Elon Musk, the richest bloke in the world, is a weird unit for a human. Or just a weird unit.
On the plus side, he likes dogs and has three of them. He wisely pronounced Floki, his shiba inu, the chief executive of Twitter soon after he bought it, and I’m thinking Floki might have done a better job if Mr Musk had left him there to get on with it.
Elon has had a dozen children with three different wives and wants to have more, because he’s worried about global population decline. He’s also worried about the world blowing up, which is why he’s so keen to colonise Mars.
This improbable goal came a little closer on the weekend when his Starship rocket blasted off on its fifth trip into space — but this time its super-sized booster returned from space and backed slowly down into its launchpad, descending in clouds of fire and smoke, instead of plunging into the ocean.
It was spectacular to watch on the telly. The Boss says it should halve the cost of space launches now it can be re-useable. Elon’s Space X is already planning a moon orbit next year, and a moon landing in 2026, with unmanned flights to Mars as well.
By 2030 he says he will land people on Mars.
He’s not a man you can write off: Space X’s Starlink division has now launched 6000 small satellites into space, using reusable Falcon 9 rockets to launch 24 satellites into low-Earth orbit every mission.
They support the Starlink high-speed internet network, which The Boss switched to after tiring of endless NBN outages.
Born in South Africa in 1971, Elon started early, creating a computer game at age 12. He moved to Canada at 18 after his parents divorced and studied economics and physics before co-founding an online city guide in 1995.
With money from its sale to Compaq, he founded Paypal in 1999. After selling his share to eBay in 2002, he started Space X with US$100 million of his own money, with the aim of reducing space transportation costs and colonising Mars by 2030.
He joined Tesla as an early investor in 2004, became its chief executive in 2008 and turned it into the world’s most valuable car-maker. He then started building huge batteries, founded a tunnel boring business, started Neuralink (to work on brain-computer interfaces), co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and is now running his own AI and robotics company.
So he’s clever, and very busy. He has created waves in the investor community, mostly for his astonishing success but also for making bold promises that don’t quite meet their targets.
He attracted controversy after he bought Twitter for US$44 billion in 2022, then changed the name to X and cut its moderation, claiming it should champion free speech. He posts a good deal himself, The Boss tells me, often re-posting conspiracy theories and wild allegations.
This has coincided with his transition from a Democrat into a MAGA Republican; he appeared with Donald Trump last week at the scene of the first assassination attempt on Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Elon jumped up and down on the stage and warned the crowd that Democrats would take away democracy, free speech and gun rights.
For a dog, it’s hard to pick the very stable genius from the unstable one. The Boss says he can’t help me. But he reckons wealthy people who have run businesses successfully often conclude they can run a country the same way. “Politics is a different art, General,” he says. “And mostly it doesn’t end very well.” Woof!