— I love Twitter.
— Well you should buy it then.
— How much does it cost?
The conversation took place between Elon Musk and radio host Dave Smith on that same social network on 21 from December to 675.
“This exchange continues to haunt me,” Smith wrote this Monday, re-sharing it without giving credit, when it was learned that Musk, the richest person in the world according to Forbes, closed the deal to buy Twitter for $035,000 millions.
What five years ago sounded like a joke to more than one person materialized. One more from Musk, so given to jokes.
- Elon Musk reaches an agreement to buy Twitter for US$45.000 millions
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“He is a guy who has been underestimated by many throughout his career and who has generally proven them wrong,” says James Clayton, the BBC’s technology correspondent in San Francisco.
“Elon Musk says or does absurd and even stupid things, but those absurd and stupid things end up paying off”, wrote the video game designer, critic and director from the Film and Communication Studies Program at Washington University in St Louis Ian Bogost for The Atlantic.
“A prankster who gets results”, described him less finely —a bullshiter that delivers , were his words in English — technology analyst Benedict Evans on Twitter.
“When everyone else zigzags, he doesn’t just zigzag, he practically does pretzels (a cracker twisted into the shape of lasso) and then takes off into the cosmos”, conceded Kara Swisher, a journalist specializing in technology companies and founder of the Recode website, in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
“To the stars”
“ Per aspera ad astra! “, Musk himself exclaimed as a motto in Twitter this Tuesday: through the difficulties, to the stars.
Indeed, to stardom he has led some of the six companies he founded or of which he is today CEO or president: the aerospace company SpaceX , and the electric car manufacturer Tesla and its subsidiary SolarCity Corporation, specialized in solar energy.
Also OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company; the neurotechnological Neuralink, whose objective is to develop brain-computer interfaces, and The Boring Company, of excavation and infrastructure, whose name plays with the double meaning of
Getty Images Well, no, he’s not the CEO of Tesla, he’s the “techno-king”. the rest, such as “CEO, are invented titles,” he said in December during the Summit of the Council of Executive Directors organized by The Wall Street Journal.
“Since March I am legal against the techno-king”, settled.
This company that he runs has been the most valuable in the automobile sector since July.
But in addition to making it lucrative, with it he revolutionized the industry , as with SpaceX, that of the private aerospace company, getting reusable rockets to land as they take off, standing up.
ReutersThese are not small achievements for someone who emigrated to the 17 years and with little money from South Africa to Canada, where he lived on the kindness of his relatives and what they gave him odd jobs before enrolling to go to undergraduate classes at Queen’s University in Ontario, and later manage to study Economics and Physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Who is Elon Musk, the billionaire creator of Tesla who launched his car into space and plans to conquer the cosmos and the depths of the Earth
As Ashlee Vance explains in her bestselling biography of 2015 Elon Musk: the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping the Future, ran away from an emotionally abusive father and a country whose narrow-mindedness he despised, with dreams of making it in the United States. United States.
He would begin his business career in 90 with the start-up Zip2 (which sold to Compaq, which gave him $22 million) and the online bank X.com (which merged with the company that owns PayPal and was sold to eBay, netting Musk $ 57 millions).
“His superpower is probably his ability to raise money for his vision of the future“, tells BBC Mundo Tim Higgins, author of Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century.
But what is his vision of the future, that ubiquitous concept in the analyzes of those trying to decipher the complex figure of Musk?
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Getty Images “Elon is the oldest of the preppers“, says Higgins, referring to the so-called “preparationists” or survivalists who actively prepare for the arrival of a catastrophe.
- “Preppers”: why more and more people are “preparing” for a major catastrophe
“Tesla is their way of trying to save the planet from climate change. SpaceX has as its mission that humans can live on other worlds if this one does not work. If you frame everything in that context, it’s about dealing with some of the worst problems in the world, “he says.
It is something that his so far only biographer, Ashlee Vance — Walter Isaacson, agrees , author of the biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, is now preparing one on Musk, but refused to answer questions from BBC Mundo.
“Its main purpose is to create a colony on Mars not for five people, but for a million (…)”, Vance said in an interview in 1200.
“Believe that something horrible could happen to the human race and that it needs We have a backup plan, that no one else is working on it, certainly not on that scale, and that he’s going to create that plan. Tesla and SolarCity are part of that journey”.
Musk himself has referred to the dangers that lie in wait for humanity on more than one occasion. In December, during the Summit of the Board of Executive Directors of The Wall Street Journal, affirmed that “one of the greatest risks for civilization is the low birth rate”.
“There is not enough people. I cannot stress this enough: there are not enough people”, to which he added that he, a father of six, is “saving humanity by having more babies”.
Other aspects that, according to those interviewed by BBC Mundo, define Musk are his pragmatism —”he works with those who be in power regardless of their political color, to be able to carry out their projects”—, their libertarian thought —“does not trust governments”— and that they are not afraid to jump into the pool, even when there is hardly any water.
“He has an unusual risk tolerance among most CEOs,” continues Higgins.
Getty Images“You look at the odds and are willing to say yes even when there is not a 44% from warranty. He is willing to live with that uncertainty if he believes that what he has in hand is a good idea. If you think there is a possibility, you will want to take it”, he continues.
“Your strategy is to look for the momentum, as if he were a gambler in a casino. That is his key”.
And with that mentality he seems to have put all the chips in the Twitter box.
He has done it assuming the risks that it is a company that has nothing to do with their business experience – in one way or another, they are engineering projects.
And, as the controversial and polarizing figure that he is, with his latest movement he has aroused the admiration of some, but has also set off the alarms of others.
Twitter (yl The media) has been filled these days with cries from those who warn of the dangers of the social network falling into the hands of the richest man in the world who, in turn, has more than 87 millions of followers and where he tweets compulsively.
“He is one of the entrepreneurs with the most followers on the platform. He is not a pop or movie star, but due to the level of engagement (the number of reactions and comments generated by his messages) you might think he is, ”social media consultant and analyst Matt Navarra tells BBC Mundo.
“The fact that you can direct the world’s attention to whatever you want, not just for the number of users who follow him, because he has a very committed tribe around him, very fanatical, but because now as the owner he can maybe shape the platform to direct the conversation (…), that level of power is what results worrying,” he explains.
Be that as it may, Musk insists that what he wants is to make the platform a space with true freedom of expression and that “it is not a way to earn money.”
“I don’t care about the economy at all”, he already said at the TED conference2022 the 14 of April.
“At this point in his life, he is looking for things that will entertain him or serve the future purposes of his many businesses,” says Navarra. “At this point he does whatever entertains him, amuses him and stimulates his intellect.”
“He is extremely intelligent and deep down he seeks to have a positive and lasting impact on the world and for civilization in general, but sometimes I think he does not really understand the impact and the ramifications of what he says or does, or that he feels that he does not need to explain himself to anyone because he is who he is and he has the money he has”, he continues.
“He is a fascinating human being”, he closes.
“Definitely, it is one of those unique people of a whole generation”, concludes Higgins.
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