Barry Didcock: In praise of Elon Musk – sort of

Dorsey was in the news because his first ever tweet, which is also Twitter’s first ever tweet, has been put up for sale by its ‘owner’, one Sina Estavi. Mr Estavi ‘bought’ the tweet as a non-fungible token (NFT) when it was ‘sold’ at auction in March 2021. (The inverted commas are for those still struggling to wrap their noodles round the idea of NFTs. If that’s you, try this: an NFT is a way of conferring ownership on something which only exists in the digital realm and can therefore be reproduced, or ‘right-clicking’ in the parlance).

Mr Estavi paid just shy of $2.9 million (£2.2 million) for the tweet and has now put it up for sale on NFT trading website Open Sea. It reads “just setting up my twttr” and being a historic artifact to rank alongside such items as Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone, Stephenson’s Rocket and Laszlo Biro’s first ballpoint (currently missing its lid), he fancied the item would net him around $25 million (£19 million). So he must have been a little disheartened when he was only offered $6,200 (£4,720), about one fifth of one per cent of what he paid. I’m no banker – and I do give thanks daily for that fact – but even I can tell that’s a poor return on an investment.

If you haven’t guessed by now, there are those who liken the trade in NFTs to a Ponzi scheme. True or not, if you like your investments to be something you can drink, eat, hang on a wall or rent out on Air BnB, then NFTs probably aren’t for you. That financial advice was free, by the way.

Twitter is for Elon Musk, however. He already owns nine per cent of the social media platform and has now shaken out the contents of his piggy bank onto his Star Trek duvet cover, counted the cents and made an unsolicited offered to buy it outright for $43 billion (£32 billion). He is, in his own words, “a free speech absolutist”, so it’s easy to see why owning Twitter appeals to him. The company, which is publicly owned and headed now by 37-year-old Indian-American tech whizz Parag Agrawal, is said to be considering the offer. If it is refused, Musk says he has a Plan B, though he hasn’t revealed what that is.

What will he do with the company if he does buy it and put himself at the other end of its ongoing timeline? He will tweet, obviously. He has 80 million followers and they need something to read on the loo once they’ve done Wordle. Will he also use it to become more obscenely rich than he already is? Almost certainly. Get stoned out of his gourd and promote his views on, say, the free market (he’s for it), direct democracy (ditto), socialism (against), a wealth tax (against)? Possibly, though his reported marijuana use has in the past been the cause of some tut-tutting. The US Air Force, which has contracts with Musk’s SpaceX company, was forced to act in 2018 after he openly smoked a joint during a filmed interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. Technically that put him in breach of some rule or other, even though marijuana is legal in California. After some harrumphing it was all brushed under the carpet.

More problematic for Musk’s public image are the views themselves. For example his mocking comments on the use of pronouns to indicate non-binary identities (“pronouns suck” was one much-publicised tweet on the matter). This has seen him accused of transphobia. Then there are his views on the pandemic. He has opposed mandatory lockdowns, claimed that children are “essentially immune” to Covid-19 (a tweet which Twitter judged not to have contravened its rules about misinformation), promoted the benefits of chloroquine as a treatment, tweeted support for Canadian truckers opposed to restrictions and mandatory testing – remember the blockade of the government buildings in Ottawa that was supposedly predicted in a 2019 episode of The Simpsons? – and regularly referred to Covid-19 as being like a cold.

Despite all that – and it’s quite a rap sheet – I can’t get enough of Elon Musk. There are many reasons. For a start, he has a great name, the kind Ian Fleming would give to what these days we well call a Bond baddie, or Gwyneth Paltrow to a candle scented with something, er, unusual. Then there’s the fact that he makes electric cars and wants to explore space and is married to a pop star, which is all kind of cool (at least to my juvenile mindset). High-brow American magazine The Atlantic calls him “an unusual purveyor of infantile jackassery, whose unfathomable wealth makes it possible, and even likely, that he’ll carry out even the most ridiculous plan”. That seems about right. In the same vein, Musk has also been described as a “bullionaire” because he peddles bull****, while in the boardroom he prefers titles like Technoking to the more traditional Chief Operating Officer (CEO).

Yes, it put a smile on my face too.

Oh, and he has a company which makes tunnels and I swear he only founded it so he could call it The Boring Company. “What I love about The Boring Company are the low expectations,” he tweeted in 2017. “Nowhere to go but down.” LOLZ, as they say on Twitter. True or not, the firm was born out of his frustration with traffic in Los Angeles and will be used to construct his much-vaunted underground ‘hyperloop’ transport systems. One of its boring machines is called Godot, as in Waiting For. Another is called Prufrock, after a TS Eliot poem. If he wants to continue with the theme of literary characters for future boring machines, may I suggest Bartleby, put-upon clerk and anti-hero of a Herman Melville short story, whose answer to any request to work was a refusal and the words: “I would prefer not to”?

Finally (and this despite having said he will stay out of politics) Musk has supplied Ukraine with thousands of dishes to provide internet connections via his Starlink network of satellites. On top of that he has challenged Vladimir Putin to a fist fight, even offering to use only his left hand if that seals the deal.

By now there are many who would like Elon Musk to go into space and not come back, like the dude in 2001: A Space Odyssey who ends up in the trippy, kaleidoscope-y whirly-gig thing that shows him his own future. But in an often dull world which has turned dark and threatening, you can’t say the 50-year-old bullionaire doesn’t brighten things up just a little.