Elon Musk has broken boundaries. The character of the most successful businessman in the world has been living for months with the guy who rubs shoulders with extremist leaders and lectures sovereign countries about their policies, with the United Kingdom and Germany as preferred targets. This new political facet, whether corporate strategy or purely ideological, has already brought him considerable economic benefits: the shares of Tesla have risen more than 50%, the candidate to whom he has linked his destiny; the valuation of its social network X.com, in free fall, has cut its bleeding; bitcoin and the main cryptocurrencies, in which it invests, are moving near all-time highs; and the recent financing rounds of xAI, its artificial intelligence company, and SpaceX, the aerospace company, have catapulted their market prices.
Once Washington has been conquered, Musk’s battlefield has moved to Europe, where his economic interests are not minor. It has been proposed to overthrow Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Government is preparing new regulations for cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, and who is negotiating with Amazon to enter the broadband business through low-orbit satellites, the so-called Kuiper Project. , which would compete directly with Starlink, owned by Musk, now much more advanced, with 87,000 connections in the country, most in rural areas. This fierce fight has also moved to France and Spain, where Pedro Sánchez’s Executive has just granted Kuiper the license to operate.
Musk’s furious attacks on leaders with whom he does not agree coexist with business agreements and the courtship of those with whom he maintains a good relationship. The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, had to come out to give explanations this Thursday about the negotiations she is maintaining with SpaceX to award it for 1.5 billion euros the security of the communications of the Government and the army, through the encryption of telephones and the Internet, as well as the use of satellites for emergencies such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
His ties with other European leaders, such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, whom he met in December with Trump at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, also open the door to blocking community initiatives that harm their companies. Musk has turned his extensive checkbook into a political weapon. He not only financed Trump’s campaign with $277 million. He has also asked to invest in the Argentina of libertarian Javier Milei, and has said he is willing to do it himself. This is combined with his proselytism to support the far-right AfD in Germany, thus guaranteeing allies in case the extreme right comes to power at some point, as may happen in neighboring Austria.
Its continuous interference, however, also threatens to cause a rebound effect that is counterproductive to its interests: it has earned the rejection of Executives such as those of France, the United Kingdom, Germany or Spain. And Brussels, a regulatory giant, which already has an open file against X that can lead to a million-dollar fine, has warned him that the old Twitter. On a commercial level, the risk is that potential clients and users of Tesla and Look for alternatives like the Bluesky social network.
The rise of an eccentric
Elon Musk has risk in his veins. The richest man in the world has taken over from a generation of traditional investors led by Warren Buffett, a believer in not putting money into what he does not understand and in the power of time to grow wealth. Musk is the antithesis of that conservative and cautious prototype. He is reckless and witty. He doesn’t mind flirting with bankruptcy and failure — as he himself acknowledged, Tesla was close to bankruptcy between 2017 and 2019, and initiatives like him —. He shuns common sense, investing and founding companies in sectors he doesn’t understand, at least not in depth, because almost no one has immersed himself in them before. Trusting his impulses and intuitions, he plunges into futuristic plans, whether it be sending spaceships to Mars, implanting chips in human brains to connect them to computers, or autonomous cars cruising the streets without a driver.
It is difficult to find a cutting-edge industry in which it is not present: it has built its empire through electric car companies (Tesla), social networks (X), artificial intelligence (xAI), aeronautics (SpaceX), satellite internet (Starlink ) or neurotechnology (Neuralink). And he fervently believes in the future of cryptocurrencies, in which he invests. However, his figure divides and polarizes. While for his devoted followers he is a genius and a visionary – a sort of contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, in the recent words of the Argentine president, Javier Milei – his detractors, increasingly numerous, see him more as a modern Rasputin, whispering in the ear. of the most powerful man in the world, over whom he displays his influence. And they do not forgive him for his growing far-right activism, including electoral interference, nor his lack of interest in combating hoaxes.
How does the son of an engineer and a model become the richest man in the world? Elon Musk’s fortune exceeds $400 billion, almost double that of the second, the creator of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and above the GDP of South Africa, the country where he was born in Pretoria 53 years ago. Since he was a child, Musk had two obsessions: technology and the United States. In her biography of the tycoon, Ashlee Vance recounts the moment she saw her first computer in a Johannesburg shopping center. He didn’t stop insisting until he got his father to buy it. “It was supposed to take six months to assimilate the manual. I became obsessed and went almost three days without sleeping until I finished the last lesson. “It seemed like the most incredible thing I had ever seen,” Musk tells Vance.
At the age of 12, he created his first video game, Blastar, and began to harbor the idea that the ideal place to grow up was thousands of kilometers away, in the United States. “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon,” says his friend. mother in Vance’s biography. He wasn’t wrong. Despite his father’s attempts to dissuade him—he fired the domestic help and made him do all the chores to teach him what it would be like to “play at being an American”—nothing stopped him. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Physics and Mathematics, he felt understood. “Being surrounded by geeks excited him,” remembers his mother.
With the diploma in hand, Musk headed west, towards the epicenter of all the action, Silicon Valley, and after doing internships at a video game company and another that was researching technologies applicable to the electric car, in 1995 he founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, a kind of yellow pages where businesses could make themselves known for an Internet still in its infancy. After all, as Musk repeated, everyone had the right to know the location of their nearest pizzeria.
Its sale four years later for $307 million was key to the climb he was about to undertake: he was no longer a newcomer asking his father for money to rent a place. He was a millionaire puntocom. And the money was burning in his hands: that same year he founded the online bank—the seed of PayPal—. And then came the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX in 2002, Tesla in 2003, Solarcity in 2006, specialized in solar energy, which would end up being acquired by Tesla, OpenAI in 2015 — from which it left abruptly after a confrontation with its current CEO, Sam Altman —, Neuralink and Twitter (current X) in 2022.
Tesla, the eighth largest company on the planet by market capitalization, in 2023 became the first electric vehicle manufacturer to place one of its cars, the Model Y, as the best-selling in the world, and is the one that holds the first place in Musk among the billionaires. Instead, the $44 billion it paid for X was soon revealed to be an excessive amount. Calculations by the investment firm Fidelity indicate that its value today is more than 70% lower, around 12,000 million. The acquisition has brought benefits in another way: the social network claims that it has more than 600 million monthly active users, and Musk has 212 million followers, the equivalent of the population of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece together. That powerful speaker, and the absence of content moderation for the sake of supposed freedom of expression, have turned the network into Musk’s ideal platform.
