ELON MUSK – eccentric genius or loose canon?
By Femi Olugbile
There are very few people in the world who, by now, would not have heard of Elon Reeve Musk. That is a big deal for a 54-year-old man who was born in Pretoria, in Transvaal Province, South Africa. To call him an African would, of course, be a joke. He has no affinity with the continent, or empathy for its people. Nor is he required to, in a strict sense.
Elon was born to Maye Musk, a model and dietician, and Errol Musk, a South African maverick of Dutch ancestry who was an engineer, a pilot, a sailor as well as a property developer.
With a fortune now estimated at US$247 billion, Musk is one of the wealthiest men in the world. His body language towards money, even from his earliest unprepossessing beginnings, displayed a rather flippant lack of respect, with an unemotional focus purely on its utility, ‘errand’ value. Never afraid to gamble, never hesitant to take a risk, he is a man who has ‘lost some’, ‘won some’. He also disdains creature comforts, including living in a decently luxurious house.
Like a scenario from a science fiction movie, there are currently two astronauts orbiting in space, who are stranded there, unable to return to earth. They were despatched there by the American Space Agency – NASA, on a mission that was supposed to last for six weeks. It has just been announced that, due to some worry about the safety of the NASA vessel that conveyed them on the mission for the return journey, it has been decided by NASA that the astronauts will spend the next six months in space, until a vessel by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s Space travel outfit, is ready to pick them up from the orbiting station and bring them home.
Like his father, Elon’s interests are multifarious. At a stage in the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, when Ukraine’s internet was compromised, Elon opened up internet channels in his hovering Starlink satellites for Ukraine’s military use. When the Ukrainians requested him to block Russian channels, or open internet channels for them over Russian-occupied Crimea so they could attack it, he demurred.
Elon migrated from South Africa to Canada at the age of 18 years. He eventually enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he obtained Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Physics. He joined Stanford University in 1995 but left after only two days on the campus. He co-founded a city guide software startup company named Zip2, which was purchased by Compaq four years later for a whopping $307 million dollars.
In the same year, he co-founded an online bank named X.com which merged with another company to form Paypal, which itself was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.
With money from the sale, he founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company.
He was an early investor in Tesla, an electric-vehicle manufacturing company, and later became its Chairman.
He set up The Boring Company to pursue his ambition of rapid mass transportation underground.
Among his most controversial initiatives was the setting up of Neuralink, a company devoted to creating a link between the human brain and computer systems by implanting electrodes and other devices in the human brain. His scientists have conducted experiments in pigs and monkeys which appear to hold out exciting possibilities for human-machine synergy. The research has led to some deaths among the animals, and many scientists have expressed grave ethical concerns about tampering with the human brain. Despite this, the American Food and Drug Administration gave Musk and his Neuralink permission in September 2023 to commence human trials.
Musk’s most recent controversy is over the purchase of Twitter, which he did for $44 billion, and renamed X. He is obsessed with letter X. He purchased the X.com domain from Paypal, and even spoke of creating ‘X, the everything app.’ He fired several top executives, lessened content moderation, ‘verifying’ numerous right-wing extremists. A few days ago, he held a media chat with Donald Trump on X, essentially promoting his candidacy.
He has lived through some hardships that may have ossified his views into their present right-wing ‘anti-progressive’ frame. One of his twelve children by different mothers – a boy, ‘came out’ as a transexual and currently ‘identifies’ as a girl. They are no longer on speaking terms. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was opposed to the enforced lockdown imposed on Tesla factory by the Democratic Governor of California. He was so incensed by the ‘woke’ laws and regulations of the state that he decided to move the Tesla factory to Texas.
He is the influencer of influencers, with 163 million followers, to whom he regularly offers tart nuggets of biased commentary, ‘liking’ conspiracy theories and occasional racist comments, and even making snide remarks about the Prime Minister of the UK during the recent riots, taunting him to expect a ‘civil war’.
With Twitter and a guaranteed audience of several millions for every impulsive thought, with unlimited funds to pursue any ‘out of the box’ venture that captures his imagination, such as sending human beings to live on Mars, with a power to influence distant wars by turning on or off his satellite internet channels, with an obsessive drive, to implant devices into brains and ‘change creation’ by potentially converting human beings to cyborgs, Elon Musk is like a privileged child, with the world, and the lives of other human beings, as his toys, to do as he pleases. It is difficult to escape the notion that he lacks empathy and an adequate sense of responsibility, treating his workers and public alike as objects. He spoke recently of being influenced by Christian values. Many people took that with a pinch of salt, like Donald Trump’s protestations of faith.
A talented little child to be fondly watched, or a dangerous unguided missile without moral anchor to be regarded with trepidation? The jury is out on Elon Reeve Musk.
