather than mastery.
These are ancient archetypes, embedded permanently in human nature, that surfaced with unusual clarity in the same forty-eight-hour period.
But here is the insight I initially missed and that matters more than anything else in this essay. The binary flooding social media — Brunson good, Musk bad, one I need to do everything I can to resist, given Musk’s psychopathology — collapses a real distinction into a cartoon.
Neither of these archetypes exists, or can exist, in pure form. Every human being carries both the Promethean hunger to singularly achieve no matter the cost and the Round Table need to be bound to others in mutual obligation. We are constituted simultaneously by both Adam I and Adam II yearnings. The question greatness actually turns on is not which archetype a person embodies — since we each embody both — but whether a person can integrate them, hold them in living tension, know when to take control and when to surrender it. And the danger, always, is absolutizing one at the expense of the other. When either archetype is idealized into the whole of a person’s identity, it doesn’t simply become unbalanced. It metastasizes.
The real distinction between Brunson and Musk is integration versus absolutization.
Brunson’s achievement cannot be explained by the Round Table alone. Reaching the pinnacle of professional basketball required ferocious, solitary, Promethean discipline — punishing training regimens undertaken when no one is watching, the willingness to take the final shot when a season hangs in the balance, an interior toughness that sets him apart from nearly everyone else playing the game. That is not communal. That is a person alone with himself, forging something only he could forge. What makes Brunson’s greatness whole is that this Promethean discipline never absolutized into the totality of who he is. He took the proverbial fire and then, deliberately, brought it back to the circle. He left the $113 million on the table so that Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges could play beside him. He consistently deflects credit. He affirms the work the team still has to do, rather than his own part in having done it. Brunson integrated the archetypes — the singular discipline that forged him and the communion that completed him. He knew when to take control of a game and when to subordinate himself to the four other men on the floor. This integration — not selflessness alone — is the real achievement.
Musk’s trajectory shows the opposite movement. He does have Promethean gifts; he did catalyze a genuine revolution in commercial space flight and has built companies that most serious people thought impossible. The fire he carries is real. The problem is his absolutizing. Musk received enormous government subsidies across Tesla and SpaceX — built, in large part, on the public’s investment and risk-bearing — even as he positioned himself ideologically against the very institutions that helped build his empire, later taking a chainsaw to large parts of that society’s governing capacity. He joined the Giving Pledge in 2012, but his philanthropic record since has been negligible relative to his accumulation. When he took the stage at SpaceX’s IPO last week and spoke at length about the company’s achievements, the only person he mentioned was COO Gwynne Shotwell. He did not name a single engineer or scientist who built SpaceX alongside him. Not one! He appears constitutionally unable to recognize, honor, or sacrifice for the variety of larger communities — government, society, team — in which his own success has always been nested. He never returned the Promethean fire to any circle; it simply continues to consume what surrounds it. For Musk, the singular theory of greatness is a license for extraction without reciprocity, for visibility without acknowledgment, for accumulating power over democratic institutions while claiming to transcend them. This is not actually an embodiment of the singular theory of greatness, this is corruption.
Reframing how we understand this pair of leaders matters because the moralistic commentary — Brunson good, Musk bad — actually lets Musk off the hook in a strange way. It makes him a mythic villain rather than what he actually is: a man who possesses half of the full human inheritance of greatness and has refused, perhaps cannot bear, to develop the other half. It also matters because we would otherwise idealize Brunson into something less interesting than he is. He is not great because he lacks ego or ambition. He is great because he has integrated ferocious individual will with genuine relationship; because he knows, game by game, when the moment calls for Prometheus and when it calls for the Round Table, when it calls for Adam I and when it calls for Adam II.
This integration is rare. Most of us, most of the time, fail to hold both halves, idealizing one or the other, at least for a time. We should not ask “Promethean or Round Table?” but, which am I idealizing right now, and what am I refusing to integrate?
When the final buzzer sounded Saturday night, my 34-year-old daughter Talia — who has been a Knicks fan with me since she was a toddler —turned to me with tears in her eyes, hugged me, and said, “Abba, I was hoping and praying the Knicks would win a championship in your lifetime. And we did.”
She wasn’t crying about basketball. She was crying about covenant — about what it means to carry something together across decades, a father and daughter, a point guard and his two oldest friends, a city and its team, and to have it, improbably, come through. That is the Round Table lived at the cellular level. It does not deny the years of individual discipline that got us here — fifty-three years of my own stubborn, solitary devotion to a team that gave us so little for so long, a discipline of its own strange Promethean kind. It simply insists that the discipline was always in service of something we were holding together, not something I was hoarding alone.
Americans actually understand that the integration of these two parts moves them deeply. The tears on Saturday night — from players, fans, children watching with parents and grandparents who had waited decades — were not tears about an archetype. They were tears of recognition that the way of achieving greatness we had been told was gone, or naive, or insufficiently “optimizable,” turned out to still be real.
That’s worth more than a morality play. The question isn’t who is good and who is bad. Every one of us carries fire and the need for a community to help light it and to bring it back to. The question is whether we can integrate the two, and whether the people whose greatness we’re tempted to either idolize or vilify are doing the same. The question is what kind of greatness are we building toward, and whether the people embodying each vision are actually practicing what they preach.
One of them, this week, manifestly was.