US pet insurance policies in force

It turns out that as Elon Musk's relationship with the post button grew increasingly baroque between 2015 and 2022, Americans were simultaneously deciding that their pets deserved actuarial protection against catastrophe, and these two phenomena moved together with the kind of synchronicity normally reserved for planetary orbits or people who finish each other's sentences at dinner parties. One might almost believe that every time Musk tweeted about flamethrowers or the colonisation of Mars, somewhere an anxious dog owner signed up for premium coverage. The universe, it seems, operates on a principle of cosmic coordination we do not yet understand.

What's almost certainly happening here is that both variables are passengers on the same economic boom. Pet insurance grew because millennials and Gen X were becoming wealthier, pet ownership was hitting historical highs (Americans now spend roughly 136 billion dollars annually on their animals, which is more than the GDP of Iceland), and the financial technology to package and sell niche insurance products finally caught up with consumer demand. Musk, meanwhile, was riding the SpaceX and Tesla growth trajectory with the particular restlessness of someone who has discovered that Twitter will amplify whatever emerges from his brain at 3 AM. Both trends accelerated together because the underlying condition—economic expansion, technological optimism, and a particular flavour of American surplus—was lifting both boats.

This is what we do, of course. We collect data points and connect them like children with a constellation map, finding patterns because our brains are magnificently, catastrophically good at finding patterns, even when the universe has simply arranged two unrelated things to move in the same direction for completely different reasons. Pet insurance policies and Elon Musk tweets rose together because both were symptoms of the same moment in history, not because one caused the other. But doesn't it feel like something.