Man, Myth, Musk
Elon Musk is a man of many superlatives. The richest man on Earth and iconoclastic CEO, Musk has always been prominent in the public eye, commanding a bevy of multinational firms and reportedly serving as inspiration for Robert Downey’s Iron Man. Having revolutionized multiple fronts of 21st-century living with his co-ownership of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, Musk has always had an industry outsider’s keen eye for disruption. Now, as he takes command of Twitter in the aftermath of a rocky $44 billion acquisition, Musk and his controversial visions for humanity are set to become more influential than ever before, a prospect that threatens to erode the boundaries of political ideology and corporate management.
The South African-born Musk was raised in an upper middle-class family, a world away from the apartheid-gem-mining origins that internet detractors have claimed. Musk was no rags-to-riches struggler either, reportedly drawing thousands in startup funding from his own father, who did have investments in an emerald mine. After studying at Queen’s University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, Musk matriculated at Stanford in a prestigious Ph.D. program, only to drop out after two days, plunging straight into the deep end of a then-nascent Silicon Valley.
Musk quickly established a reputation for innovation, riding the waves of multiple startup ventures to increasingly greater success. Among these early successes was X.com, an early online bank that, after a series of acquisitions and transformations, is now PayPal, the multinational payments processing firm valued at over $90 billion. However, most fans know Musk better for Tesla — the groundbreaking electric vehicle manufacturer, which has risen from an industry upstart to the most valuable car company in the world — and SpaceX, his similarly revolutionary aerospace firm.
With these impressive successes, Musk has risen far above the status of his fellow Fortune 500 CEOs to celebrity status, and just as any A-List celebrity might, Musk boasts a staggering array of dedicated fans. With devotees like the 23,000-strong Elon Musk Fan Club on LinkedIn, Musk has gathered his fair share of acolytes, many of whom are fervently loyal to his futurist gospel. After all, Musk’s aspirations to a brighter, more tech-infused tomorrow have won many over in an era where grim and dystopian visions of the future tend to populate media, while his guru-esque prescriptions for success have developed their own fervent following. Even skeptics have conceded the remarkable nature of Musk’s achievements as CEO, including his risky turnaround of a struggling Tesla and the awe-inspiring Falcon Heavy rocket launch, which won him many admirers.
Musk himself is very much conscious of his superstardom, reveling in the fame with appearances on platforms ranging from Saturday Night Live, in which he played a mustachioed Wario, to the Joe Rogan Experience, where he infamously smoked marijuana on camera. Positioning himself as a “people’s billionaire” of sorts, Musk has long worked to avoid accusations of elitism, boasting of selling nearly all of his houses, engaging daily with his most dedicated fans on Twitter, and often using social media polls for high-stakes decisions, such as selling millions of Tesla shares. Responding to the results of one such poll, surveying users on whether to unban ex-President Trump’s Twitter account, Musk declared: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” – Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” People’s billionaire, indeed.
Yet, even as Musk claims to represent an ideology opposing the elite “psyop” and “mainstream media” he rails against, his views are not so much independent as they are a reflection of conservative internet culture. Amplifying this rhetoric is a strain of prominently anti-establishment thinking that has undergirded many of his more infamous comments. In the world of Elon, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and more are not just innovators, but disruptors — ideas staged to overturn the proverbial “swamp” of traditional interests like the oil lobby, financial elites, and even unions. Musk has roundly criticized mainstream financial interests in recent years despite being a billionaire CEO; examples include calling ESG a “scam,” repeatedly feuding with the SEC, and lambasting the “woke regime.”
This persona has extended to his corporate dealings, where Musk’s freewheeling attitudes have attracted repeated government scrutiny in fiascos ranging from public squabbles with government figures to a $20 million fine for misleading tweets about Tesla’s stock. These scandals, while often spooking institutional investors and fellow billionaires, have only made Musk more of a public icon, sparing him much of the populist era’s criticism of monied corporate interests. Musk’s attitudes have proven especially popular among internet populists, catapulting Musk to fame in conservative circles, with Musk even serving on President Trump’s advisory council at one point. Musk has responded by further associating himself with conservatives, declaring in 2022 that he would be voting for Republican candidates going forward, and expressing support for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as a 2024 presidential candidate.
