Over the last few weeks, America has somehow had even more exposure to Elon Musk than usual thanks to his new role as, apparently, our nation’s unelected co-President.
Musk, the richest man in the world, is widely considered a genius, a modern-day Nikola Tesla furiously driven to invent electric cars, artificial intelligence, rocket ships, and dozens upon dozens of neglected offspring.
I will be the first to admit that Elon Musk is a very good businessman who had the good fortune to inherit a great deal of money and the good timing to invest it in the right places at the right time. But he is not a Nikola Tesla nor a Thomas Edison. He’s more of a Thomas Midgley Jr., the man who gifted the world leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons and then died when he became strangled in the invention he used to get himself out of bed.
To explain, let’s make like a line of ketamine and take a brief journey through Elon Musk.
Born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk began his business career in 1995 when he cofounded the Global Link Information Network with his brother Kimball and a man named Greg Kouri. The company was later renamed Zip2. The three worked out of a rented office in Palo Alto and Musk spent a great deal of time coding the website, which was essentially an online city guide that provided maps and lists of area businesses. I won’t get into the backstory of how he got from Pretoria to Palo Alto, but according to his brother Kimball, they were working in our country as illegal immigrants at the time.
Zip2 obtained contracts with a couple of major newspapers and was ultimately acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. The capital from the sale allowed Musk to co-found X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. You might hear people claim that Musk invented PayPal; this is not true. However, X.com saw some success and ultimately merged with Confinity, which owned and operated PayPal. PayPal was the more popular online payment system and the merger was intended to eliminate potential competition from X.com.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal and Musk received $176 million in the deal, which he was able to use as capital to fund his other ventures. He invested $100 million of his own money to create SpaceX in 2002. After a few setbacks and a few major wins, SpaceX began receiving the massive government contracts that have kept it afloat ever since.
What of Tesla Motors? Musk didn’t found it; it was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk invested heavily in the company and eventually bought his way into a leadership position in 2008, whereupon he became CEO and “product architect.”
There are a few other companies Musk has founded, such as The Boring Company, which is intended to construct massive tunnels, and Neuralink, which is intended to create man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. But if I may editorialize a bit, here’s Elon Musk’s basic career trajectory:
- Create some early web-based map software and an early online banking company. These achievements are nothing to sneeze at and likely represent the last time Musk actually did hard work largely by himself.
- Have the good fortune to create these companies during the height of the dot com bubble, when you could write “waffles.com” on a cocktail napkin and sell the idea to a cocaine-addled tech bro for $500 million.
- Use the money from selling his early companies to either invest heavily in an existing company and become the face of it or create a new company and hire competent staff to manage the day to day operations of it.
My point here is that Musk is — depending on how charitable you’re feeling — either a brilliant businessman or the world’s most successful gambler. But he is not designing electric motors for Tesla, or figuring out how to make a more efficient rocket engine, or personally soldering wires into a monkey’s brain over at Neuralink. He’s an inventor in the same way as the late Steve Jobs; he can tell a bunch of people in his employ what he wants a product to do, and then they have to figure out how to do it.
It’s a good thing that Musk isn’t more hands-on considering that when he went all-in on a pet project at Tesla, the end result was the CyberTruck, an uninsurable boat anchor with the reliability of a second-hand Yugo. And I say that as someone who likes electric vehicles.
Honestly, it’s easy to prove that Musk doesn’t do much of anything at the companies he oversees. There’s absolutely no way that a single human being could run about seven different companies while also being glued to Twitter all day. Sure, he’s freed up a lot of time by being an absent father to his 12 children, but still, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
At this point, it’s safe to say that Musk’s most successful business venture was buying Twitter. Sure, everyone laughed when he spent $44 billion on a website and then immediately introduced new ideas that caused it to hemorrhage value, but we weren’t seeing the bigger picture. The end goal was to turn one of the world’s largest and most successful social media sites into a right-wing echo chamber in order to disseminate propaganda and gain cachet with Donald Trump.
Clearly, Musk accomplished that goal with flying colors. In the last two weeks, Musk has spent more time with Trump than Melania has during the entire course of their marriage, and Trump has appointed him to oversee (with Vivek Ramaswamy) the newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency.
First off, there is a wonderful irony in creating a department to eliminate inefficiency and then giving it two leaders. Second, it’s supposed to take an act of Congress to create a new federal agency, but we’re living in a world where rules don’t matter and consequences are nonexistent, so never mind.
If you’re not concerned about the Department of Government Efficiency, you should be. What happens when you take a guy who only cares about money, has a bunch of government contracts, believes strongly in the privatization of government, and then put him at the head of a government agency designed to root out inefficiency? The answer is likely to be a level of corruption almost impossible to fathom.
Elon Musk would like you to think that he’s a genius inventor, the youthful father of a new age. In reality, he’s a second-tier Bond villain with a deep, gnawing desire for everyone to think that he’s really cool and hip and funny (“Live and Let Try-Hard” would be a good name for the movie).
There is, however, a potential silver lining here. According to reports from anonymous leakers, Musk is allegedly so annoying that Trump and his inner circle are getting tired of him hanging around Mar-a-Lago in his self-described role as “First Buddy.” With a little luck, maybe Trump will get tired of sharing the spotlight with Musk’s enormous ego and kick him to the curb.
If that does happen, it will be the most poetic ending to Musk’s story: he had all the money in the world, but he couldn’t buy a likable personality.
