Anyone who has read about it has asked the question at least once: but who is really Elon Musk?
How to put together his often bizarre or obscure statements, his ambitious projects and the gossip that inevitably surrounds him?
Let's try to find out more about Elon Musk, a character who at every appearance, at every declaration, even every tweet is bound to be talked about.
Who is Elon Musk: the biography
Elon Reeve Musk is not very classifiable from the personal data: he is a South African businessman with Canadian citizenship who has been naturalized from the United States.
Raised in Pretoria where he was born in 1971 (and where he was heavily bullied by his schoolmates), Elon Musk is son of two parents who perfectly correspond to his two souls, the entrepreneurial one and the narcissistic one. His father Errol is in fact an electromechanical engineer, while his mother Maye was a model and is now a dietician. We also saw her in a cameo on Saturday Night Live, which we told you about in a recent article.
The first successes
After his studies and his debut in the working world, Musk gets a lot of money and notoriety with the sale to Compaq of Zip2, a web software company founded with his brother Kimbal.
Ma the operation that will make him one of the most famous young entrepreneurs in the world dates back to 1999. Then 2002-year-old Elon is one of the co-founders of X.com, an online financial services company. The following year X.com will merge with Confinity to give life to PayPal. The latter will be purchased by eBay in 1,5 for the sum of XNUMX million dollars.
Since then, Musk's capital will continue to grow. Until 2021, when Forbes magazine lists him as the second richest man in the world (behind Jeff Bezos), with assets of approximately $ 168,7 billion.
Elon Musk oggi
Today Musk's entrepreneurial commitments see him active in various capacities in various companies.
Ma there are three main companies managed by the multibillionaire. And in addition to being the most futuristic, they are the ones on which the South African billionaire has made the most famous and controversial statements.
We are talking about Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.
In summary: Tesla is the well-known company that produces electric cars, and which aims to put fully autonomous cars on the market as soon as possible.
SpaceX even has the goal of creating the technologies suitable for allowing man to land on Mars.
No less ambitious is Neuralink, which aims to develop implantable neural interfaces (in other words, microchips in the human brain, to create a continuous human-machine interface).
Who is Elon Musk? Worship of oneself and worship of humanity
To better analyze the areas of action of the three largest companies led by Musk, one thinks of a character moved by conflicting desires.
The astonishing expenses incurred in each of the three sectors, and the desire to succeed in almost impossible feats (think of the money wasted in the countless unsuccessful attempts of SpaceX rockets) certainly denote courage, ruthlessness, obstinacy and a huge dose of narcissism.
Yet, in hindsight, it would also be three landings that - at least in Musk's intentions - would improve people's lives in the more or less near future: a humanity always connected, a humanity that delegates part of its labor to the machines, and a humanity to the conquest of space.
Only time will tell if it is a bizarre billionaire with no sense of reality, or someone - as they say - with much longer vision than ours.
Elon Musk and communication
Every Neuralink experiment, every SpaceX flight, every public appearance of Musk is punctuated by statements that are often lightning-fast, ambiguous, unclear, which the media interpret in all possible ways.
During his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, which we have already mentioned, Elon Musk said that his naive communication is due to the Asperger's syndrome, which he suffers from.
Ma Musk has accustomed us to dissolve the line between possible and impossible, between true and false. To the point that now no one knows if his words should be taken literally, if it is a self-promotion or a long-range marketing strategy.
One thing is certain: his every statement leaves its mark. Just think of how the value of cryptocurrencies fluctuates according to the quality of its public interventions, whether by voice or via a twitter.
Discount
The Elon Musk method. The business model and the principles of ...
- Valentin, Michaël (Author)
So who is Elon Musk?
Certainly Elon Musk is not an intellectual. That is, he is not someone who wishes to change reality through complex reasoning.
His hypermodern way of communicating is perfectly in line with his way of acting: it always seems that, while Musk says something, he is thinking of something else that will happen later. Similarly, for example, when Neuralink showed the video of a macaque whose brain has been implanted with a chip, it seemed to everyone that this was a sop given to the general public. While the company researches who knows where they are already going.
There remains the big question destined to remain unanswered: will this way of acting and communicating ever lead to concrete, surprising and revolutionary results for humanity?
Or is there nothing behind this fascinating smokescreen and, apart from special effects, Elon Musk doesn't really exist?
