WHILE we’re all groaning in despair/dancing in the streets about the implications of the mid-term elections for Donald Trump, we might do well to do spare some thoughts for an even more powerful and dangerous man. No, not Putin. I’m talking about Elon Musk.
Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. That means he grew up in apartheid South Africa – i.e. in a country with the firm belief that some races were superior to other races. His parents split up when he was very young; he had a difficult relation with his father and he was seriously bullied as a child. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that this unstable, unhappy childhood helped create the chainsaw wielding bully who is now the richest man in the world.
So what else makes Musk a nasty piece of work? The fact that he was for a time at least a Trump lackey. Heading up DOGE, he happily cut the jobs of thousands in the US. At Tesla, he announced a 2024 plan to cut roughly 14,000 jobs. These cuts affected deeply the lives of workers in the United States and other countries.
Musk’s reckoned to be worth around $917 billion, which means he's within an ass’s roar of being the world’s first trillionaire. He has so much money he could eradicate poverty in several countries with the stroke of a pen. Instead, he has given some Republican candidates around $400 million to support their election efforts. Big money? Hah. A mere smidgin from the bulging coffers of the bully.
Musk believes that AI will become smarter than humans inside the next ten years, while at the same time insisting there may be benefits to this. (No, Virginia, I can’t think of any benefits to be derived from living as the domestic pet of an AI master-race.)
Musk’s hundreds of Starlink satellites circling the earth have brought him in well over $11 billion. Starlink satellites give Musk unique power over governments as well as businesses. A glitch in Starlight recently paralysed Ukraine in its war against Russia.
He owns what was Twitter, now officially X, and uses it to promote right-wing parties worldwide.
And I haven’t even mentioned Tesla, also the property of Mr Musk.
Needless to say, Musk does not believe in equality – certainly not in financial terms. But because he is so bloated with wealth, countries are required to have him on their side, as Ukraine has found out. Governments – including the US – must come to Musk to use Space X. He then decides whether he’ll allow the US and NASA to use his rockets for government and military launches.
He’s opposed to ‘wokeness’ of any kind, and is particularly contemptuous of trans-gender rights. He has 14 known children to four different women; the children have names like Nevada, Griffin, Vivian, Kai, Saxon, Damian, X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus (Tau), Strider, Azure, Arcadia, Seldon Lycurgus and Romulus.
He’s intent on establishing a permanent colony on Mars. Whether he’ll be one of those go there and stay, there’s no official word. Musk is uniquely powerful – an individual more powerful than some countries. And yet in some ways he’s a throw-back to the robber barons of hundreds of years ago, who considered might was right and acted accordingly.
If people or causes or countries can get on the right side of Musk, they can benefit enormously. If you get on the wrong side of a man who's about to be the world’s first trillionaire, you'd better beware of this crazed colossus with an ego the size of a planet.
