What will space ambitions be?

Fresh out of college, Elon Musk built his first business on early Web search technology to help struggling newspapers get their start in the digital world. . Enthusiastic and belligerent, newspaper executives hailed the brilliant but eccentric Musk.

A former news agency executive who negotiated with Musk said: “He sleeps under his desk and it doesn’t smell very good. He’s not originally interested in journalism. He told me. that he wanted to do this just so he could make money and then do what he really wanted to do, which was design spaceships.”

Musk made money from the industry, then pumped most of it into the company that would become PayPal. His interest in facilitating online payments also turned out to be stale. What Musk really wants is to focus on his lifelong ambition: saving humanity through space exploration, electric vehicles, and solar power.

His subsequent business ventures – SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, Neuralink – ultimately propelled Musk towards the goal, which he set when he was 14 years old to reach the pinnacle of transforming his life. human life becomes “interesting and inspiring”.

Now, Musk is turning around once again, taking over one of the most prominent and problematic icons of the Internet age, the acquisition of Twitter. It is true that when he started each of his major business ventures over the past quarter century, he was at once bold, rude, and somewhat obscure about his purpose.

Elon Musk has referred to Twitter as a “de facto public town square,” essential for a functioning democracy. But it carries a legacy of unseen problems — misinformation, censorship, harassment, some starring Musk himself — that are far from the specific domain of rocketry and the propulsion industry.

Earlier last week, amid doubts he could collect the cash, Elon Musk tweeted that the $44 billion deal was “temporarily on hold.” The tweet said he was looking for “details” to clarify Twitter’s claim that fake accounts known as bots account for less than 5% of users. (Because Musk has pledged to make getting rid of fake accounts central to his takeover efforts.)

Two hours later, Musk tweeted out the words: “Still committed to acquisition.”

Does his pre-emptive tweet suggest he’s looking to get out of the deal? Or is he simply looking to reduce the purchase price? Twitter stock futures plummeted after his questionable tweet. Meanwhile, Tesla, the foundation of Musk’s massive fortune, was up slightly at the same time. But Twitter’s stock price has lost 30% of its value since April 4, when Musk revealed the first moves of a Twitter acquisition.

Musk has done this before. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined him $20 million to settle a government complaint that he misled investors by tweeting that he had enough money to make Tesla a private company. Musk did not admit to wrongdoing and has grumbled about the SEC ever since. According to the report, the SEC is also investigating Musk’s delayed disclosure of taking a large stake in Twitter.

Elon Musk is an open book – an omnipresent star inventor who trumpets free speech in tweets and podcasts

At every stage of his supreme publicity career, he has positioned himself as an entertaining, if unreliable, celebrity. He’s simultaneously an open book – an omnipresent star inventor, trumpeting free speech in tweets and podcasts, hosting “Saturday Night Live” – ​​and a mystery. elusive, given quizzes, insults, and slogans about how he can reinvent society — or, in this case, a social media platform with 229 million daily users .

“He is the engine of contradictions”

Beneath his grotesque public personality, Musk exhibits an intense temper and what some associates and employees call a dark tendency to fire or harass people who are not like him. He has randomly released offensive tweets against women, and other comments have sent his nearly 93 million Twitter followers through whirlwinds of abuse.

According to several Tesla workers and California regulators who have sued the company, Elon Musk oversaw a factory rife with racial slurs and a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment… sexist language and behavior… [và] often fumbling on the factory floor. Tesla has denied some of the allegations and sought to handle others by private arbitration rather than in court. The company said it takes any breach seriously.

Last fall, a jury awarded a black Tesla worker $137 million in punitive damages after upholding his allegation that Tesla condone racist harassment race, including “daily racist speeches” at the factory. After the ruling, a Tesla executive said the company is “still not perfect, but we’ve come a long way”. Musk himself rarely mentions such allegations, but it must be noted that Elon Musk fled his native South Africa in part because of the repressive apartheid regime there.

He is the engine of contradictions. He shows interest in keeping the world guessing about how he might use his fortune and prominence, delving into random hobbies with pleasures – sumo wrestling, electronic music , Barack Obama’s presidential campaign (he used to wait six hours to shake Obama’s hand).

The billionaire is often opposed to government regulation, but his most prominent projects are mainly based on taxpayer dollars, in the form of federal loans to Tesla, tax credits to electric vehicles and government contracts for SpaceX.

Lonely but ambitious

Musk showed space ambitions even as a child. At age 14, having created and sold a video game called “Blastar” (he won $500 from a computer magazine), Musk decided his life needed a serious mission.

He then told his biographer: “Strive for greater collective enlightenment”. He has revolutionized two complex industries – car manufacturing and rocket making – but often tweets like a 12-year-old. He has absolute confidence in his ability to innovate but describes himself as fearful and anxious. “When I was a kid, there was one thing I said: ‘I never wanted to be alone,'” Musk told Rolling Stone in 2017. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Adventure comes naturally to Musk, who was born into a family of explorers. His mother, Maye, a Canadian-born model, flew around the world in her father’s booster plane as a child. His father, Errol, was a South African engineer who taught Elon and his brother Kimbal hourly, teaching them how to wire and how to build bricks. (He also has a younger sister, Tosca.)

But Musk’s childhood in Pretoria, South Africa, was tumultuous. His parents separated when he was 9, and he has described his upbringing as lonely and harsh. He reads books continuously, often 10 hours a day – science fiction, history, encyclopedias.

After the divorce, Musk spent two years with his mother, then moved in on his own with his father, who “seemed sad and lonely” as Musk told Ashlee Vance, author of “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX” , and Mission for a Great Future”. But father Errol mistreated Elon as a child: Ashlee Vance said the father engaged in “psychological torture” on his eldest son. Both brothers declined to provide details, and Errol has always denied any abuse.

At school, Musk was bullied, pushed down the stairs of an airplane, beaten to the point that he needed to have his nose repaired. At the age of 17, he decided to immigrate to America. He first came to Canada, taking up logging and farming jobs before enrolling at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario.

He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and did some graduate work at Stanford, but was still worried about his life’s work. He knows how to achieve, “I work a lot,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2020. “I mean, a lot,” and he knows what sets himself apart. .