Elon Musk has achieved remarkable things, as even his fiercest critics sometimes must
admit. He revolutionized space travel, launching hundreds of rockets to deploy satellites
in space, recycling rockets to slash prices, and saving NASA from the embarrassment
of not being able to send astronauts into space since the end of the shuttle program. As
of late, he is making progress with his Starship test flights, a spaceship that could be
used to colonize the Moon and Mars.
Musk has also turned decade-old dreams of electric car mobility into reality, as
highways are flooded with his sleek-looking Tesla models. He has started a number of
other ventures, including a link between humans and machines with implanted chips
from his company Neuralink. He is working on robotaxis or ‘Optimus’ robots who can
assist humans at work and at home, as well as a number of other ventures.
For a long time, Musk was called a genius, and his business success as a serial
entrepreneur made him the richest man in the world. But there always seemed to be a
dark side to this immigrant from South Africa. He, first, made a number of controversial
comments on Twitter, as the social media platform was called at the time.
But then he decided to take over and buy the platform himself. After seemingly getting
cold feet following a binding offer and the threat of an embarrassing verdict against him,
he agreed to the purchase. The price tag was a cool $44 billion, and Musk had to take
out huge bank loans for the takeover. He went to Twitter HQ with a small army of loyal
and ruthless managers and stripped the plush workplace of amenities, and finally of
people. 80% of the workforce, 6,500 employees, had to clear their desks. He insisted it
was one of the hardest decisions he had ever made and was “not fun at all.”
He turned the platform into a place of even more vitriol, since content managers were
ousted and even controversial activists were allowed back. Finally, he rebranded Twitter
to X and became the social media service’s most ardent content creator (or ‘troll’ as his
critics would like to point out). After changing the algorithm, his posts are always on top,
sometimes simple and irrelevant sounding musings but often outright attacks, as of late
mostly against the left as he sees himself as a self-declared warrior against anything
woke or progressive. X today has more traffic than before his takeover, but it seems to
remain financially in dire straits.
In 2023, ad revenue has fallen by $1.5 billion since many companies started to boycott
the platform in reaction to Musk’s increasingly controversial postings. Big names like
Disney and Apple fled. His subscription service eventually resulted in a flop, as at one
point only about 150,000 subscribers opted for the ‘blue tick’ for a monthly payment.
Musk himself admitted that if the company could fail, it would have been due to the ad
boycott. Still, X makes 90% of its revenue with advertising. In the meanwhile, he has
taken his constant fights overseas as he battled officials in Australia or Brazil.
But Musk’s biggest power derives from an internet network called Starlink. As of April
2024, 5,827 satellites are beaming data from the orbit to even the most remote areas of
the planet. The service made global headlines after Musk provided his service initially to
support Ukraine’s troops when battling the Russian invasion after February 2022. Later
though, he interfered in Kyiv’s military operations when they tried to attack Russian
ships with Starlink-guided water drones. It became clear that he had created a
monopoly for a space-based internet service – with all its geostrategic implications.
Therefore, he has frequent contacts with high-ranking generals in the Pentagon. Last
year, the New York Times ran a headline: ‘Elon Musk’s Unmatched Power in the Stars’.
Their verdict: ‘Mr. Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter, has become the most
dominant player in space as he has steadily amassed power over the strategically
significant field of satellite internet!’ The value was estimated at $140 billion.
As of recently, Musk has had to demonstrate his abilities as a crisis manager, and Tesla
seems to be the biggest worry. With sales slumping and electric vehicles facing their
first serious crisis, he just announced job cuts of 10% of the workforce. He went
‘hardcore’ again, according to insiders, and laid off entire divisions like the Supercharger
team, with 500 employees alone there. Musk also made a public kowtow with the
communist regime in Beijing as he met with Premier Li Qiang. China, of course, is
Tesla’s most important market, and his Gigafactory is the largest in the world.
Turbulent as his business career seems to be, so is his private life. He has 11 children
with a number of women, some of whom have bizarre names like X Æ A-12 with
Canadian singer Grimes. They call him X, and the boy seems to be his favorite child
since he carries and walks him into business meetings as well. One daughter, Vivian,
came out as transgender in June 2022 when she filed a request to change her first
name and take the last name of her mom. Some of Musk’s vitriol against progressive
policies seems to stem from these experiences, as he has lamented. Musk has always
complained that people in Western countries and he seems to solve the problem singlehandedly.
