I think they like it for a reason that Banks himself would have disapproved of, and that the author misses completely. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks

I think they like it for a reason that Banks himself would have disapproved of, and that the author misses completely. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths. The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :) The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)