Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pictured during a visit at the company's electric car plant in Gruenheide, near Berlin, eastern Germany, on March 13.ODD ANDERSEN/Getty Images
Is there a private citizen on the planet who combines the creativity, power, wealth and genius of Elon Musk? Is anyone even close?
We pay a lot of attention to our 21st-century Prometheus, but as he becomes more stridently political and moves closer to Donald Trump’s orbit, not enough.
Mr. Musk, who attended Queen’s University and whose mother is Saskatchewan-born, has registered massive achievements: in respect to the climate crisis, he runs the world’s leading maker of electric vehicles; in planetary exploration, he oversees the creation, from scratch, of magnificent rockets with his SpaceX company; and in neuroscience, he is the founder of Neuralink, which develops brain-computer interfaces. He was onto artificial intelligence as a threat to humanity a decade ago, and is working to alleviate that threat.
“There is no one in our time,” said Microsoft founder Bill Gates (in Walter Isaacson’s recent 700-page Musk biography), “who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has.”
But the engineering wunderkind, who vies with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man, is condemned as much as he is celebrated. As if everything he was doing wasn’t staggering enough in its breadth, Mr. Musk had to take a prime role in mass communication with his US$44-billion purchase of Twitter. A great mass communicator he is not, and the move has left many to wonder if he is a force for good – or something else.
Mr. Musk announced in 2021 that he has Asperger’s and acknowledges perhaps being bipolar. Former Tesla president Jon McNeill, as reported by Mr. Isaacson, sometimes found the entrepreneur lying on a conference room floor seemingly comatose or in a state close to it. He would have to lie down beside him to get instructions. He asked him directly once whether he was bipolar and Mr. Musk said probably, yes. (In a 2017 Twitter response to another user asking if he was bipolar, Mr. Musk responded, “Yeah,” followed by, “Maybe not medically tho … Dunno.”) Mr. McNeill told Mr. Musk he had to get some help: “The world needs you.” But, writes Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Musk never did.
Wild mood swings have led to rash outbursts, a prime example being his public endorsement, for which he later apologized, of an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities harbour “hatred against whites.” He proposed a peace plan that sounded Kremlin-hatched, advising Ukraine to surrender all territories occupied by Russia. He has taken harsh stands against immigration.
At the workplace, Mr. Musk has been a brutal taskmaster, with a management style the reverse of the touchy-feely kind wherein if you raise your voice you’re deemed guilty of creating a toxic workplace. But his demanding style has paid off in productivity. “It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he told SpaceX executives. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.”
Mr. Musk was a Democrat who campaigned for Barack Obama. But he was pushed rightward by the COVID lockdowns, and by wokeism, which he detests. He opposes Mr. Trump on the environment and other issues, but the former president has been courting Mr. Musk recently and has invited him to speak at the Republican convention in July.
That’s worrisome, as is the overhaul Mr. Musk has brought to the former Twitter, now X. A free-speech absolutist, Mr. Musk has removed content moderators, reinstated users previously banned, and brought changes, such as user fees, that have left most wishing the takeover had never happened. “Most” would include Don Lemon, who thought he had a partnership with X for his new show, but had it abruptly cancelled following an interview he did with Mr. Musk.
But there should be no question about whether Elon Musk is a force for good. Of his work in moving the world to electric vehicles, he says, “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth.” It is a credible boast. Next up, if we put a man on Mars and colonize it, it will likely be Mr. Musk’s doing, such is his progress with rocket science. His Starlink satellite system has been used by Ukraine in the war against Russia.
Of major importance could be his work on AI. He has been long obsessed with building safeguards. He has just launched his own AI company and is suing rival OpenAI, alleging that it is on a dangerous path in having deviated from its original mission to develop the technology for the betterment of humankind.
To read Mr. Isaacson’s biography is to be left with the feeling that the 52-year-old Mr. Musk’s amazingly creative trajectory is barely at the midway point, that his genius mind, if not given over to the dark side, will light remarkable new paths.