Elon Musk: revenge of the nerd
The billionaire’s purchase of Twitter has brought him more attention, and harsher criticism from the media, than ever before. The latter could be what drove him to buy the social media platform. By
Elon Musk, the South African-born richest man who ever lived, has joked on several occasions about being an alien. Members of his inner circle, notably his ex-wife Talulah Riley, have also made the same joking suggestion. Which leads us, inevitably, to the question: is it really a joke?
As evidence for the possibility that Musk might be a bona fide extraterrestrial, we have his strange manner; that he always seems slightly uncomfortable in his skin; his ability to work for almost three decades at a pace and intensity that would see most humans hospitalised; and, most compellingly, that he has marshalled developments in the space, technology and energy industries that seemed utterly improbable from a private individual working to Musk’s timeframes until he pulled them off.
But the evidence for Musk being decidedly human has been mounting since about 2018 and building at a furious pace in recent months with his acquisition of Twitter. It seems fair to say that if Musk is an alien, he is an alien that has now gone rogue in fairly spectacular fashion.
Since buying Twitter, Musk has approached the social network as if its challenges are predominantly located in engineering or programming – apparently deaf to the notion that free speech, in particular, is a more nuanced issue than can be resolved by a sharp piece of coding.
Origin story
Every superhero or super-villain – and the jury is still out on which category fits Musk – needs an origin story, and Musk has presented a classic: a miserable childhood at the hands of his sadistic father, Errol Musk, exacerbated by the bullying he endured in high school.
As his profile expands, so too does the scale of this personal mythology. In 2015, his biographer recorded that class bullies beat him into hospital for a week; by 2022, his mother, Maye Musk, was telling the BBC that the same incident landed him in hospital for a month.
Regardless of the details, Musk’s
South African upbringing appears to have filled him with what is possibly the animating drive of his life: a nerdish desire for revenge. As a child, he is described as a know-it-all with a fixation on correcting other kids.
Now, at the age of 51, he has taken control of the ultimate platform in world history for know-it-alls with a fixation on correcting other kids: Twitter.
He is the nerd who has been repeatedly told that his plans wouldn’t work: that he couldn’t mass-produce an electric car, that he couldn’t make a rocket. He has had the last laugh on pretty much everything so far, but that appears not to have quietened his insecurities.
In the BBC documentary series The Elon Musk Show, his ex-wife Riley says the perception that Musk is emotionless – perhaps stemming from the fact that his Asperger’s means his responses sometimes seem out of whack – could not be further from the truth: “He is the most emotional person I know,” she said.
Indeed, you only have to watch the BBC series, or other Musk footage, to see that in a truly staggering proportion of interview clips Musk appears to be on the verge of tears: eyes moistening, lip quivering.
This is particularly the case when he is presented with criticism that he feels to be unjust. At moments like those, the little boy being subjected to “brutal mind games” – in the words of his biographer – by his father, or being pummelled by bullies, seems very close to the
surface.
It is this element of Musk that makes his 2018 interview with alt-right podcast bro Joe Rogan so cringeworthy to watch. It is embarrassingly clear that Musk is revelling in the company of an “alpha male”. Taking a swig of whiskey, having his second-ever puff of marijuana: Musk is one of the cool kids at last, as Rogan showers him with compliments and tells Musk he trusts him much more than the government.
Rise of the egomaniac
It was around 2018 that Musk’s activities appeared to go off the tracks. You may think his stated aim of making humanity a “multiplanetary species” is absurd, or politically problematic. You may view his electric cars as “utterly derivative overhyped toys for show-offs”, to cite one critic. But there was simultaneously no disputing that what he was achieving was pretty jaw-dropping.
Unlike the other white male billionaires buzzing around the public consciousness, Musk actually articulated a coherent and meaningful purpose.
He was very clearly not in it simply to make more and more money, because unlike his uber-rich peers, he kept ploughing his own resources back into his ventures, often assuming insane quantities of personal risk.
He had a vision, and despite his quirks – and despite the stories of his often appalling staff treatment – he was by no means charmless. He was interesting in a way Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg were not.
2018, however, was the year in which a Messiah complex in Musk, mixed to potent effect with his absolutist engineering beliefs, became impossible to ignore. Deciding it was up to him to orchestrate the rescue of 12 Thai boys stuck in a cave, he delivered a mini-submarine to the site and, when it was rejected as useless for the context, responded by labelling British cave diver Vernon Unsworth a “paedo guy”.
2018 was also the year in which a Tesla whistle-blower leaked information to Business Insider about waste and environmental issues at the car company. Musk responded by tracking down the whistle-blower and effectively ruining his life, as the BBC series shows. He also personally went after the journalist who broke the story on Twitter, causing his fanboys to launch a vicious harassment campaign against her.
Musk has apparently been increasingly aggrieved by his treatment by the press, which he feels to be disproportionately negative given his efforts to, as his followers would say, save humanity. There is some truth to this. The US business media tends to go wild over stories of fires involving Tesla vehicles, for instance, which obscures that these fires occur with negligible frequency compared with petrol cars.
His purchase of Twitter has to be seen in this light. Since he took control of the platform in late October, he has repeatedly suggested that Twitter be considered a more reliable source of news and analysis than the mainstream media.
It is probably not fanciful to suggest that Musk has bought Twitter, at enormous personal cost, in order to exact revenge on the media. Now it is time for him to control the narrative.