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When the richest men in the world were the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the medieval sultan Mansa Musa the emperor of Mali, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor and John D. Rockefeller, it was impossible to have confusion because none of them opposed those who we today call the "great powers", none of them challenged their business rivals to a fight in the Colosseum, and above all none of them would have been proposed as a reference figure for elite-hating populism. In short, billionaires used to be the elite, period.
Simpler times, with the rich, happy just to be rich. Maybe because technology has changed the parameters of wealth, maybe because with the possible exception of the Emperor of the Mountain, no one in human history has been richer than the rich of the twenty-first century, or maybe because sooner or later it just happened that man the richest of all became the most populist.
Elon Musk, naturalized American but of South African origin, 52 years old, worth $222 billion in December 2023 (Bloomberg Billionaires Index), had become famous thanks to x.com, which later became PayPal, the services site financial firm bought by eBay in 2002, for an amount close to one and a half billion dollars.
Musk, 21 years ago, surprised Wall Street watchers because he had simply reinvested all the money raised from eBay — about $100 million — in his other businesses, instead of buying houses, yachts, big cars like his colleagues of the digital "new economy" of that time.
The musk of that time was very different from the current one: more "nerd" than boastful, dressed (not very well) "casual" and far from the "all black" look of recent years.
The money raised by eBay had ended up in more ambitious projects: SpaceX for space exploration, Tesla to change the world of automobiles by reversing the old gasoline engine after two centuries of service, the Boring Company to dig tunnels through which to free traffic, Neuralink to put microchips in the brain, with which it can potentially cure a series of terrible diseases, from Alzheimer's to paralysis, OpenAI to change the world with artificial intelligence. And in his spare time, he dealt with Optimus' robots, with which he wants to forever revolutionize the way of working and (many fear), that of waging war.
It also launched rockets into space on behalf of NASA, whose supplier it had become. He connected the Internet via satellites with his Starlink, drove around in his Tesla, opened factories around the world and broke one record after another.
In the wake of his global fame, he also made his mother, Maye, a seventy-year-old model and spokeswoman for Moncler, famous.
But then it wasn't exactly the fall – he gets richer and more media-focused – but the metamorphosis. Or, as others think, the simplest: showing the true character of the billionaire innovator.
Walter Isaacson, in Musk's biography, writes: "At the time I was gathering material for Steve Jobs's biography, his partner Steve Wozniak explained to me what the main question to ask him was: was it really necessary for him to was he so mean, so rude and cruel, so addicted to dramatic situations? When, after collecting the material, I went back to Woz to ask him the question again, he replied that if he had been in charge of Apple, he would have been better. He would have treated everyone like one big family and wouldn't have fired people. Then he paused and added: "But if I had run Apple, we would never have produced the Macintosh." And so the question, in Musk's case, is: if he'd had a quieter character, would he still have been the man to project us to Mars and an electric car future?
This is, in psychology, a classic example of reasoning: that is, the attempt to disguise the true motives (see the fable of the Fox and the grapes). First Jobs and then Musk, were/are people of impossible character? It is the price of their genius.
The salient feature of Elon Musk's brilliant and populous fan club is that they notice his qualities – which are undeniable. All the others? The beginning of the new life of Musk, who from the "richest man" became the most famous, is due to the purchase of Twitter, on October 27, 2022, for 44 billion dollars. Brilliant move? Error in estimation? Sure enough, 14 months later, Twitter (which he renamed X loses money, Musk has become the idol of anti-establishment American Republicans, a whip of George Soros, a fierce critic of the progressive left, of LGBT activists, of the American Jewish Association more influential, which it accuses of antagonizing Twitter/X's biggest advertisers.
Because Musk, who once boasted that he did not advertise in his companies, and who had never used a press office for Tesla, because he took care of public relations himself through social media and special interviews, now finds himself running a business that relied on publicity.
By temperament and perhaps a bit arrogant, Musk is not good at ad revenue. She even made quite a splash when she said "fuck you" at a conference to former big advertisers - like Disney - who are boycotting Twitter/X's new management, seen by many as too soft on misinformation and trolls. right wing.
It was then inevitable that those who didn't like him would start citing his dour father and the emerald mines in apartheid South Africa, his anti-Semitic grandfather, the contractual clause listing him as a co-founder of Tesla, though he later came to the company that ultimately made it his own, the failed promises in Neuralink that he is trying to take off, and that failed project on very high speed trains that many people said was just a gimmick for him blocked projects of the state of California in the same field.
Of course, Musk remains very good at organizing media events, such as the inauguration of the Cybertruck, an electric anti-machine gun truck.
It's hard not to argue that Musk sees himself as the new Steve Jobs – he also shares an official biographer, Walter Isaacson – and while he reminds many of Pt Barnum, his talent is undeniable: he plays the bourgeois provocateur – the Bürgerschreck they would have called it in the Vienna of a century ago – and any circus instrument is good to engage.
He challenged Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (who weighs 70 kg compared to Musk's 134) to a strange duel-fight in the Colosseum unfortunately involving Italian politics, he poses as a superhero à la Tony Stark (the tech billionaire of the movies Marvel who transforms into Iron Man).
Musk belongs to that current of thought that is unfortunately very widespread in Silicon Valley called transhumanism, that is, the aspiration to make homo sapiens a multiplanetary species by sending us to Mars with Space X rockets and with Neuralink microchips inside the skull, to drive Tesla to the red planet, perhaps handing over the wheel to an AI-driven robot.
All very well, but when he promoted from his Twitter account a post accusing Jews of harboring "dialectical hatred" for whites, he had to apologize for once (for Soros, a Jew, he continues to say harsh things) .
Ex-wife, singer Grimes, with whom he has three children with complicated names (X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus), says that part of Musk's problems stem from Asperger Syndrome - a form of autism. "If someone is suffering from depression or an anxiety attack, everyone shows compassion. If someone has Asperger's, people just say they're an animal." / Bota.al
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