Elon Musk - How does South Africa's spacefaring superstar strike you?

Elon Musk isn't your regular billionaire, he is in fact, the world's richest man with a net worth of $215.1billion. But beyond this, he's known throughout the world for his revolutionary electric car company, Tesla, as well as SpaceX, a spacecraft manufacturing company, and The Boring Company in California which focuses on mass transit innovations.

What is it about South Africa's most iconic superstar that has everyone hanging on his every tweet? Is he a villain, or a hero? Or simply an unconcerned businessman using his social leverage to enrich himself? Let's find out.

SpaceX, Tesla, and Paypal - the beginning 

Image Source: Biznews/TeslaSalesSA2021

Born in Pretoria in 1971 to a South African father and a Canadian mother, Musk had always shown an incredible knack for computers and engineering. At the age of 12, he developed a fully working video game which he sold to a computer magazine.

After attaining his Canadian Passport, Musk left South Africa to avoid doing military service for an Apartheid government he did not believe in and to seek greater opportunities in the United States. After attaining his bachelor's degree in physics and economics in 1997, Musk quickly realised the potential of the burgeoning internet craze and founded a company called X.Com (a financial services bureau) which later became Paypal.

Musk bought major shares in Tesla Motors (Later becoming Tesla) in 2004 after taking interest in developing electric cars. In 2006, Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 394 km on a single charge.

After becoming obsessed with the idea that man needed to become a multi-planet species to survive, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to manufacture rockets at a much cheaper rate. After years of testing, Musk was able to launch the world's first-ever privately funded Heavy Spacecraft which carried one of his iconic Teslas into space in 2020. 

Problems surrounding his mass transit innovations in California

Image Source: The Boring Company

Through the innovations at Tesla, Musk was able to springboard his authenticity and credibility as a talented engineer and quickly diverted his attention to public mass transit. The Boring Company, his tunnelling venture, is focused on developing the first public loop system akin to the tubes used in the Jetsons.

Musk's overall goal was to lessen traffic by providing people with rides in their vehicles which would be powered by a hyper suction system designed to reach speeds of up to 600kms and travel underground. The main selling point is that you could take public transport without it being "public." 

"Individualised mass transit in the future," Musk has said.

However, what may look fine on paper does not always translate to reality. The personal aspect of the system has its shortcomings. People already have a personalised transport system - they're called cars. According to Ted Svehlik, West Virginia University's Vice Chair, adding additional personal vehicles to a one-way underground system during peak hours would simply lead to more congestion. Making this venture nothing more than a literal pipedream.

However, Musk has shot back, claiming that regardless of whether or not there are results on congestion, they will not simply pivot away to something else, and see this venture to its final stage.

Elon Musk the Human

Image Source: Thedelite.com

In a world where great men inspire, it's exceedingly difficult to remain objective about their character without pointing to their many contributions. To keep this level, we will focus on two main criteria to try and analyse the man's ultimate goals. These come in the form of how he treats his staff, family, and general strangers and does he value moral consciousness over profit margins?

We can never truly read his mind, but we can infer what he believes through his actions. In 2010, his first ex-wife, Justine Musk, wrote a scathing column in Marie Claire titled "I Was a Starter Wife: Inside America's Messiest Divorce," where she details her experiences in her marriage. Personal stuff, and not enough to convict what could be a more mature individual today.

So, what about how he treats his army of employees? According to a Medium post, one of his workers decried the awful working condition at his Tesla factory in Fremont. Musk subsequently responded to this post by sending out an email to the division discouraging unionisation and emphasising just how "fun" the company is. A few months later, a full expose was released by The Guardian UK.

Meanwhile, at SpaceX, the crowning company of his career, a $4 million settlement had to be paid out to staff who claimed they were being mistreated and underpaid creating a pattern of unethical business practices that regular workers find to be unfair.

While it is his job as a CEO to maximise profits as much as possible, selling himself as both a visionary and a stalwart for humankind is seemingly contradictory.

Twitter, Memes, and accusations of Market Manipulation

Image Source - Reddit

"There's an odd irony to Elon Musk's ability to move the market while attacking what he sees as unnatural market forces in short-selling," Dan Lane, Data analyst at British trading app Freetrade. 

Musk has faced problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for tweeting about Tesla's stock. In August 2018, he said he wanted to take Tesla private at $420 per share and that he had secured the funding to do so. This was ruled to be a false claim and both Musk and Tesla had to pay a $20 million fine in settlements. 

Later that year he tweeted that Tesla stocks were too high, sending shares down by almost 10% in an instant. With just a few seemingly innocuous tweets, Musk has become the Zoella of public markets and there's no way around it for the SEC.

He is also well known for fueling the surge in shares in Gamestop in 2021 after tweeting a "Gamestonk!!" with a link to the WallStreetBets Reddit thread. This made-up word is a combination of Gamestop and "stonk" which is Reddit slang for stocks.

The company's all-share index increased by $10 billion in after-hours trading which resulted in amateur trading apps having to pause trading entirely. Of course, Gamestock's price plummeted shortly afterwards culminating in hundreds of thousands of people losing money with a select few individuals coming away with a tidy profit in what could be described as a public "Pump and dump" scheme. While not entirely Musk's doing, jumping in on the bandwagon certainly did the trick.

Having the social standing, credibility, and wealth that he has, it is clear that Musk tends to play fast and loose with his tweets, but the issue comes with actually proving his intent to manipulate the market in his favour, which there is none. The responsibility ultimately lies with new regulations which need to catch up with modern trends and proactively enforce what is and what isn't acceptable.

"The reality is that this new brand of charismatic leader has a public platform now and isn't confined to the boardroom. It's up to regulators how they deal with that but, eventually, the onus will be on them to update the rule book," added Lane. 

Conclusion

Love him or dislike him, Elon Musk is perhaps one of the most powerful people on earth. A man defined by grandiose and exciting dreams from romancing supermodels to colonising Mars. And while it's easy to have these dreams, Musk has proven that he has the intellectual and financial capacity to fully realise some of these seemingly impossible goals.

Regardless of his motivations, his power and money grant him every opportunity to change the world in the manner he sees fit. For better or for worse.

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