Musk has more important things to do

Forget Twitter: the world’s richest person should focus on his self-appointed mission to save humanity

“My advice to Twitter executives is to put on your track shoes now because Elon is going to push you to pick up the pace,” said former Tesla board member and investor Steve Westly, after Elon Musk made his outrageous $43bn hostile bid for Twitter last week.

“I think he’s going to shake things up,” Westly told Bloomberg.

In the end, Twitter turned down the bid, which tech journalist Kara Swisher rightly called a lowball offer. And the Twitter board engaged the “poison pill” strategy against its now largest shareholder’s further attempts at buying it.

Can anyone say “messy”? It has been another frantic two weeks in the frenzied life of the world’s richest person.

From buying 9.2% of Twitter for $2.9bn, Musk’s initial filing claimed he would be a passive investor. Then he was offered a board seat, which he turned down just days later. Then Musk tweeted — obviously — his intention to take it private.

“It’s a pump-and-dump,” one US tech executive told me of Musk’s Twitter flirtation. I think it is much more. Musk is famously single-minded about his projects — from his early B2B success with Zip2 to the career-making triumph of PayPal and its sale to eBay.

When he says “Twitter has extraordinary potential” and “I will unlock it”, he means it. But I can’t see the boards of Tesla or SpaceX countenancing the energetic Musk taking on another major role.

I am glad he hasn’t succeeded in his bid to buy Twitter, for one specific reason: he has much more important work to do — focusing on his avowed mission to “save humanity”.

Look at what his upstart electric vehicle (EV) company Tesla has done to the motoring industry. It is now rushing to embrace EV technology, and now has a more unified, climate-saving focus.

This wouldn’t have happened without Tesla — and Musk’s obsession with his stated intentions.

Whether one man can actually save humanity is beside the point; if that’s Musk’s mission, chances are we’ll be better off for it. Climate change is a major problem — which is hard to deny after five months of rain fell in KwaZulu-Natal in a few days — and we need to find a better alternative to fossil fuels.

Renewables are the future, but all that solar and wind power needs to be stored somewhere — and batteries are the missing link. Tesla is a rampant pioneer in battery technology, and the tie-up with SolarCity, however controversial, is a useful collaboration. Tesla’s Powerwall battery is an ideal, if expensive, battery for home usage. Like all innovations that push the boundaries, there are already imitators.

But Musk’s greatest contribution — without speculating on what the Starlink satellite internet service might one day enable, as it is now doing in war-torn Ukraine — is spurring the motor industry to adopt EVs. By accelerating the move to electric and away from fossil fuels, Musk is helping to free society from a major source of climate change: the internal combustion engine.

He needs to stay focused on that. Let someone else fix Twitter. x