Every few days, a Falcon 9 rocket takes off and puts satellites into orbit. Perhaps it should now be considered a routine practice. The crowds that gathered on December 1 near the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California did not think so. First came the euphoria. The sight of the rocket streaking across the sky with its trail of fire and then dropping, with an elegance worthy of Mary Poppins, its reusable first stage onto the launch site elicited gasps of astonishment, as did the sonic boom that followed. “It never goes out of style. It’s like being at an AC/DC concert,” exclaimed one of the spectators. Next came the realization of what had been achieved. That craft had a geopolitical payload: It was carrying the first spy satellite from South Korea, a country trying to reach North Korea just days after the Hermit State reportedly launched its own spy satellite into orbit. The Falcon also had a scientific payload: it allowed Ireland to enter the space age, since it carried that country’s first satellite, built by students from University College Dublin.
It escaped no one’s attention that the one they should thank for the show was Elon Musk. However, the almost absolute reliability of the engineering marvels engendered by the founder of SpaceX, the company behind the Falcon (SpaceX has launched and recovered its rockets 250 times), contrasts sharply with some deranged and often erroneous comments that They’ve made him look like a petulant space cadet in recent weeks. Among them: a tweet that seemed to support an anti-Semitic post on X, his social platform (an act that he later described as “stupid”); a foreign-Israel shame trip whose goal, he said, was to promote peace, but which gave the impression of being an apology tour; a barrage of “fuck you” to advertisers like Disney at a summit hosted by The New York Times after they pulled their X ads; and crass self-praise such as the comment that he “has done more for the environment than any human being on Earth.”
One of those attending the rocket launch confessed that, despite all his genius, Musk reminded him of the disastrous Tony Soprano from the gangster television series. Another attendee, a young British physics buff, explained why the businessman still had a following of loyal followers. “It’s clear that he is a troubled man. But being strong and turning a troubled past into a successful future is attractive. He is a mega-leader. He has to make people believe that he can walk on water.”
This points to the dilemma that lies at the heart of the Musk phenomenon. Is such braggadocio only part of the stage mastery of a business pioneer? Can a man who has defied the conventions of engineering, energy and economics and revolutionized terrestrial and space travel get away with defying the norms of human decency because of the importance of his mission? Or has that mission gone to his head and given him a savior complex that could end up bringing him down?
The answer is a combination of all three. Musk’s provocative humor, from childish fart jokes to pranks like smoking marijuana in public, has helped burnish his reputation as a maverick businessman. He often crosses the line, irritating regulators and raising fears about his mental health. However, breaking the rules also excites his followers and, although his main marketing technique has been to sell great products, it helps his brands stand out; Until this year, Teslas have been sold through word of mouth rather than advertising. His showmanship has something of Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl’s character; It’s hard to know where the magic ends and the madness begins, but the fact is that it’s hard to look away.
There’s no doubt that now that Tesla is valued at $750 billion and is the most valuable car company in the world and SpaceX is valued at $150 billion, their motives for continuing to behave unpleasantly are darker. An anecdote from Walter Isaacson’s recent biography suggests that they can be compulsive. On one occasion, while in a hotel, Musk’s friends took his phone and locked it in the room safe so that he would stop tweeting during the night. At 3 in the morning he called hotel security to open the safe. The truth is that, no matter how toxic his tweets are on His antics at X have caused periodic declines in Tesla’s share price, but over the years they have risen dramatically. In the event that SpaceX goes public, investors will rush to buy shares, even if some do so holding their noses. Despite all the outbursts of eccentricity, it is above all thanks to his vision and drive that the company has achieved such a great advantage in rocket manufacturing and also in satellite communications.
The most worrying thing is the messiah complex. With both Tesla and SpaceX and artificial intelligence (AI), Musk acts apparently convinced that his mission is to save humanity, whether by avoiding climate catastrophe, providing a loophole through interplanetary travel, preventing machines from being smarter than man or avoiding nuclear Armageddon (last year it hampered Ukraine’s efforts to strike back at Russia when it refused to expand its Starlink satellites’ access to Russian-occupied territory, claiming that such an attack could lead Vladimir Putin to retaliate with nuclear weapons). He sometimes sounds like a capricious Greek god who believes he has the future in his hands. “Finally the future will look like the future,” he boasted on November 30 when launching Cybertruck, Tesla’s pickup truck.
Saving humanity is in fashion. It is a dangerous obsession. Last month, a letter to protect the world from the dangers of runaway AI nearly destroyed OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried, now convicted of fraud, stated that the disastrous risks he incurred with FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange platform, were at the service of humanity. Such missionary fanaticism is not new in business. He pushed Henry Ford, inventor of the Model T, to raise the standard of living for workers. However, his savior complex got the best of him and he ended up vomiting anti-Semitic bile.
Musk’s arrogance can also end badly. For all the futuristic verbiage about the Cybertruck, drivers have a hard time finding the door handles. Now, in the grand scheme of things, Musk’s technical achievements will likely end up outweighing his all-too-human imperfections. Being a pioneer of electric cars and reusable rockets has earned him a place in history. It is likely that future generations will judge him as current generations judge Ford: some will criticize the imperfect character, but most will remember the greatness of his creations.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix