Elon Musk, currently the richest man in the world, has announced his intent to acquire a controlling stake in Twitter. The management, led by CEO Parag Agrawal, is determined to resist. Which way the battle will go is unclear. I’d be surprised if Musk won, and frankly I hope he loses this battle.
That said, I continue to be a fan. Here’s why: While the idea of him wielding disproportionate soft power is frightening, there is just so much to learn from him.
He has taught us that if we aim for the stars, we might just get to the moon. Two years ago, I watched him parade pigs on a stage that had microchips embedded in their brains. The chips were developed by his hyper-secretive start-up Neuralink. Human trials of these brain-machine interfaces would begin soon, he said.
I had said then that I would be among the first to sign up, because I didn’t intend to be left behind as humans merged with artificial intelligence. For now, no one seems certain what happened to those pigs, or what Neuralink is up to. But we do know that Musk has a history of making predictions that appear totally insane, only to make them come true himself. He predicted private space travel; cars that would drive themselves; tourists on the moon; human colonies on Mars.
Each of these wild ideas was an entirely new endeavour. There was no prototype for a self-driving car; no precedent for private trips to space. He had to build these ideas from the ground up, and as he did, he broke new ground in other areas too.
In trying to build a self-driving car, Musk invested in research on electric vehicles when most people weren’t even thinking about them.
In trying to get to the moon and Mars, he managed to build rockets at a fraction of the average cost. Two years ago, his company SpaceX displaced NASA (America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration) as the world’s largest rockets supplier by number; in a further twist, NASA is now one of his company’s biggest customers.
A thread that binds all of Musk’s narratives is the determination to never be average, and to fearlessly define what he wants. He realises that his purpose as an outlier is to push boundaries. It’s what makes people like him rare. It’s what makes people like him change the world.
So why do I want his bid for Twitter to fail? Because some things don’t belong with an outlier. Social media platforms are already dangerous spaces. They are hotbeds of abuse and slander, lies and political machination, all in the guise of free speech.
The founders of these platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have gained the kind of power that heads of state now look upon with envy. In the hands of a very wealthy man with a history of wild ideas, there is no knowing how Twitter might mutate further.
“I don’t care about the economics at all,” Musk told technology magazine Recode recently, when asked about his plans for the company. That doesn’t sound good, given that there is still no sign of what he cares for instead.
We have already had a front-row seat to just how much a single app can shape history. I wouldn’t want that app to be run by a maverick, especially one who still won’t tell us what happened to those pigs.
(The writer is co-founder at Founding Fuel & co-author of The Aadhaar Effect)
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