Elon Musk has broken boundaries. For months, the personality of the world’s most successful businessman has coexisted with that of the guy who rubs shoulders with extremist leaders and lecturing sovereign countries on their domestic affairswith the United Kingdom and Germany as his preferred targets. This new political facet, whether corporate strategy or pure ideology, has already brought him significant economic benefits: Tesla shares have risen more than 50% since the election victory of Donald Trump, to whom he has committed his own fate; the valuation of his social network X.com, once in freefall, stopped its bleeding; bitcoin and the major cryptocurrencies it invests in are moving close to historic highs; and the recent financing rounds of xAI, his artificial intelligence company, and SpaceX, his aerospace company, catapulted their market prices.
Having conquered Washington, Musk’s battlefield has now shifted to Europe, where his economic interests are no less important. He aimed to stymie Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose government is preparing new regulations for cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, and is negotiating with Amazon to enter the broadband business. by low-orbit satellitesthe so-called Kuiper project, which would compete directly with Musk’s Starlink, is now much more advanced, with 87,000 connections in the country, most of them in rural areas. This fierce battle has also moved to France and to Spain, where Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government has just granted an operating license to Kuiper.
Musk’s furious attacks on leaders he disagrees with go hand in hand with business deals and the courting of those with whom he has a good relationship. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was forced to make a public appearance Thursday to explain the negotiations she is conducting with SpaceX to award the company a $1.6 billion contract to provide secure government and military communications through the encryption of telephones and the Internet. as well as the use of satellites for emergencies such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters. “There is no alternative” to SpaceX, Meloni argued.
His ties to other European leaders, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who he met with Trump at the latter’s Mar-a-Lago residence in December, also open the door for him to Blocking European Union initiatives which harms his companies. Musk has turned his large checkbook into a political weapon. Not only did he fund Trump’s campaign with $277 million. He also pushed for more investment in Argentina under its libertarian leader Javier Milei, and said he was willing to do it himself. This is in addition to his campaign to give a boost the far-right AfD in Germanyincluding an interview with its leader, Alice Weidel, who thus guarantees himself allies in case the far-right comes to power at some point, as may well happen in neighboring Austria.
However, his continued interference also threatens to cause a counterproductive recovery effect for his business interests: it has earned the rejection of managers in France, the UK, Germany and Spain. And Brussels, a regulatory giant that already has an open file against X that could result in a million-dollar fine, has warned that the former Twitter can’t promote Musk’s political positions over others. On a commercial level, the risk is that potential customers and users of Tesla and X who disapprove of his behavior will turn their backs on him, as some advertisers have already done, and look for alternatives such as the social network Bluesky.
The rise of an eccentric
Elon Musk has risk in his veins. The richest man in the world has taken over a generation of traditional investors led by Warren Buffett, who is in favor of not investing money in what he does not understand and who believes in the power of time to grow wealth. Musk is the antithesis of this conservative and cautious prototype. He is reckless and witty. He does not mind flirting with bankruptcy and failure, as he himself admitted. Tesla was close to bankruptcy between 2017 and 2019, and initiatives like the Hyperloop to travel at 1,000 km/h by train sleep the sleep of the righteous. He avoids common sense, invests and starts companies in sectors that he does not understand, at least not in depth, because almost no one has delved into them before. Relying on his impulses and intuitions, he dives into futuristic plans, whether it’s sending spaceships to Mars, implanting chips in human brains to connect them to computers, or self-driving cars.
It is difficult to find a cutting-edge industry in which he is not present: he has built his empire through electric car companies (Tesla), social networks (X), artificial intelligence (xAI), aeronautics (SpaceX), satellite internet (Starlink) and neurotechnology (Neuralink). And he believes fervently in the future of cryptocurrencies, in which he invests. However, his persona is divisive and polarizing. While to his devoted followers he is a genius and a visionary – a kind of contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, in the recent words of Argentine President Javier Milei – his detractors, increasingly, see him as more of a modern-day Rasputin, whispering. in the ear of the most powerful man in the world, on whom he exerts his influence. And they don’t forgive him for his growing far-right activism, including election meddling, or for his lack of interest in combating fake news, when he’s not spreading it himself.
So how does the son of an engineer and a model become the richest man in the world? Elon Musk’s fortune exceeds $400 billion, almost double that of the second richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and more than the GDP of South Africa, the country where he was born 53 years ago. Musk has had two obsessions since childhood: technology and the United States. In her biography of the tycoon, Ashlee Vance documents the moment he saw his first computer in a shopping center in Johannesburg. He kept pushing until he got his father to buy it. “It was supposed to take six months to assimilate the manual. I became obsessed and spent almost three days without sleep until I finished the last lesson. It seemed to me the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my life,” Musk told Vance.
At the age of 12, he created his first video game, Blastar, and began to entertain the idea that the ideal place to grow up was thousands of miles away, in the United States. “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon,” says his mother in Vance’s biography. She was right. Despite his father’s attempts to discourage him – he fired his housekeeper and made him do all the chores to teach him what it would be like to “play American” – nothing stopped him. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and mathematics, he felt understood. “Being surrounded by geeks excited him,” his mother recalls.
With his degree in hand, Musk headed west to the epicenter of all the action, Silicon Valley, and after doing internships at a video game company and another firm researching technologies applicable to electric cars, he 1995 Founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, a kind of yellow pages where businesses could advertise themselves for an Internet that was still in its infancy. After all, as Musk likes to say, everyone had the right to know the location of their nearest pizzeria.
Selling it four years later for $307 million was key to the rise he was about to undertake: he was no longer a rookie asking his father for money to rent a site. He was a dotcom millionaire. And money burned in his hands: the same year he founded the online bank X.com, which became the origin of PayPal. And then came aerospace manufacturer SpaceX in 2002, Tesla in 2003, Solarcity in 2006 (which would eventually be acquired by Tesla), OpenAI in 2015 – from which he hastily left after a confrontation with its current CEO, Sam Altman -, Neuralink and the tunnel boring company The Boring Company in 2016. Then came the purchase of Twitter (now X) in 2022.
Tesla, the eighth largest company on the planet by market capitalization, has become the first electric vehicle maker to rank one of its cars, the Model Y, as the world’s top seller in 2023, and it is the company that retains Musk’s top spot. among billionaires. However, the $44 billion he paid for X soon turned out to be an exorbitant amount. Calculations by the investment firm Fidelity suggest that its value has fallen by more than 70% to around $12 billion. However, the acquisition has brought him benefits in other ways: the social network claims to have more than 600 million monthly active users, and Musk has 212 million followers, the equivalent of the populations of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece combined. That powerful speaker, and the lack of content moderation in the name of a supposed freedom of speech, made the network the ideal platform for Musk’s new and lucrative political purposes.
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