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It should be fun to be Elon Musk. You get to build rockets. You get to build cars. You become really, really famous and – not for nothing – really, really rich. It's a sweet concert if you can get it, and Musk got it.
But Elon Musk does not seem to be amusing at all lately. This is not just because of the continuing delays in the development of its Dragon spacecraft, which may not be ready to transport crews to the International Space Station until the next day. in 2020, three years late. And this is not just because of the two fatalities, in 2016 and 2018, involving people using the autonomous driving function in one of the Musk Teslas. These are failures – in the case of the Tesla deaths, tragic setbacks – that can be an inevitable part of any major operation trying to do ambitious things.
Musk's problems are more recent, and well, Musk – a recent combativity There have been smackdowns and tweetstorms that threaten to turn the old wünderkind into another media troll. The most recent and blatant case concerns his growing rivalry with British diver Vern Unsworth, who played a key role in the recent rescue of twelve boys and their football coach in a flooded cave in Thailand
. Musk has entered the center of the surrounding media storm with offers to send drill teams and a child-sized submarine to lend a hand in the job. For many people, it was less like helping than making headlines, a need for FOMO to introduce it into a drama that had nothing to do with it – just as much More than what Musk was offering was of uncertain value, while site already were lifeguards and first responders doing this kind of work to make a living. Things became personal when Unsworth dismissed Musk's efforts as an RP coup and said to "stick his submarine where it hurts."
Musk responded to nuclear tweak with a nuclear tweet, labeling Unsworth a "pedo", probably a pedophile, and replying "Bet it's a signed dollar, that's right" when his supporters Are opposed to it. Both tweets were quickly removed, but not fast enough to prevent Unsworth from announcing that it is pursuing a lawsuit. Whatever the prospects of a lawsuit, Musk lost big in the public hearing room. The man in a dive suit that enters a cave beats the man in business suit who owns a large company – and that should have been axiomatic to somebody else as well. mediatized as Musk.
May, when Musk, responding to the negative coverage of Tesla's production and design woes, tweeted his criticism of "the hypocrisy more than the hypocrisy of the big media companies" that publish only enough truth "to stifle the lie". announced that it was launching a website to check the facts – allowing users to weigh in to know if a story is true or not. Comparisons with repeated cries of "false news" by President Donald Trump were inevitable.
Musk, like Trump, has long benefited from the skyrocketing of a non-critical media: with Trump, it was the saturation coverage of his rallies in 2016; with Musk, it is the false comparisons of Tony Stark and the often gullible cover of his astonishing promises – send two paying passengers around the moon this year or have humans on Mars by 2024. (The weather has covered the two stories here and here.) And like Trump too, Musk seems to need to hit hard when the questions get harder and the coverage becomes less favorable.
The comparisons between the two men clearly have limits. Trump was always a provocateur of social media, saying the scandalous thing, giving voice to the dark idea; the fury that it aroused was a feature, not a bug. Musk was a defender, a decidedly happier media figure. When he made his first attempt to launch a rocket, he tweeted memorablely: "If it works, I pretend to be a volcano lair. It's time. "When these landing attempts repeatedly failed, he published a video compilation of crashes on his own Instagram account, set to a soundtrack of Monty Python .
These were the messages of a person who is or was, equal parts, self-conscious and deeply secure, which makes Musk's current descent into petulance and defensiveness, especially the slamming head. Public self-immolation is not unique to it.Many entrepreneurs, artists or politicians have exposed after the spotlight they profit from are turning to somebody else. 39, one of the others or the one that shines to them still shows, for the first time, their flaws
.Musk – it feels heat and shows ugliness – then there will probably be more than his angry performance coming in. He chose a tough business – a bunch of Companies – and none of them will be easier. People, like rockets, can crush and burn – and when that happens, there is no funny soundtrack.
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