Elon Musk: acting like “a bonehead”?

“There has never been anyone quite like Elon Musk in my lifetime,” said Pilita Clark in the FT. Other tech billionaires have built big companies, but few have been “compared with Thomas Edison” or amassed the Spacex founder’s “rock star-sized fan base”. None has sent a red electric sports car into orbit with a dummy in the driver’s seat, as Musk did in February, or designed a giant rocket to go to Mars code-named the BFR, or “Big F**king Rocket”. Musk’s exuberance and irrepressible ambition are part of his charm, but since his Tesla car business began to experience setbacks, failing to hit production targets and burning through cash, his behaviour has “noticeably soured”. Witness his petulant response last week when experts in Thailand declined his offer of a specially designed “kid-sized submarine” to save the boys trapped in a cave network. When one of the British divers behind the rescue, Vernon Unsworth, dismissed Musk’s idea as a “PR stunt” that had “absolutely no chance of working”, Musk fired off a tweet to his 22 million followers, baselessly accusing the diver, who lives for part of the year in Thailand, of being a “pedo”. This week, he apologised for the comment.

Musk is acting like “a bonehead”, said Hannah Jane Parkinson in The Guardian. The 47-year-old tycoon is clearly very bright, and has put his resources to good philanthropic use before by, for instance, sending solar battery packs to hurricaneravaged Puerto Rico. But by hopping on a plane to Thailand with his mini-sub, and then throwing a tantrum when experts declined his help, he allowed his ego to get the better of him. Before casting aspersions on the British diver, Musk had also lashed out at the media, complaining that they used the “billionaire” label to “devalue” him. For today’s tech tycoons, it’s not enough just to be fabulously rich, said Janice Turner in The Times. “They want to be magical beings, superheroes, saints.”

What we saw in Thailand was “two different worlds colliding”, said the FT. Musk embodies the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley that champions individual brilliance and originality. The rescue operation, by contrast, was in every respect a team effort. The largely anonymous collaborators didn’t require “flashy innovations”; their approach was methodical and rested on the painstakingly accumulated knowledge of experts. Musk’s clumsy intervention exposed “the limits of Silicon Valley’s ‘yes, we can’ attitude. This was one situation where the last thing a trained team needed was a dose of disruption.”