Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa.
His upbringing was coloured by a fervour for computing and entrepreneurship; he sold his first piece of software, a video game named Blastar, at the age of twelve. Later, he moved to the United States to study at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually dropping out of a PhD programme at Stanford University to co-found Zip2, a city guide software company that Compaq acquired for nearly $300 million in 1999.
Post the success of Zip2, he co-founded PayPal, which went on to become one of the world’s leading online money transfer platforms. The successful sale of PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 thrust him into the global spotlight.
SpaceX, established in 2002, aimed to make space travel more accessible and eventually colonise Mars. Today, it is a leading company in the space industry, having launched the first privately-funded spacecraft, Dragon, to dock with the International Space Station.
Adding to that, Elon has stated, multiple times, that Earth is not overpopulated, an idea with which I wholeheartedly agree. Depopulation is a globalist goal and there is no evidence supporting the Malthusian claim that Earth has too many people.
Meanwhile, his electric car company, Tesla, founded in 2004, has certainly shaken the automobile industry, pushing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles and advancing autonomous driving technology.
I prefer internal combustion (as did Henry Ford), but I suppose electric cars have a place in the market.
Neuralink is Elon’s ambitious attempt at creating high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces, while his OpenAI project focuses on ensuring artificial intelligence (AI) can be used safely and beneficially. Transhumanist agendas are real but equally misunderstood, as Joe Allen explained to me.
Elon has been vocal about his concerns regarding AI, stating that it could potentially be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
The thing to consider is that, technological progress occurs with or without his involvement. A way to keep everything in check is to create competition which, in turn, promotes choice and decentralisation.
In other words, if Elon is genuinely worried about the potentially dark future of AI, then being involved with its (competitive) development could potentially be a net benefit.
On top of all of that, Twitter is a demonstrably better experience than it was before he acquired it. I am no longer censored, for instance.
Viewing Elon as a zero-sum game is a dogmatic approach. Nuance matters.
Brian Berletic runs The New Atlas channel on YouTube.
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