Elon Musk and the tweet smell of success
As the world’s richest man pays $44bn for Twitter, how he overcame violent bullying and an ‘evil’ father to become a powerful, if VERY eccentric, iconoclast
HE WAS the maverick student who dropped out of one of the world’s leading universities after just two days and was branded an idiot by his own father. Since then Elon Musk has gone on to become the richest human in history and this week added Twitter to his empire with his controversial $44billion (£34.5billion) takeover of the social media giant
While he is well-known for his Tesla electric cars, space rockets and bizarre statements, the entrepreneur remains a somewhat mysterious character – despite his estimated £212billion fortune being more than the GDP of some countries.
The 50-year-old is messianic in his belief that humanity must colonise Mars to find another home beyond our fragile planet, once quipping: “I want to die on Mars, just not on impact”.
Before then, somewhat counterintuitively, he wants to tackle the threat of global warming by converting us all to his battery-operated Tesla cars.
Musk is not the only tech billionaire who believes mankind needs to look beyond the Earth for its future – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has his own space company – but he is undoubtedly the most eccentric.
In February 2018 Musk blasted a red Tesla electric sports car into orbit on one of his SpaceX company’s Falcon Heavy rockets.
A mannequin was at the wheel, David Bowie’s Space Oddity was playing on the stereo and the message “Made on Earth by humans” was on the dashboard.
Born in apartheid-era Pretoria in June 1971, Musk left his native country aged 17 to avoid compulsory military service. Later he explained: “Spending two years suppressing black people didn’t seem to be a great use [of the] force.”
It has been claimed his father – a halfBritish engineer and property developer – and mother – a Canadian model and dietitian – had so much money they couldn’t close the door of their safe for all the cash.
Musk and his younger siblings – brother Kimbal and sister Tosca – were driven to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche.
DESPITE their wealth it was a far from idyllic childhood. Musk claims he rarely saw either parent for the first eight years of his life, but there were early signs of his brilliance. Aged six and playing outdoors with his siblings, he reassured them they didn’t need to run home when it got dark:“There is nothing to fear – it is merely the absence of light!”
Nicknamed “genius boy”, he read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and reputedly learnt how to code within three days of being given a computer.
At school he was so introverted that his mother Maye, a former Miss South Africa finalist, feared he was deaf.
Later, she realised he was simply thinking deeply. Yet Musk was ruthlessly bullied and, on one occasion, beaten up so badly he needed surgery.
His parents separated when he was eight and Musk lived with his father, who he has subsequently branded evil and “a terrible human being”.
“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he claimed. Errol Musk countered by accusing his son of acting like “a spoilt child”.
Whether Elon was spoiled or not, he was certainly showing signs of his engineering aptitude and the relentless need for innovation that would drive him from an early age.
“I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed,” he recalled.
When Musk left South Africa for Canada, his father predicted he would return within three months. In fact, he never looked back.
After two years, he moved to America where he obtained a degree in economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
But after just two days of his masters programme at Stanford University in California, he quit to become the wealthiest college drop-out in history.
It was now the mid-1990s and he was in the ‘golden state’ at exactly the right-time – at the start of the Silicon Valley dot.com internet boom.
With a $28,000 investment from his father, he was a millionaire by his mid-20s after founding, then selling his first computer software company.
He subsequently co-founded PayPal, which lets customers pay securely for goods and services online.
When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5billion, Musk netted himself $165million.
His sometimes curious behaviour and lack of empathy has led to suggestions he sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
In 2018,Tesla shares plunged six per cent – wiping £3billion off the value of the company – after Musk smoked marijuana and drank whiskey while discussing everything from drugs to the possibility we’re all living in a simulation during a live podcast on YouTube. Two years later, he wiped $41billion off Tesla’s value after claiming his own company’s share price was too high.
He then tweeted: “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house”, adding that his girlfriend was mad at him.
His reputation is as a highly exacting boss with high expectations for everyone, includ
ing himself. According to one biographer, when his PA asked for a pay rise, Musk asked if he could try doing her job first – and ended up sacking her instead.
He remains an inveterate risk taker, almost going bankrupt twice when he divided everything he had between Tesla and SpaceX. Yet like all good chess players,
Musk has always managed to stay several steps ahead of his competitors, with his technical skills allied to inspired, off-thewall entrepreneurship proving a winning combination.
As co-founder and CEO of Tesla he is the world’s largest producer of electric cars – sales of which have grown by more than 100 per cent since 2020.
In 2015, Musk set up OpenAI, a not-forprofit company with the aim of researching and promoting ‘friendly’ artificial intelligence.
He also founded Neuralink, which develops brain-computer interfaces, and The Boring Company, which specialises in tunnel construction.
He envisages a hypersonic vacuum tunnel that could carry people the 250 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30 minutes.
Musk’s love life has been every bit as colourful as the way he does business. He met his first wife, Canadian novelist Justine Wilson, while they were students.
Their marriage produced six sons, including one who died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks, but ended in acrimony. She later claimed he was determined to turn her into a trophy wife.
They divorced in 2008 and, two years later, he married English actress Talulah Riley, who had starred in the re-made St Trinian’s films.
THE couple met in a London nightclub, then went on to divorce, remarry and divorce again. In 2020 he had a child with his girlfriend, the Canadian singer Grimes, and late last year the couple had a baby daughter via surrogate.
They have subsequently broken up, though are said to remain friends.
He also had a year-long romance with Johnny Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard.
Not surprisingly, when it comes to naming his children, Musk does not favour orthodoxy. His last two offspring have been called X AE A-12 and Exa Dark Siderael, or X and Y for short.
Now the man who already owns two trillion-dollar companies and a multi-billion one, has another addition to his portfolio.
His purchase of Twitter has led some highprofile account holders to claim they would leave the platform with expressions of concern that the ‘free speech absolutist’ would reinstate controversial accounts that have been banned. These could include former US President Donald Trump.
But Musk has tweeted to his 85.1 million followers that he wants his detractors to stay around: “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”
He also issued a statement saying: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
He pledged to make the micro-blogging site “better than ever” by “enhancing the product with new features”.
There are also suggestions he might make it harder to operate anonymously on the site, thus preventing trolling.
Meanwhile, there are still the realms of outer space for the world’s richest man to conquer.
Last month Musk set a date of 2029 for when humans will make it to Mars on board his company’s Starship rocket, with the ultimate aim of establishing a permanent colony on the Red Planet by 2050.
Going by his track record of backing winners, it should be no surprise if he makes it.
As for Twitter, it is likely to thrive under the stewardship of a man for whom even the sky is no limit.