RISE OF ELON

Elon Musk seems wildly popular. He appears in the news weekly, each time with a new incoherent beef, get-rich-quick scheme, or bacchanal tech-scandal. It is easy to convince oneself that he’s powerful and intelligent, based on his public persona. The case in favor of Elon is easily comprehendible; Bo Cunningham, Senior, enumerated it to me as follows.

“One of the biggest reasons I think positively about Elon Musk is his ability to persevere, even when that’s not what every one is telling you to do … What makes Tesla so fascinating is its mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, and Elon Musk has helped make this happen. Not to mention SpaceX and all of the new tech regarding reusable rockets. Musk knows the risk of carbon emissions and global warming, but rather than make it political, he took action and made Tesla the tech and vehicle giant it is, all while staying in tune with Tesla’s mission … Tesla also has the safest cars in the world, as well as the most American-made, helping bring jobs to America … More recently and controversially, Musk bought Twitter for billions in the name of free speech, as he has seen the rapid censoring across several social media platforms, and wanted to make his site the opposite. Through this outlet, he has pointed out flaws in the media and politics which has them setting their sights on him.”

Elon Musk was born in 1971 to an English and Dutch family, in Pretoria, South Africa. He attended what Americans would call “private” schools throughout his childhood, located in predominantly-white suburbs. However, his family, including his City Councilman father, publicly opposed the institution of apartheid, with one Musk biographer claiming this opposition contributed to a young Elon’s decision not to join the military, but to attend college in Canada, where his mother was born. His family was wealthy: Elon’s father helped to fund his first company, Zip2, a website that hosted city guides. Musk’s shares there were bought out in 1999, and he moved on to finance, co-founding X.com, an online bank, in March of 1999. After a year, this company merged with a larger, similar one called Confinity, forming a union called PayPal. Musk was the chairman, and became the company’s second ever CEO after Bill Harris was ousted a month in. This lasted around six months, after which point Elon was removed and replaced by his longtime foil/nemesis, Peter Thiel. Elon remained the largest shareholder, owning over 10% of the company until it was bought in 2001 for $1.5 billion.

Elon invested his PayPal money into two companies in the early 2000s through which he became a household name. One began when the Mars Society, a group of space enthusiasts, tried and failed to buy a viable rocket from the newly formed State of Russia. Elon founded SpaceX, then, with the goal of making affordable, viable space travel a reality. The company has since launched many rockets, making strides in reusable spacecraft and satellites. Simultaneously, he invested in a startup electric car company called Tesla, which has truly been a massively successful disruption of hegemonic carbon in vehicles. It has also been a frequent beacon of controversy, due to Elon’s staunch anti-union leadership, deaths stemming from “full self-driving” mode, accusations of “pervasive racial harassment” and “a hostile work environment,” the fact that it takes between 3,000 and 8,000 gallons of water to put out a Tesla that’s on fire because of the ensuing chemical reaction, and Musk’s constant public exaggeration of the company’s capabilities. He’s also founded xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.

All of that is not how I first learned about Elon Musk. He is most well-known as a Twitter celebrity. He’s been an active user of the platform for almost 15 years now, loudly proclaiming his conservative cultural and economic stances, frequently cited and celebrated by the “alt-right.” His celebrity on the platform culminated last year, when he bought the company and renamed it “X.” He’s made many unpopular decisions since then, such as firing approximately 80% of the company’s employees and cutting most content moderation amid an unprecedented rise of hate speech on the platform.

X was once the best source on the internet for large amounts of textual data. Its API (interface allowing data access and transfer) was easily the most robust among the major apps, and researchers in disparate fields such as journalism, linguistics, and political science relied on it heavily. Essentially, any time a claim is backed up by “social media evidence,” it is almost always the result of an algorithm run on a wide swath of Twitter data. Vastly increased pricing and general degradation of service “will devastate public interest research,” as the board of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research declared in their open letter to the board of Twitter sent in 2023.

Kolya Souvorin, Senior, was impacted by this in his research into Machine Translation for Kinyarwanda. “It is hard to find large amounts of Kinyarwanda text on the internet. Up to this year, the API allowed for unlimited data scraping for free, which would have been a very good resource, as many Rwandans use Twitter. It would now cost about $500 to access the amount of data that my project would require. He’s running the company dry.”

Taylor Aishmann, Senior, felt similarly. “Elon reminds me of the card in Cards Against Humanity which says ‘Having big dreams, but no realistic way to achieve them.’ At the end of the day, though, he’s just another out-of-touch billionaire. He’s wanted an ‘everything app’ since Paypal, so the rumors go, and his sudden removal was because it wasn’t a realistic expectation at that point. It’s not a realistic expectation now, either. His conduct since shows that he doesn’t really understand how coding works.”