An opportunistic guy who has built a career and made a fortune off the behind-the-scenes flirtation with the government and clamorous PR stunts has now made a call that forces him to start pumping some real stuff inside his shiny outward glaze.
Elon Musk could be rightfully called one of the top persons of the year in 2023. The US businessman now embodies the ‘fake it till you make it’ principle even more prominently than ever before, however impossible this feat may seem.
This saying started out as a reference to a psychological effect whereby someone who acts as a successful person eventually becomes one. However, over the recent years, the principle has transcended the realm of psychology and migrated elsewhere, only to lose its original shine. Above all, it is true of the business world and, more specifically, the startup economy.
You are encouraged to conceive a business idea, trumpet it as a disruptive and futuristic breakthrough and rake in some hefty investment in the end. But the implementation part as well as financial yield is where things get tricky. The number of bubble projects that popped out of existence has recently been alarmingly high. Some discredited ‘maverick’ businesspeople were lucky to dodge scrutiny from law enforcement. The story of Theranos, a truly worldwide scam, and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, sentenced to 11-and-a-half years in prison, would be one perfect example.
Elon Musk has been projected to face a similar fate countless times. For instance, recently Musk’s white paper for Hyperloop, a project that has turned into a disaster, marked a 10-year anniversary. But time and again the entrepreneur proves the doubters dead wrong as he eludes trouble. That being said, the critics are technically right in claiming that Musk is a brilliant and opportunistic self-promoter with a unique flair for getting away scot-free and enviable connections among the US elites that has helped him secure government backing for his most ambitious projects. That is why, to a degree, the allegations of running sham business schemes do hold up.
However, recently Elon Musk has seen an incredible transformation where a glitzy glaze has suddenly developed an unorthodox filling underneath. Having turned on a dime, the former idol of liberally-minded Californians has now been rebranded as the world’s vilest enemy of progressive values. He moved his business operations to the Republican-dominated Texas, turned the totalitarian liberal platform called Twitter into an outrageously censorship-free X (firing throngs of trend-milking slackers in the process) and has unapologetically sided with the ‘evil’ in the growing divide faced by the American society.
And here is the interesting part. Did Musk realise what he was about to deal with once he threw down the gauntlet and opposed the left liberal agenda? He might not.
For most of his life, Elon Musk has been the darling of fortune with a cult following. Hundreds of millions of people saw him as a genius, a guru and a visionary. Successful stories always added to his lofty public image while failures seemingly never affected it a tiny bit. Topped off with an ingrained sense of entitlement and off-the-charts self-confidence, this could be a recipe for a god complex, something Musk may in fact be afflicted with. To prove this point, we can turn to any of the public controversies he was involved in, like smoking pot during an interview. The businessman looked poised to show the world that he could get away with literally anything.
Given the above, Musk’s right leaning may have started out as yet another antic of a flamboyant billionaire who believed in his lucky star as well as in his impunity and got into another dicey undertaking echoing the principle ‘let’s announce it big time, and then we’ll see’. That is how he set out on a truth-seeking crusade and confronted both the deep state that had once punched his ticket to the big leagues and the liberal establishment that had catapulted him to global fame.
Except this time, it went deeper. It may come across as a dubious statement to make with regard to someone who had spent decades running large business enterprises. Yet, it is true. It has turned out that ‘privatising’ NASA’s resources and research findings for SpaceX, years of siphoning off taxpayer money and reeling in billions of dollars in private investment for his shady projects is all eclipsed by mingling with the ‘wrong’ crowd amid the humongous domestic polarisation and railing against the ‘Washington swamp’.
The unsavoury reality is now banging on Elon Musk’s front door with an imposing force. The White House has discontinued subsidies for SpaceX’s high-speed rural internet programme. SpaceX is also being probed into over the alleged discriminatory policy (its refusal to hire illegal aliens), whereas Neuralink is being investigated over the animal rights abuse. The Securities and Exchange Commission is out to try and charge Musk over his purchase of Twitter. Tesla is going through a rough patch too, facing subsidy cuts and pending investigation into the alleged misuse of the company’s funds.
This is the deep state striking back at the businessman who joined the ‘wrong’ side of history. But Elon is adamant about standing his ground. His own future and that of his business empire now hinges upon the 2024 presidential election.
An opportunistic guy who has built a career and made a fortune off the behind-the-scenes flirtation with the government and clamorous PR stunts has now made a call that forces him to start pumping some real stuff inside his shiny outward glaze. A rogue businessman who has capitalised on the ‘fake it’ principles is now having to navigate the ‘make it’ part of the deal.
By the looks of it, Elon Musk is determined to go all the way through. Good luck then!