Elon Musk: The Man of the Hour

Elon, the gender affirming car, and his unusual rise to power

Jump on the train to nowhere, from now on you are free
After rising from the ashes, you'll become a mystery
Too many of those strange injections, too many gazings at the sun
The lady smiled "Well, that's the business, running after number one"

For all their childish daydreams, you caught their falling stars
Just for the cheapest contracts, you signed your autograph
And if you started much too early, therefore you've stopped too late
Make sure that no one stops you now, here comes the ultimate

Let's take a ride on Iron John's shoulders
He has more gold than anybody in this world
Let's take a ride, heigh-ho on Iron John
He has more gold than anybody in this world
-Iron John, Alphaville

People occasionally ask about wealthy people I’ve met - usually they asked about Jeff Bezos, but more recently since Elon has taken the Richest Guy crown at least for the moment they ask about him. It occurs to me that I should publish this before he isn’t anymore, the way the stocks his wealth is based on are fluctuating. So technically yes, I have met Elon Musk (tremendously in passing) back in the days after Paypal when he was just getting going with SpaceX, back when he was ... balding.

As some of you may know, Elon's first big success was a company called Zip2, which he sold for about $300 million (Elon took home about $22 million).

Elon rather famously bought a tremendously high performance car, a McLaren F1. Million dollar car. They only made a little over a hundred of them. This is kind of a large percentage of your net worth to lay out on a car, but what the hell, he really wanted it.

Here - linked from YouTube- is the video of him getting this fabulous car. Let’s be fair, it really was a hell of a vehicle. I’m not a car guy, though once I do get properly back In The Game and put a third comma in my bank account I’m going to buy something suitably outrageous. Probably from Koenigsegg, like the Regera or the Gemera… but only once that’s a rounding error in the bank account. Anyway, never mind my aspirations, this story is about Elon.

Apparently Elon was using the F1 as his daily driver back in 1999, and had supposedly put about 11,000 miles on it. But one day, while on his way to meet with some investors for Paypal, he was driving along with his good buddy Peter Thiel, and he was showing off - and he didn't have the traction control engaged - so he gunned the engine, and went right into the embankment. Crash! They had to hitchhike the rest of the way to their venture capital meeting.

One of my friends showed me this video and was trying to describe Elon's hair transplant as "gender affirming care", implying some equivalence to transgender esthetics, but typo'd it as “gender affirming car” … and I must say - that's far more accurate.

Of course, bodybuilders with exaggerated musculature from supraphysiological levels of androgenic anabolic steroids are an example of gender affirming - indeed, gender exaggerating; nobody looks as ridiculously masculine as these gigachads with their 3000% normal testosterone levels. And women are the stereotypical market for plastic surgery - they’re about 92% of that market, and the 8% that are male are mostly reconstructive to repair damage from damage from burns, accidents, disease, injury, and the like. And while women also have reconstructive surgeries, you’ll not be surprised to learn that most plastic surgery for women is for aesthetic appeal - to enhance appearance of youth and beauty - and is thus, also, gender-affirming.

But taking hormones (and generally undergoing surgery) to change your gender is not “gender affirming care” - you're not affirming your gender, you're rejecting it. That’s very strange Orwellian Newspeak, and I’m not quite sure how the activists got away with such obvious redefinitionist nonsense. Again, though, that’s not really something that belongs in Elon’s story (other than whatever concern he has around his kids, and though I know there’s controversy there I’m not privy has transpired behind out of the public eye nor precisely what his thoughts are behind that) so I’ll leave that for some other time.

So, let’s take a traditional retrospective view at Elon’s life.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Musk’s parents split relatively early and he was mostly raised by his father - who … well, let’s delicately say that he doesn’t seem to have gotten along with particularly well. Elon taught himself to code at a young age, creating and selling a BASIC-based video game called Blastar for $500 at 12. This early taste of building and monetizing tech set the stage for his later ventures.

You’ve probably heard some contradictory rumors about whether or not his father owned an emerald mine - it sounds like the most correct answer is “Errol (Elon’s father) had some rights to the output of three mines but didn’t actually own the mines” which I think we can all agree is still a nice situation to be in. The relationship between Elon and his father, however, was probably not a nice situation to be in, so it’s no particular surprise that he was eager to jet off to North America - first to Canada, then to the US where he attended the University of Pennsylvania.

He was due to go to grad school to Stanford but jumped into his first big dot-com venture - Zip2 - which absorbed his efforts full time from 1995 to 1999 (until he sold it - as above, for circa $300 million) Elon’s share of the payday didn’t keep him satisfied for long and he immediately was involved in starting x.com (yes, that’s the same domain name) which was at the time an online bank and email payment company. X merged with Cofinity (Max Levchin and Peter Thiel) - but you know that firm better by the name of their primary product: Paypal. Musk was for a brief while the CEO, but the board tossed him out and put Thiel in his place, whereupon they they threw away all their other branding (including X) and went whole hog down the path of Paypal, because Ebay was a juggernaut and Paypal was the #1 payment solution on Ebay - bigger than Ebay’s own payment solution (derp). Ebay eventually bought them for a billion and a half dollars and made “the Paypal Mafia” some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley for the ensuing generation. Elon took his money and grumbled and went on to do his next big thing.

