Elon Musk and the return of ‘the gilded age’
If we forget about inflation briefly (surely we deserve a break for the long weekend), then Elon Musk’s potential Twitter takeover is the most interesting business story in the world to me right now.
I think Musk is the most interesting character in the business world. But I hope he doesn’t get Twitter.
Putting aside moral issues around his extraordinary wealth (around US$270 billion), there’s a moral hazard in allowing individuals to have total control of media companies — social or traditional.
At a time when trust in government is low, multi-billionaires like Musk are wielding more power than ever.
Barely a day goes by when Musk doesn’t generate a global headline.
Since I started writing this column he’s made fresh headlines, revealing he doesn’t own a home and spends his days staying with friends around the San Francisco area.
The world’s richest man simply doesn’t have time for property it seems, he’s too busy working, making things happen, re-shaping reality.
That is what makes Musk more interesting than just the number of
zeros on his balance sheet.
Musk is fascinated by the future and has both the scale and ambition to shape it.
And he is shaping it in myriad ways, not all of them good.
It’s probably the moral ambiguity that makes the Musk show so compelling.
The guy is one lab accident away from becoming a comic book superhero. Or supervillain.
It could go either way.
Musk doesn’t fit standard definitions of conservative or liberal.
He’s the guy who turbocharged electric cars with Tesla and made it viable to imagine a world without petrol-powered transport. Tesla is now the fastest-growing car company in the world.
He’s passionate about green technology. Tesla has big plans for solar power. He’s also throwing money at a weird rapid-transit system of high-speed underground tubes.
Musk wants to be cool. He smokes pot and has good taste in music. He dated uber-cool pop star Grimes.
But he also has a distinctly libertarian streak that puts him onside with some of the most rightwing groups in the US.
His views on free-speech have Donald Trump supporters cheering on his Twitter takeover plans.
They believe he’ll let Trump and other right-wing voices back on the site, giving them a crucial leg-up in the battle to take back control of the White House.
Musk is obsessed with cryptocurrency, which sits well with libertarian notions of shaking off government control over society.
He’s warned about the threat artificial intelligence is to humanity but he’s invested heavily in Neuralink — a company working to plug computers directly into our brains.
Why he needs Twitter isn’t clear. It isn’t the money, so we have to assume it is for the influence.
When it comes to Twitter, I’m biased. Like a lot of journalists, I spend far too much time on the site.
I’m invested. Not in a financial sense. I haven’t given a single dollar to Twitter, just countless hours of what media execs like to call engagement.
Twitter is a profitable enterprise — but not hugely by the standards of its tech-boom peers.
Musk thinks he can make it more profitable.
But the way he’s gone about the takeover, with a steady streaming of mocking and slightly juvenile tweets, has done little for his credibility as a serious market player.
Still, the Twitter board was concerned enough to invoke something called a “poison pill” — issuing shares to dilute shareholdings and make the takeover more difficult.
The experts say Musk’s best next move is something called a “tender” where he makes his offer directly to all shareholders.
He’s clearly considering it because he keeps tweeting song lyrics like Love me Tender and Tender is the Night.
The whole play for control comes across as an indulgence. A game
Musk is playing to amuse himself and from which he can walk away with no consequences.
That highlights the problem of billionaires treating society like a giant playground.
Musk’s rise suggests a return to the “gilded age” where billionaires and powerful individuals dictated the terms by which people lived.
In the past 20 years, technological change has accelerated faster than we’ve seen since the late 19th century — when electricity and combustion engines changed the world.
Those who’ve been at the forefront of the revolution have grown extraordinarily rich.
The likes of Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg,
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Alphabet’s Larry Page are so rich they rival the so-called “robber barons” of the original 19th-century gilded age — JD Rockefeller, JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie.
These men were also celebrated as philanthropists while they exerted their power influence to undermine government.
At his peak, JD Rockefeller was worth an estimated US$450 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, almost twice Musk’s worth.
The gilded age was so dubbed by satirist Mark Twain to suggest a cheap knock-off of a proper golden age.
He was right to be cynical. It was a terrible time for workers and led the world into the epic market crash of 1929.
Perhaps we should be heartened that America has been here before and self-corrected.
But it took the Great Depression to re-establish public trust in government.
Musk is adventurous and rebellious. Traits that are innately charismatic. There’s a lot to like.
He’s never boring but in a world where history is already accelerating at a dangerous pace, that could be the problem.
The guy is one lab accident away from becoming a comic book superhero. Or supervillain.