Who is Elon Musk?

Who the hell does Elon Musk think he is? And what’s he up to? Not content with building interplanetary rockets, the American giga-billionaire now amuses himself by blasting Britain for jailing anti-immigrant rioters.

What drives him and what, if anything, should we do about it?

Musk is a visionary. But he’s also a world-class drama queen. His genius is to see things others do not. He moves fast and blows things up. He is a force of nature. But, like nature, he can be unpredictable and dangerous. He is direct to the point of boorishness, which occasionally leads him into a world of hyperbole.

Musk paints a dystopian caricature of Britain, a country he barely knows: it’s on the verge of civil war; free speech is being throttled; sending people to jail for encouraging far-Right mobs to burn down immigrant hostels is “messed up”; if things carry on as they are, people in the UK will be shot for exercising their right to free speech in a few years. And so on.

Most of his fellow billionaires who want to change the world  (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Taylor Swift are examples) tend to do benign things: wipe out malaria; support women’s rights; build libraries. Musk, the reigning bad boy of the tech sector, is a full-on philanthropy sceptic. He believes that charity is a kind of wokeness which he abhors.

What will change the world, he insists, is profit and enterprise. “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth,” he told the New York Times last year in a Trump-like moment. In his world, capitalism (and especially his own brand of it) are the superheroes.

He thinks big. Musk doesn’t just want to save humanity. He’s also on a mission to save democracy. He wants influence; but unlike, say, Rupert Murdoch, he despises the “legacy media”. So he bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion. It has around 550 million monthly users, although this number has fallen sharply since Musk bought it.

He wants X to become the world’s town square with as few barriers to free speech as possible. In practice this means that moderating extremist posts on X is now far looser. As a result X has become a kind of megaphone for (mostly right-wing) conspiracy theories. It’s the ultimate example of power without responsibility.

He recently allowed Donald Trump back onto the platform. Trump was banned after claiming the 2020 US presidential election was stolen. In a rambling discussion Musk told the Republican candidate: “It’s essential that you win the (2024) election for the sake of the country.” For someone who claims to be of the centre-right, this is little more than slavish self-interest.

Musk says he distinguishes between freedom of speech and what he calls “freedom of reach” on social media. “Anyone can go into Times Square and deny the Holocaust,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to promote it (on X) to millions of people.”

But allowing people to advocate incinerating asylum seekers in a Holiday Inn is OK?

If you called Musk a mixed-up kid he probably wouldn’t demur. He’s complex: a manic genius addicted to risk and drama; he refuses to play by other people’s rules if he can possibly avoid it; he alternates between blinding epiphanies and periods of emotional darkness which then become springboards for his ceaseless creativity.

He does weird stuff. He once smoked weed on a popular radio show. He sent a picture of his then wife Grimes having a caesarean to his friends.

His projects might appear haphazard: rockets, electric cars, robots, brain implants, AI. But they have an internal logic that binds them together. They’re all about the future and how we can shape it. One thing leads to another.

His (current) tick-list includes: save the planet with clean energy; turn humanity into an interplanetary species in case we can’t; make the lame walk and the blind see by implanting tiny neural chips in our brains, which he calls “Jesus-level stuff”; save the world from uncontrolled AI; make robots user-friendly; rinse and repeat.

Some of his achievements are, it has to be said, spectacular. Falcon 1, his prototype rocket, was the first privately built machine to reach orbit. Space X has since helped NASA put more payload into space than China.

At its peak in 2021 Tesla was valued at over $1 trillion, though today it is trading at 45% less as competition eats into its position as the leading maker of electric vehicles.

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Musk sent thousands of Starlink satellite communication terminals to restore the country’s crippled military command system. But he has at times been an unreliable ally. Musk is nothing if not consequential.

Musk’s commitment to free speech is undoubtedly genuine. But it can be selective if not downright hypocritical. He will use his position to shut down people on X who offend him. When one user posted the movements of Musk’s private jet online he, and a number of journalists who followed up, were suspended.

He occasionally flirts with conspiracy theories. During the pandemic he tweeted (but then retracted) “Prosecute/Fauci”, apparently for backing lockdowns, a reference to Anthony Fauci the highly respected US Chief Medical Officer.

Musk has Aspergers. He confesses to suffering from bouts of deep depression. He has no natural filters to temper his response to people — online or face to face. He can be a bully and he can be brutal. But he also evokes deep loyalty. “Most of us,” says one SpaceX executive “would follow him to the gates of hell carrying suntan oil.”

Musk is worth around $250 billion, about the same as the GDP of a middle-sized mixed economy like Nigeria. He can buy pretty much anything he wants. He is hyperactive. He likes to fool around and have fun. He is addicted to high-powered video games. One of his favourite films is The Life of Brian. Musk, like the Pythons, is a serial disrupter.

He told Walter Isaacson, author of his compelling biography Elon Musk : “At first I thought it (Twitter) didn’t fit into my primary large missions, but I’ve come to believe it can be part of preserving civilisation, buying more time to become interplanetary.” Free speech, Musk claims, undermines group-think, which is a barrier to progress, and encourages democracy and the open exchange of ideas.

This, to say the least, stretches credulity. For someone with a legendary bullshit detector, Musk can bullshit for America.

Isaacson believes that the deeper reason for Musk’s attachment to Twitter lies in his troubled childhood. As a scrawny kid with autism in South Africa, he had virtually no friends. When he was bullied and beaten in the playground, ending up in hospital his abusive father, Errol, called him a loser.

Twitter is the ultimate playground, a vast, planetary amusement park, where anyone can be your friend. But where you don’t have to actually face them if you give them a kicking.

It’s complicated being Elon Musk. Dealing with him need not be.

Memo to the Prime Minister. From Cabinet Secretary. Eyes Only

You asked for our advice on dealing with Mr Musk. He is without doubt an extraordinary human being. His achievements are game-changing. He should be encouraged and, indeed supported, in his commercial ventures to the extent that what he does helps our economy.

However, Mr Musk is also erratic and emotionally unstable . His forays into politics through his privileged position as a social media publisher (X) are potentially harmful and should be carefully monitored. If he breaks the law, he should be treated the same as anybody else.

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