First there was Bill Gates, then Steve Jobs. Now the latest corporate messiah to come out of Silicon Valley with all PR guns blazing is the iconoclastic Elon Musk. The South African-born wunderkind is the man behind Tesla, the world’s largest electronic car producer, and he has managed to privatize space travel through his multi-billion dollar SpaceX venture. Musk peddles ‘vision for profit’, wrapping his ventures in a ‘saving the species’ message to beat back climate degradation by putting us all behind the wheel of a luxury Tesla. If that doesn’t work, Musk plans an escape from our befouled environment in his spaceships to set up an 80,000-person space colony on Mars. Musk promises ‘his’ Mars colony by 2040. Altogether Musk (‘worth’ over $20 billion) is CEO or major player/moving force in SolarCity (an energy services firm), the Boring Company (an infrastructure operation tasked with building tunnels to avoid traffic congestion) and OpenAI (to promote friendly artificial intelligence).
Like most of Silicon Valley’s tech-evangelist entrepreneurs, Musk’s politics run to the market libertarian variant opposed to the heavy hand of government regulation slowing down the entrepreneurial genius required to (profitably) ‘save the species’. To his credit he is not a climate change denier (he actually quit Trump’s ‘advisory council’ over this) and is suspicious of the social impacts of artificial intelligence. Sometimes he refers to himself as a ‘socialist’ and other times ‘half Republican, half Democrat’. He toys with the idea of a guaranteed income but how he would pay for it given his advocacy of a wealth-friendly ‘flat income tax’ is not clear. He says he is against patents yet his myriad companies hold many. He is on record for opposition to public subsidies to corporations but SpaceX and SolarCity stand to collect an estimated $4.9 billion of them over the next 20 years.