Which was, of course, SpaceX. Yes, SpaceX is that old! Elon put $100 million into it in 2002, deciding to build his own rockets after the Russians refused to sell him surplus ICBMs (can you imagine the alternate timeline?) Elon kept bankrolling it and in what was literally his last shot at successful launch before he would have gone bankrupt, SpaceX got the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008 and Elon’s goose was in fact not cooked; SpaceX got a $1.6 billion contract from NASA. SpaceX has also since enabled the launch of the Starlink satellite broadband system, which has become extremely popular globally and is only now acquiring any real competition.

Also in the interim, Elon bought into Tesla. Despite common parliance he wasn’t actually the Tesla founder - he was one of the earliest investors; he led their Series A investment round. became their largest shareholder and chairman, but didn’t actually start the firm. But certainly he was pretty instrumental in making it happen. It was also 2008 that Tesla started shipping cars (the Roadster) and Tesla has been responsible for most of Elon’s wealth, thanks to this particular car company being worth more than the rest of the American car industry put together. Even before it became a meme stock. You might think that’s a little bit ridiculous, except that the American car companies are all more or less valueless in and of themselves these days and are run for the benefit of their unions - this is an appalling state of affairs, and I’ll go into that claim in another article, but ever since the Chrysler bailout on behalf of Lee Iacocca, the American automotive industry has been basically a government employment program like the Tennessee Valley Authority back during the New Deal era; they have been zombie corporations for decades. (The alternative, for those of you who weren’t around at the time, was that the American automobile industry would be gone, killed primarily by more efficient Japanese car makers and also to a much smaller sense European car makers at the high end. For further details… I’ll get to it.)

Tesla also bought SolarCity (this was a good move; some people didn’t think so at the time) and merged it with it own battery unit to create Tesla Energy. I expect at some point this may stand on its own; likewise, some of the other things under the Tesla umbrella may spin off. Elon sometimes plays a little fast and loose with corporate structures, which the SEC usually is pretty fierce about, but so far he’s gotten away with that. He has Neuralink, the Boring Company, Hyperloop, xAI and some level of ownership in OpenAI or maybe not ownership but he thinks he should (this is unclear - he contributed a bunch of cash when it was a nonprofit, they they turned it into a for-profit corporation, and there’s some legal maneuvering going on), probably some other ventures, but the next big thing he’s known for - and arguably his first sizable misstep - is the acquisition of Twitter.

Elon started talking about buying Twitter in 2017 and finally did so - possibly as an impulse buy - in 2022. It’s been something of an obsession, it’s taken a lot of his time and effort, and probably more of his attention than anyone other than he would probably like. It has given him quite the megaphone, and has given the world back a … remarkably uncensored channel. Some people say “dumpster fire” but y’know, free speech does not always bring out the best in people. It is good that it is open and not as censored as social media (especially Facebook) had become. It is probably not good that it is as toxic as it is, though he did make it lively again for a while. I still have more followers on X/Twitter than I do over here… but I never post there anymore.

Elon re-acquired the domain X and renamed Twitter to X. He has declared visions of creating “the everything app” on X - probably something like WeChat for a Western market, with news, chat, payments/banking, dating, ride hailing, shopping, gaming, video, food delivery, AI chat, search, etc. This is harder to do outside of China, of course, because Apple and Google do not generally permit universal applications (they prefer to keep a tighter leash on what developers can do or at least enforce that it gets spread across multiple apps) so we’ll have to see whether this comes to pass. He has at very least branded his artificial intelligence initiative xAI - and aimed it at competing with OpenAI, possibly using the Grok engine that is currently accessible through X/Twitter but probably also other technology that is yet to be disclosed or acquired.

Let’s not forget, Elon was Time’s Person of the Year (in 2021), an honor he shares with Bezos (in 1999), Mark Zuckerberg (in 2010), and of course Hitler (in 1938) and Stalin (in both 1939 and 1942).

He’s managed a number of media cameos of various quality. My kids insisted that I include Elon Tusk, from Rick and Morty, so here you go.

He also appeared playing himself in Machete Kills when Danny Trejo’s eponymous Machete needed to get to space and needed a lift from a SpaceX rocket, so that he could fight supervillain Mel Gibson in his orbital space station (in the teased-but-as-far-as-I-know-never-actually-made movie Machete Kills Again In Space.)

He was also briefly in Iron Man 2, just in case anyone saw that one.

