Elon Musk is described as a product of Silicon Valley. Certainly, he has taken full advantage of it for the past twenty-five years, but he does not share its spirit, he simply does not like it. He demonstrated this during the pandemic, by marking his disagreement with the Californian executive on how to manage the health crisis. As early as January 2020, he proclaimed loud and clear that Covid-19 was not a viral disease, in March that any form of panic was “stupid” and that the cases would have practically disappeared before the end of April. As the disease ravaged the country, he advocated, with Trump, more fanciful remedies than each other, and when the governor of California announced strict confinements, Musk seized this pretext to set up his headquarters in Texas. In fact, he had left Silicon Valley since the late 2000s, when he got sucked into Hollywood and its star system.
Let’s rewind. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971 to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He moved to Canada at the age of 17 with 2,000 dollars in his pocket to pursue his higher education. He ended up at the University of Pennsylvania where he obtained a double degree in economics and physics and arrived in California in 1995 for a doctorate at Stanford University. There, he decided instead to create a start-up with his brother and a friend, Zip2, acquired by Compaq in 1999.
Fame makes him lose his mind
He reinvests the 22 million dollars from the sale in what will become Paypal, bought 1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Elon is rich and it goes in all directions. He starts by sending his $1 million McLaren into the set. In 2002, he founded SpaceX and crowned himself CEO and chief engineer to build rockets and apply what he learned at school. In 2006, he participated in the creation of SolarCity which promotes solar energy.
In 2015, it was OpenAI that he helped set up, in 2016, Neuralink. Still in 2016, he created The Boring Company with the idea of digging vacuum tunnels to send vehicles through them at speeds of up to 8,000 km/h without using a lot of energy. All these companies, in order to develop, have of course taken advantage of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Musk is also Tesla, in which he invested $6.5 million in 2004, before becoming its CEO in 2008.
It is by becoming famous that he begins to derail. Let’s skip over the romantic escapades, reported by the tabloids, of this father of eight children, his two marriages and divorces with the same woman, or the five properties bought for 72 million dollars, not far from Beverly Hills – since resold. Let us instead remember his often provocative and sometimes misleading declarations which earned him numerous citations in court.
And while Elon put on his free-speech show, Obama was at Stanford speaking out against the dangers of misinformation on platforms like Twitter. But nobody heard him: he was not on Twitter.
Luc Julia, author of “Artificial intelligence does not exist”