Elon is in it for the Power

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

There are, it seems, somewhere north of three thousand billionaires o the planet, while, at the same time, more that seven hundred million people around the globe live in extreme, life-threatening poverty.  The disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots" on our small planet is unconscionable and immoral.

But it is what it is.

It is unlikely that any of the world's billionaires got to their exalted economic status through good works and constantly applying the Golden Rule in their dealings with others, but now that they have enough economic security to see their heirs and descendants comfortably through the next few millennia, it would seem that they could share some of their riches to pull others out of the reach of disease, pestilence, and starvation.

Some in fact do.

There are all types of billionaires, from adventurers like Hamish Harding, the Brit who died when the submersible in which he was a passenger imploded while trying to reach the Titanic, to recluses like the late Howard Hughes.    There are good billionaires who are focused on the needs of those less fortunate and the future of the planet - including the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and MacKenzie Bezos, and there are less good billionaires who, while exercising some charitable instincts, will still pick your pockets at every opportunity.  Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Prime, and the Washington Post, is such a creature.  And then there are the fringe billionaires, a group that includes phonies, wannabes, dubious, and barely billionaires, like Donald Trump, who rush around endlessly proclaiming their wealth and constantly trying to keep their name and image in front of the public in a way of solidifying their status as members of the Billionaire's Club.

There are also billionaires whose thrust in life is to run things.  They are the ones who are in it for the power that their wealth can exert.  And when it comes to power billionaires, Elon Musk, is definitely the big dog.

There have been two major reports in the news in recent weeks regarding the life and power of Musk.  The first was by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow in a report that he published in the New Yorker entitled "Elon Musk's Shadow Rule" and subtitled "How the US government came to rely on the tech billionaire - and is now struggling to rein him in."  It was published on August 21st and can be accessed free over the internet.  

In that article Farrow details how Musk had identified areas in which the government should be actively engaged in public endeavors, but has instead, for a variety of reasons withdrawn in favor of private enterprise. - and Elon Musk, (surprise, surprise) has stepped into several of those areas and gained an awkward control over things that should be in the public domain or that are necessary to control  large portions of government activities, the economy, and even war and peace.

Farrow notes that sixty percent of electric vehicle recharging stations are currently controlled by Musk, a platform that will give him (the majority owner of Tesla) an out-sized influence over the push toward green energy. But a lot of what Ronan Farrow concentrates on in this article is the Musk dominance in space. His company, SpaceX, is currently the only option that the United States has for sending astronauts into space and bringing them safely back to earth.  And SpaceX has set up a satellite communication system called Starlink that has so far brought satellite services and connectivity to over sixty countries.  There are currently over eight thousand manmade satellites orbiting the earth, and over half of them belong to Elon Musk.

Musk's satellite system, Starlink, was used to keep Ukraine connected to the internet and to keep its military struggle against the Russian invasion operational during the early days of the war when Russia tried to shut down the country's communications.  Musk had responded to a plea for help from Ukraine and gave them access to his already-established satellite communication system.  But not too long after Ukraine became dependent on Musk, he had some second thoughts about his involvement in a military operation and temporarily pulled the plug - leaving a submarine drone attack by Ukraine against the Russian fleet in Crimea to falter in the water.

Suddenly is was dawning on people in the US military and government that Musk was behaving more like an independent nation state in geopolitical affairs than he was as a private citizen assisting with what should have been a government-directed project.

Farrow also focuses on Musk's bursts of erratic behavior, such as those we have all witnessed with his hands-on operation of Twitter, or X as it is now known, and he makes references to the billionaire's reported drug use.

Farrow's article dwells on the power aspect of Elon Musk.

There has also been a lot of hype in the press over the last couple of days regarding a biography of Musk by skilled biographer Walter Isaacson.  The book, titled simply "Elon Musk," will be available in bookstores on September 12th.  One of the stories in the book that has received a lot of press has to do with Musk turning off Ukraine's satellite connection while that country was in the midst of the submarine drone attack on the Russian fleet, an effort that failed due to Musk's intervention.

But by writing a book-length biography instead of a long magazine article, Isaacson had more space to reveal the character he was trying to illuminate.  Isaacson spent two years shadowing Musk in order to gain a some level of personal understanding of the man, and he interviewed friend and foe alike.  Apparently from the reviews that I have read, Walter Isaacson acknowledges Elon Musk as a ruthless power player, and then tries to explain that ruthlessness in terms of Elon being bullied by other youngsters in the South African neighborhood where he grew up, including one beating that was notably severe - as well as daddy issues.

Both works of research on the life and times of Elon Musk are currently (or soon will be) available to anyone who has an interest in understanding the complexities and motives of the world's richest human.  Elon Musk is a man who seems to be motivated by a need for power and a desire to be right at the center of everyone's attention, and if those are his goals in life, he is already a raging success.  But if he has any desire to be remembered as a great human being instead of just a powerful person, he still has a long way to go.

It's about more than just you meeting your needs, Elon, it's also about taking care of the world and its people - those who are surviving, day-by-day, on the fringes of catastrophe - the world that has given you all that you have.  Take a lunch with Bill Gates and listen to what he has to say.  It would be time well spent - for you and the rest of the world as well.