Musk’s gradual “Republicanization” has brought out a less appealing side of his visionary status — one that has proven worryingly popular among his fans. Ranging from his views on COVID-19 lockdowns (criticized by Musk as “fascist”) to his comments on contemporary liberal culture (saying that “wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal”), Musk has taken to parroting some of the internet’s right-most popular talking points, plunging straight into the “culture war” pool. Declaring free speech “a battle for the future of civilization,” and warning of “tyranny,” Musk has very clearly aligned himself with the conservative side of political culture. These concerning comments have amounted to more than just a sequence of off-hand gaffes — they represent components of a political vision that Musk believes is the right way forward for humanity, a vision that he intends to impose beginning with himself. Last year, Musk was reported to have fathered two children in an extramarital affair with a senior executive at one of his firms, an allegation he cryptically responded to with a tweet that “he was doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis.” Now, more than just combating environmental and demographic crises, Musk has taken it upon himself to fight the issue he finds most pivotal: wokeness.
Having successfully remade finance, cars, and space travel, Musk has set his eyes on the final frontier of social media. His landmark deal to buy Twitter closed less than three months ago, marking the beginning of a swathe of changes…
…to the popular microblogging platform, most notable of which was Musk’s assertion that he would impose “free-speech absolutism.” This insistence on transforming internet discourse, and resisting what he calls the mainstream media’s “oligopoly on information” has led Musk down a thorny path — within weeks of Twitter’s launch, much of the content moderation team was fired, placing him in conflict with regulators around the world. Hate speech and impersonation instantly skyrocketed, with antisemitic posts alone soaring by 61% in the two weeks after Musk’s acquisition. Tweeting through it all, Musk asserted his goal, stating: “Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.”
Yet, with the demise of moderation and Twitter’s transformation into the internet’s Wild West, the opposite seems likely to happen. Twitter’s COVID-19 moderation program, which originally suspended accounts that repeatedly spread misinformation, has already been discontinued, while controversial public figures known for spreading misinformation such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have been welcomed back to the website. With some 23% of American adults using Twitter, among whom a 57% majority say they “get news” from the platform, the ramifications for news consumption is clear. Beyond that, more than merely posing a threat to the dissemination of truthful information, Twitter’s acquisition also displays the ways in which a mercurial billionaire might use their wealth to influence and harm.
Prior to Musk’s acquisition, Twitter was a publicly-owned company accountable to its shareholders, with a board of directors and extensive scrutiny over its operations. Now, that’s all gone. In a proverbial “L’etat, c’est moi” moment, Musk now has effectively unilateral control over Twitter’s operations, an aberration among social media firms that becomes even more worrying when his political opinions, and his willingness to act on them, are taken into account. Despite his claims to the contrary, it is clear that Musk’s leanings are already seeping into the workings of the company, beginning with his very-public lambasting of the “old” Twitter’s laid-back, “woke” culture. With well over 100 million followers, Musk’s reach is now also larger than ever, and he has used it to encourage “independent-minded voters” to vote for Republicans, while calling the Democratic Party “the party of division and hate.” Among his fellow CEOs, Musk’s status as an active ideologue goes beyond the norm — many remain apolitical in their management, at most silently providing financial support to causes of choice.
The politicization of corporate management is a worrying idea, but with a company as influential in public discourse and the democratic process as Twitter, it becomes an outright danger — a threat exacerbated by the unprecedented fandom Musk enjoys. Yet, one errant CEO does not represent the heart of the problem: it is our outsized reliance on the media narratives Musk rails against, with news sources like Twitter at the very apex. If we are to find an antidote to the demise of credibility and accuracy that has defined modern media, then viewing Twitter and its explosive CEO with less seriousness would be a good start. Maybe, then, we ought to take Elon Musk for who he really is — not a myth, but merely a man.