The knives are out for Elon Musk.

But why, exactly?

There’s a big reason and a small reason.

The big reason is that he’s a powerful figure who isn’t under the control of the establishment.

When he saw how the establishment was using Twitter (in collusion with various government agencies, we now know) to suppress speech it didn’t like, he bought Twitter and put a stop to it.

Where just before the 2020 election, the establishment was able to shut down reporting from this paper about Hunter Biden’s laptop, now the establishment finds such censorship much harder.

That was unforgivable and all by itself transformed Musk in the media’s eyes from brilliant eccentric who made eco-friendly cars to potential mad scientist in need of being “reined in.”

The surest proof the knives are out is a Ronan Farrow “exposé” in The New Yorker: “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule: How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.”

Exactly what business it is of the United States government to “rein in” a figure remains unclear, but the establishment doesn’t trust any power center it cannot control.

This is the instinct of authoritarians everywhere and with good reason — Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution arguably started with rock and roll.

It’s why college administrators are hostile to fraternities and why communist regimes control the churches.

As the sometime world’s richest man and a person of unique gifts in business and technology, Musk has become quite powerful.

But he has his own goals, and they are not the establishment’s.

Musk thinks a human civilization limited to this planet is sure to stagnate and decline: Without frontiers, life becomes a zero-sum game, with people fighting to preserve or enlarge their piece of the pie instead of happily watching the pie get bigger.

That’s why Musk wants to see humanity on Mars, the Moon and elsewhere in outer space, where it’s possible to harvest almost limitless resources.

(NASA is launching a probe to the asteroid Psyche, which all by itself contains quintillions of dollars’ worth of resources.)

To politicians, who trade pie slices for influence (and more tangible rewards), a zero-sum society is appealing (and a society where the pie periodically shrinks gives them even more power).

Most of them don’t understand Musk’s ideas, and the ones who do probably feel threatened by them.

Part of Musk’s power stems from the establishment’s ineptitude, which only makes it harder to bear.

The military and intelligence communities and NASA have become dependent on another Musk enterprise, SpaceX, to launch satellites and astronauts into space.

(Just last weekend a SpaceX shuttle flight delivered astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.)

More establishment-connected companies, like Boeing and United Launch Alliance, have suffered various technical issues that leave them essentially incapable of doing half what SpaceX does, despite much higher prices.

I can’t help but feel that Musk’s sheer effectiveness, in comparison to establishment failures on everything from COVID to Afghanistan to China, serves as a constant reproach.

Even the bid to “rein him in” is failing.

The effort to end-run his ownership of Twitter with Threads, a product of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has been a flop.

And as an exposé, so is the Farrow piece.

Through it we learn that although Musk was happy to make his Starlink satellite Internet service available to Ukraine when that country was invaded, he was uncomfortable seeing it turned into a backbone of the war effort.

He also had the temerity to ask to be paid, though other suppliers to Ukraine — Raytheon, say — were not providing product gratis.

Now it’s lawyer time, with the Justice Department suing SpaceX for not hiring immigrants and refugees, though US law bans disclosing technical information relating to rockets and space to non-US citizens.

Musk tweeted: “SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense. We couldn’t even hire Canadian citizens, despite Canada being part of NORAD!”

Nobody’s perfect.

Aside from these big issues, Musk has also made enemies with Twitter in part through an uncharacteristically narrow-minded approach to links to outside sources.

Many media outfits value Twitter for traffic, and he’s created unnecessary media resentment with a policy I doubt makes him any money.

But Musk’s big problem is that he’s nobody’s tool.

That’s admirable, but a lot of somebodies would like to change that.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.