For those of you who have only heard of Elon recently, the firehose of attention that has been pointed at him has generally been that he is some flavor of far-right technocratic sort, usually with people making various allegations about prodigious drug use or sociopathic upbringing from an apartheid perspective. This seems to mostly be incorrect, though: he left South Africa young in order to avoid being pulled into apartheid service, he very consistently voted Democrat in the United States after becoming a US citizen in 2002 - and claims to have not voted for a Republican until 2022, and empirically by observation was very much the poster child for someone who wanted to save the environment through renewable energy and zero-emission vehicles; there are endless examples of him talking about this. He was also very evangelical about saving humanity from existential threats like nuclear war and pollution and other end-of-life crises - his rationale behind wanting to go to Mars and on to the stars is to ensure that we survive as a species.

Elon, in short, very much believed in a better tomorrow and was working towards that, and thought we all should. (As to whether he was assisted in that path chemically? Well, it would appear yes, probably more than we’d all feel comfortable with.) He grew disillusioned with the Democrats when he felt that they had been captured by special interest groups - his most significant disillusionment was when his son decided to gender-transition and ostracized his dad; Elon felt that this was something that the “woke mind virus” crowd had pushed on him. Certainly California’s regulations during COVID stifled business, from his perspective, and were clearly getting in the way of actually working towards the better tomorrow he valued. The hypocrisy of Gavin Newsom forbidding people to meet-even-masked for important things like work - and then having a swank party with donors at the French Laundry in Napa as if there was no pandemic at all, as pictured by Fox 11 below, gave Elon and many other people a sense of “rules for thee but not for me” that seemed to define the Democrat elite. Gradually he realized that the party had become grifters, just in it for their own power and plunder, importing millions of illegal immigrants and bribing them to vote Democrat to keep themselves in power, and support increasingly radical agendas.

Something had to change. So he bought Twitter, and reached out across the aisle, with the intention of being a free-speech centrist. The left, of course, incinerated and vilified him. Elon summarized it with this political cartoon retweet.

Eventually Elon decided that political change was needed, that the Democrats would just pocket whatever donations he would make (or their NGOs would) and threw his lot in with a reform movement through an alliance with Donald Trump’s MAGA resurgence, proposing to clean house of bureaucratic corruption through the Department of Government Efficiency - an acronym invented as yet another example of Musk’s quirky humor, adopting the Shiba Inu DOGE logo (from the meme and in turn from Dogecoin.)

Elon rather obsessively loves his memes

Now interestingly, the Department of Government Efficency - DOGE - was not actually a new department, but a rebranding of the United States Digital Service, an Obama-era initiative to improve technological interoperability between goverment agencies that were rather hopelessly obsolescent and in need of modern innovation. (Some of my friends actually helped this team out back in its founding days; I won’t out any of them here, but they did good work and really modernized things as USDS. Somewhat understandably, they did not much like how the rebranded DOGE took over that inter-governmental agency and pivoted that infrastructure into a digital audit tool to find bureaucratic waste and malfeasance, but it was both a clever use of the new technological linkage and of the legislative circumventions and special exemptions to the rules that Obama had put in place to enable authority for the USDS back in the day. I suppose this is an important lesson about subverting the reins of power and what happens when the control of the government shifts from one party to another, but we’re getting a little off track from the Elon story.) Anyway, it wasn’t quite like USDS-now-DOGE was the Praetorian Guard, but they did in a metaphorical sense have the access cards to all the data vaults of all the government agencies (and the legislative authority backing them, so they weren’t seen as hackers) so they could actually pull the data and audit what was going on - when traditionally the response from intransigent bureaucrats was “sure, an audit request, we’ll put someone on that and get back to you in 18 months.” Elon was gleeful: he had a way to cut through red tape, find and reveal corruption, publish the waste (and savings), and embarass his enemies on Twitter and other media with a constant drip feed of misbehavior and graft found out; this could run for months or years.

But of course, Elon was also very busy with other things - he at this point was helming several major companies which were sort of languishing; he was spending a great deal of time on X and DOGE and political efforts and not as much on Tesla and SpaceX, and he was coming across as stretched very thin. His detractors suggested that he was on a phenomenal amount of chemical assistance, and also that his mental health was fraying; certainly, he was making some choices that were questionable… because it’s hard to say no to the world’s richest man, especially when he has a short attention span and a rather mercurial nature. So there was a concerted and not-terribly-subtle attempt to drive a wedge between Trump and Elon; as I write this, it seems like this has borne fruit and the two of them are at odds, though inevitably, who knows what tomorrow brings. Both of them seem to have a preternatural knack for landing on their feet and for finding ways to advance when a situation otherwise appears to be adverse, which would seemingly have sunk other people.

Perhaps, as Elon likes to theorize, we are in fact living in a simulation. It might explain how some of these rather unlikely occurrences keep coming together. I certainly won’t bet against him making it to Mars yet. What a very unlikely story thus far, and by no means over.