Elon Musk has broken boundaries. For months, the persona of the world’s most successful businessman has coexisted with that of the guy who rubs shoulders with extremist leaders and lectures sovereign nations on their domestic affairs, with the UK and Germany as his favorite targets. . This new political aspect, whether corporate strategy or pure ideology, has already brought significant economic benefits: Tesla shares have risen more than 50% since the election victory of Donald Trump, with whom he has linked his fate; the valuation of his social network X.com, once in freefall, has stopped the bleeding; bitcoin and the major cryptocurrencies it invests in are hovering near historic levels; and recent funding rounds of xAI, his artificial intelligence company, and SpaceX, his aerospace company, have catapulted their market prices.
Having conquered Washington, Musk’s battlefield has now shifted to Europe, where his economic interests are no less important. He has decided to oust Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose government is preparing new regulations on cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, and who is negotiating with Amazon to enter the broadband business via low-orbit satellites, so-called The Kuiper Project. which would compete directly with Musk’s Starlink, now much more advanced, with 87,000 connections in the country, most of them in rural areas. This bitter struggle has also moved to France and Spain, where the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has just granted Kuiper an operating license.
Musk’s furious attacks on leaders with whom he disagrees go hand in hand with business deals and friendships with those he has a good relationship with. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was forced to go public on Thursday to explain the negotiations she is holding with SpaceX to award the company a $1.6 billion contract to provide secure government and military communications by encrypting phones and 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, whom he met with Trump in December at the latter’s Mar-a-Lago residence, also open the door for him to block EU initiatives that harm his companies. Musk has turned his large block of checks into a political weapon. Not only did he fund Trump’s campaign with $277 million. He has also called for more investment in Argentina under its leader Javier Milei and has said he is willing to do so himself. This is in addition to his campaign to boost the far-right AfD in Germany, including an interview with its leader, Alice Weidel, thereby guaranteeing himself allies in case the far-right comes to power at some point. as may very well happen in neighboring countries. Austria.
His continued meddling, however, also threatens to provoke a counterproductive rebound effect for his business interests: it has earned him the rejection of leaders in France, the UK, Germany and Spain. And Brussels, a regulatory giant that already has an open case against X that could result in a multimillion-dollar fine, has warned that the ex-Twitter cannot promote Musk’s political positions over others. On a commercial level, the risk is that customers and potential users of Tesla and X who disapprove of its behavior will turn their backs, as some advertisers have already done, and look for alternatives such as grid social Bluesky.
Raising an eccentric
Elon Musk risks running in his veins. The world’s richest man has taken on a generation of traditional investors led by Warren Buffett, who advocates not investing money in what he doesn’t understand and believes in the power of time to grow wealth. Musk is the antithesis of this conservative and cautious prototype. He is reckless and shrewd. He has no problem flirting with bankruptcy and failure, as he himself has admitted. Tesla was close to bankruptcy between 2017 and 2019 and initiatives such as the Hyperloop to travel by train at 1000 km/h are sleeping the rights. He avoids common sense, investing and starting companies in sectors he does not understand, at least not in depth, because almost no one has ever delved into them before. Relying on his impulses and intuitions, he immerses himself in futuristic plans, be it sending spacecraft to Mars, implanting chips in human brains to connect them to computers, or self-driving cars.
It is difficult to find an advanced 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 passionately believes in the future of cryptocurrencies, in which he invests. However, his personality is divisive and polarizing. While to his devout followers he is a genius and a visionary – a kind of modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, in the final words of Argentina’s president, Javier Milei – his critics, increasingly numerous, see him more as a A modern-day Rasputin, whispering into the ear of the most powerful man in the world, over whom he exerts his influence. And they don’t forgive him for his growing far-right activism, including election meddling, or his lack of interest in fighting fraud 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. Since he was a child, Musk has had two obsessions: technology and the United States. In her biography of the tycoon, Ashlee Vance documents the moment she saw his first computer in a shopping mall in Johannesburg. He kept insisting until he got his father to buy it. “It should have taken six months to assimilate the manual. I became obsessed and spent almost three days without sleep until I finished the last lesson. It was 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,” his mother says in Vance’s biography. She was right. Despite his father’s efforts to dissuade him—he fired his domestic help 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 interning at a video game company and another firm conducting research into technologies applicable to electric cars, in 1995 he founded Zip2 with his brother his. Kimbal, a sort of yellow pages where businesses could become known for an Internet that was still in its infancy. After all, as Musk likes to say, everyone had a right to know the location of the nearest pizzeria.
Its sale four years later for $307 million was key to the growth he would undertake: he was no longer a newcomer asking his father for money to rent the premises. He was a dotcom millionaire. And the money was burning in his hands: that same year he founded the online bank X.com, which became the genesis for PayPal. And then came aerospace manufacturer SpaceX in 2002, Tesla in 2003, Solarcity in 2006 (which would end up being acquired by Tesla), OpenAI in 2015 – which he left in a hurry after a confrontation with the current CEO, Sam Altman -, Neuralink and the boring tunnel company The Boring Company in 2016. Then came the acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022.
Tesla, the eighth-largest company on the planet by market capitalization, became the first electric vehicle maker to list one of its cars, the Model Y, as the world’s best-seller in 2023, and is the company that maintains Musk’s first place among billionaires. The $44 billion he paid for X, however, soon proved to be too much. Calculations by investment firm Fidelity suggest its value has fallen by more than 70% to around $12 billion. The acquisition has paid off in other ways, however: the social network claims 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. This powerful speaker, and the lack of content moderation in the name of a supposed freedom of speech, have made the network the ideal platform for Musk’s new and lucrative political goals.
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