Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, Oct 08, 2025

The five faces of Elon Musk

The five faces of Elon Musk

A visionary businessman, a compulsive Twitter user, a 'dangerously deluded' billionaire, a rogue entrepreneur, and an internet troll.

Few businessmen have ever dominated the public's attention quite like Elon Musk does.

Even before his relatively recent achievement of becoming the world's richest man, he had been the subject of books and countless news articles, and had even made a cameo appearance in the film Iron Man 2, whose main character he had been compared to.

But even as an avatar of success in capitalism, he's a man that provokes equal measures of applause and opprobrium, hailed by some as a genius while derided by others as an excessively wealthy threat to the social order.

But of all of these ideas about who Elon Musk is, which one is he really?


The business visionary


It is easy to forget that the idea of electric cars used to be a bit of a joke. The notion of vertically landing and reusing a rocket after it had launched into space was positively ludicrous.

But Elon Musk's businesses have made both of these things a reality. Tesla and SpaceX have reshaped the economic realities for both the electric vehicle and space launch markets.

Mr Musk himself once said: "Rocket engineering is not like ditch digging. With ditch digging you can get 100 people and dig a ditch, and you will dig it a hundred times as faster if you get 100 people versus one.

"With rockets, you have to solve the problem of a particular level of difficulty; one person who can solve the problem is worth an infinite number of people who can't," he said.

Naming him the newspaper's person of the year for 2021, the Financial Times newspaper credited him with triggering "a historic shift in the world's auto industry".

SpaceX has also returned the ability to launch astronauts from US soil after NASA retired the shuttle fleet and has single-handedly reinvigorated the public interest in space exploration.

And perhaps even more is coming, in a business sense. One of the least-recognised achievements has been the launch of his Starlink satellite constellation.

Amid growing calls for more regulation of satellites in low-Earth orbit, establishing a constellation and snapping up that orbital real estate before there are any rules governing how to do so may prove to be a shrewd long-term investment.


The compulsive tweeter


Elon Musk has as many Twitter followers as the combined populations of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands - about 85 million - but only follows 114 accounts himself.

He is, of course, now set to purchase his favourite platform for $44bn - but his comments on Twitter have caused him a lot of trouble in the past.

He was forced to forfeit his role as Tesla's chairman after falsely tweeting that funding had been secured to take the company private for $420 per share - a number popularly used to reference cannabis.

He was sued for defamation after calling a British cave rescuer based in Thailand "pedo guy" after the cave rescuer insulted him by saying Mr Musk's offer to help rescue trapped schoolchildren was more of a publicity stunt than an actual useful offer. Mr Musk won in court by claiming he had not intended to literally suggest that the Briton was a paedophile.

Tesla shares plummeted back in 2018 when Mr Musk told an analyst they were a "boring bonehead" when they questioned the chief executive about the firm's record net loss, although the company is now on a solid financial footing.

His off-the-cuff tweets move markets and prompt dozens of news stories, and anything he writes mentioning Tesla needs to be pre-approved by a lawyer following the claim to have secured funding to take the company private.

The billionaire acknowledged "there are times when I shoot myself in the foot" on Twitter, but was not especially apologetic about doing so. This kind of compulsive use of the platform has cost him before and will almost certainly do so again in the future.


The 'dangerously deluded' billionaire


In one of his most famous quotes, Elon Musk said: "I'd like to die on Mars; just not on impact."

But his goal of making humanity a multi-planetary species, including building a city on Mars within our lifetimes, has been described as a "dangerous delusion" by Britain's chief astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees.

Mr Musk's banner image on Twitter - alongside promotional material from his company SpaceX - shows the planet Mars being terraformed; transformed into a world with a similar environment to Earth's, such as liquid water and green vegetation to support an oxygenated atmosphere.

It is an idea straight out of science fiction, and an impossibility with current technology according to one NASA-sponsored study. But so perhaps were electric cars and reusable rockets.

Mr Musk has a habit of being myopic when making future predictions and anticipating they would arrive much sooner than they would, which is perhaps what is prompting accusations of his being "dangerously deluded".


The rogue entrepreneur


And this myopia - Mr Musk seeing things being much closer than they truly are - also feeds into the image of him as the epitome of a particular kind of Silicon Valley stock character; often over-promising and under-delivering.

His somewhat rogue business ventures have included the Boring Company (and flamethrowers released as part of its funding round), Hyperloop, and Neuralink - all of which have been accused of under-delivering on their initial promises.

Neuralink was pitched as a brain-computer interface that aimed to implant the first chip in a human brain before the end of 2020. This has still not happened.

The implant the company has spoken publicly of to-date is only capable of recording signals from the brain's motor cortex that normally coordinate hand and arm movements - and there is at the moment no timeline for an interface with any of the brain's higher cognitive functions.

In July 2017, Elon Musk said he received "verbal government approval" to build an underground hyperloop between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC, although nothing substantial has yet materialised from this project. A contract for a system of underground tunnels in Las Vegas has been downgraded to merely a "Loop".

Last year he claimed Tesla could launch a humanoid robot as early as this year, although there is no sign of that happening.

The billionaire also pledged "full self-driving" for Tesla within six months back in 2017. It subsequently emerged that "full self-driving" was the name of a feature that did not amount to full self-driving, and even that feature has not yet been formally released and cleared for use.

We'll have to wait and see whether these are genuinely unjustifiable projects or if they - like Tesla's cheap electric cars and SpaceX's economic model for reusing rockets - will just take much more time than Mr Musk expected to come to fruition.


The billionaire internet troll


The above faces of the man all miss something about his interactions with others, though - that he is a committed, purposeful troll, often actively agitating against anything which might inconvenience his businesses, with the legal team of a billionaire protecting him from repercussions.

But even with his extensive legal support, Mr Musk still picks his battles. While he described 1COVID1-19 lockdowns in the US as "fascism" he held his tongue about similar government moves in China, which were much more draconian and also impacted production at Tesla factories.

Unlike in the US, Mr Musk's business in China is conducted at Beijing's discretion.

He has repeatedly criticised independent regulators - especially the US Securities and Exchange Commission - and hasn't been afraid to dip his toes into "culture war" topics, recently mocking a picture of Bill Gates with a bit of a paunch, comparing him to the new emoji for a pregnant man and posting another meme featuring a transgender flag.

He tweeted in support of Canadian truckers protesting over 1COVID1 legislations that required people crossing the US-Canada border to be fully vaccinated and warned that the Canadian government was on the way to fascism by preventing legal protests.

This aspect of Mr Musk can't be disentangled from the others, of course. His compulsive tweeting is inextricably linked with his trolling, that is linked to his vision for his businesses - which has exposed him to allegations of rogue entrepreneurship - and that is tied to the same foresight that has been criticised as "dangerously deluded".

Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
×