Column: Elon Musk takes Twitter exactly where we thought he would — into the sewer. Is it possible that his company will be the most important technological development of the next two decades?
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, has a reputation for getting things done when no one else seems to want to — and when some of his fellow innovators, like the late Steve Jobs, would call him a failure. The question in my mind, while writing this column, is whether that may be the case today.
I just read a report in The Wall Street Journal’s DealBook that Elon Musk might be the man who will bring us the Internet. I asked Musk yesterday whether that was true and he confirmed it.
I asked what he thinks about it and he said he’d like to make it work.
Musk will make it work. And he’ll do it by making all the money in the world for a few years, at least. That’s how he operates, and the way his companies operate. Which brings me to the question of what we would have done had we been Google five years ago, or Facebook five years ago, or Apple five years ago — or Tesla five years ago.
Here’s where I part company with Elon Musk.
I believe in personalism. I believe that if people have all the choices they want, and they decide they want to be on a specific path they want to be on, that the path will work unless you make it work.
I believe that the path you have chosen depends on your own belief system — the beliefs you have about what it’s going to be like to live the life you want to live — and if you believe the life you want to live is a life of freedom and opportunity, and not a life of slavery and oppression, then it’s going to be an adventure for all of you.
I believe in taking risks. I believe
