One of the episodes that best represents Elon Musk is his role in rescuing 13 people, mostly teenagers, trapped in a cave in Thailand. It was 2018. Standing in the cave that had been flooded by the rain, creating the hole where twelve players from a youth soccer team and their coach were inaccessible, Musk had his engineers working on a mini-submarine, which had been constructed from wooden Space-X rocket parts in which, he said, they could come out one at a time. He was full of enthusiasm and posted videos of his ingenuity as the boys were slowly pulled out by divers. When only two boys and the coach remained to be evacuated, Musk threw a tantrum because his method was rejected.
British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth, who was involved in the rescue, said the businessman’s offer was just propaganda and that a rigid device would never have made it through the narrow, flooded cave. Musk, impulsively, went on Twitter, then called Twitter and replied to Unsworth that he had been asked about the submarine, which he thought would have worked, ending with a curt “Sorry, fart guy.” Sorry, pedophile . The speleologist, one of the heroes of this operation, took him to court for defamation. But the court accepted Musk’s version that calling someone a “pedo guy” was a common insult in South Africa, the country where he was born 52 years ago. Things said between angry men. Musk apologized and it was worth it.
Such behavior would not be expected from the richest man in the world, who, according to Forbes, is worth around $235 billion. The British documentary series The Elon Musk Show, co-produced by the BBC and available on Movistar+, is the latest attempt to get closer to this very complex figure. Without statements from the interested party, but from everyone around him. Among them are the closest ones: his ex-wife Talulah Riley, who talks about her weaknesses but avoids resentment; his mother Maye, proud of him but very aware of his manias; his father Errol, who is trying to wash off his image as a perpetrator. And former executives of his companies who remember the enormous pressure he put them under, although some point out that it was the only way he was able to achieve what he did. And with good film material, because Musk allowed himself to be filmed or has had him filmed many times. The portrait confirms the worst and best things that can be said about him. As the cave episode shows, he thinks big and takes on seemingly impossible challenges, but suddenly becomes angry and loses his temper.
These people who lived or worked with Musk range between admiration and resentment. He always sets himself very ambitious goals. Some notice tenderness in his arrogant facade: he is sweet, shy, loving in his own way. But he is also said to be “dangerous, reckless, unstable, irresponsible.” This documentary doesn’t fall into the sycophantic tone of others, such as the hagiography The Real-Life Iron Man.
The series follows a business career that begins with his first hit, Zip2, the company he founded with his brother Kimbal, and continues with a foolish bet on the electric car in 2003. When he took over Tesla, he promised to deliver models within urgent deadlines. He set up his office desk in the middle of the factory; He stayed there many nights to sleep. He became angry when he saw that the employees were not working at their pace, which was unbearable for most people. Some employees say that in these situations almost no one slept more than four hours. His greatest pride is SpaceX: the rockets crashed in the first three tests; It seemed like a very expensive mistake when the fourth one worked. He then managed to reuse the rockets and the Falcon Heavy arrived, the largest ever seen. Today he is NASA’s largest private contractor, he has sent personnel to the International Space Station, and he wants his spacecraft to reach the moon and then Mars (he has to rebuild it: it exploded on the last launch).
Here we find the most visionary Musk, or the stupidest, depending on how you look at it. The one who talks about turning humanity into an “interplanetary species”, the one who wants to offer trips to colonize Mars at a price of about $100,000, which is not that expensive to start a new life. The one who dreams of bombarding the Red Planet’s icy poles to release moisture into its atmosphere so plants can grow. Musk wants to go down in the history books for this. The series revolves around other, even more extravagant projects, such as Neuralink, which aims to implant a chip into the human brain so that we can live connected lives without having to look at screens.
More morbid is the personal and familial portrait of the businessman, who switches back and forth between different couples. When he met and wanted to seduce British actress Talulah Riley, he invited her to breakfast the next morning. When he was finished, he asked him to meet again for lunch and dinner that same evening. He ended up convincing her to go to his hotel room, but her plan was…watch rocket videos. Musk married her twice and divorced her twice. She says he had a lot of nightmares, that he woke up upset and screaming, that he lived in fear, but once the investments started going well, he became charming. “He went from being mocked to being revered.” He was so dedicated to his business that he offered his wife a way out with the same coldness with which he fires employees. Things were even worse with Justine Musk, his first wife: it was her therapist who was hired by Elon to tell her that he wanted a divorce. The billionaire’s mother, Maye, chimes in: “When you marry someone like Elon, you know you won’t see him often.” They knew what they were getting into.
Elon Musk, dressed up for a Halloween party, with his mother Maye Musk in October 2022. Evan Agostini (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
It is only at the end of the documentary, which consists of three one-hour chapters, that we realize that the protagonist suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, which is related to autism. He himself confessed it in 2021 when he was invited to host the legendary comedy show Saturday Night Live. Here their traumas are reviewed. He came from a diamond-rich millionaire family in South Africa, but he says his childhood was very unhappy. Because his father beat his mother; Since he was isolated from the other children, he continued to read Napoleon while the others played. because he was bullied at school; due to his parents’ conflict-filled divorce.
At the age of 17, he went to Canada and then to the USA to study. An obsessive tendency explains what is most irritating about him, but also what he has achieved with his persistence. His reputation as a businessman has been tarnished by more than one incident, from the marijuana joint he smoked on camera while being interviewed by podcaster Joe Rogan (known as a spreader of anti-vaccination theories during the pandemic) to towards the sanction imposed on him. The market regulator SEC said on Twitter that it was considering taking Tesla private (but did not).
There isn’t much documentation about Musk’s political positions. At one point we heard him defend that the federal government had little power; He doesn’t identify himself, but his many tweets reflect a rapid rapprochement with the populist right in recent years. At one point in the documentary, Donald Trump says that Musk told him that he never voted Republican but now voted for him. There is also no mention here of his crusade against woke or progressive activism, which has led to him denigrating the most reliable media outlets, such as the New York Times. Walter Isaacson’s just-published biography, Elon Musk, explains that the tycoon declared war on the “woke virus” as a result of the gender transition of his daughter Jenna, who was called Xavier until she was 16. She is the third of his eleven children; The last three (featuring singer Grimes, although the youngest was the result of a surrogate mother) have the strange names X AE A-XII, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus. His separation from Grimes has led to a court battle over custody of these boys.
The documentary is missing what it would have made for a fourth episode: the adventures of the head tweeter. It’s been a year since the tycoon bought Twitter, which he turned into X and destroyed one of the most established brands on the entire Internet. And Musk, who has demonstrated his talent in engineering companies, does not seem as adept at navigating the world of communications. But he wants to leave his mark on the most influential network for politics and journalism and, above all, fight the culture war. His moves were all controversial: he disbanded the moderation teams and led to massive layoffs; pardoned profiles suspended for toxic practices; terminated profile verification by making it a paid service that does not verify anything; Now hides link headings…
What the documentary captures, as it takes place before he bought the social network, is his tendency to insult or ridicule people through his Twitter/X account, which has nearly 160 million followers. Any comment against anyone will create a storm on the victim; He also tends to retweet messages from unreliable sources who believe in delusional conspiracies.
The second to last is Musk trolling Zelensky on X, which we still call Twitter, with a meme of the Ukrainian president crying because he can’t spend five minutes without asking for $1 billion in aid. He’s not trolling Putin, that’s not it. Two keys: U.S. ultraconservatives are pressuring Congress to cut off aid to Ukraine; and Kiev is heavily dependent on Musk’s Starlink satellite network, which has been denied use for offensive actions in this war. Most recently, the European Commission sent a letter to Musk and opened an investigation against X for spreading false news and hate speech related to the conflict between Israel and Gaza.
The future of space travel, electric cars and political communication depends largely on this man; it remains to be seen whether it also depends on brain changes in humans. Even the course of wars passes through them. It will be a long time before we know whether he will be remembered for taking us to Mars. Or just like the great meme of our time.
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