Tech companies in the early 2000s all seem to have one thing in common: some type of “tech heroism” about their leaders. It was all about college drop-outs; “change the world w. Internet”, era-defining products,start-ups from garages and college dorms, and pure madness and nerdiness. It was often just one person, the founder, whose beliefs were so strong that it became the spirit of the entire company. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Lei Jun, Zhou Hongyi -- all these tech heroes pound on my view of the tech world.

Elon Musk seems to be the very last one of them. He is ambitious about creating a new era; he has undeniable charisma that draws thousands of excellent engineers to him; and he is undoubtedly mad and a workaholic.

Two years ago, I was a huge fan of Musk. I loved the story of how he found his early success with zip2 and X.com; I loved how he invested all his savings into the fourth launch of SpaceX (the first three failed) and saved it from bankruptcy; I loved the futuristic look of Tesla cars; I loved his idea of renewable energy and space exploration. He was the man I wanted to become. 

I still love how he seems to genuinely believe in what he is doing and devote himself to it, which is something I have not yet found in my life. But the rest of his story gradually shattered as I developed  a deeper understanding of the world. To me, Elon Musk’s image doesn’t stand anymore.

Don’t get me wrong: renewable energy and space exploration are still great areas to explore.Tesla and SpaceX are still top-tier companies in their fields, and they have certainly led to great developments in their fields. Elon Musk, however, did not. He was a terrible CEO in X.com and later in Paypal.The success of SpaceX was not due to his contributions, but that of his engineers. He was manipulative to his employees and family, got mad because he wasn’t mentioned as a Co-Founder of Tesla when he was just an investor, and eventually kicked out the actual founders and CEOs of Tesla. So, Elon Musk has a control issue, and he likes to take credit for other people’s hard work to build up his image of a weirdo-nerdy-tech-jesus.

Elon Musk’s recent “big deal” is his acquisition of Twitter, of course. That brings to my second point about him: he plays around with his influence too much. After his initial success, Elon Musk tasted the power of media presence. He began exploiting his social platforms to build an image of him. Naming his child X Æ A-12? Fine. Smoking weed in Joe Rogan’s podcast? Why not. Colonization of Mars? Bullshit, but OK. Suddenly announcing the privatization of Tesla so the stock price dropped like a cliff? I don’t care. What I care about is that he used these crazy moves/ideas to convince the public that he was just like the good old tech heroes. The public follows his move. Despite some negativity associated with Musk’s public image, people still believe that he is a trend-setter. 

And what a new trend he started with Dogecoin, a meme crypto that was literally born to mock the invalid value of cryptocurrencies. Never did the founder of Dogecoin think that his creation would be exactly what it opposed in the first place. Elon Musk made some tweets, and his sheer influence boosted up the price of Dogecoin to nearly $.7 from nothing. Then a few months later, he announced that people could no longer use Bitcoin and Dogecoin to purchase items from Tesla, and the price of the two cryptos tumbled. The scariest fact is not that Musk most likely profited from manipulating the price of Dogecoin, but that he CAN manipulate an unmonitored area solely based on his influence. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Musk becomes the literal King of Mars if his Mars program works out. That’s how effective his influence is.

So the question becomes: is Elon Musk just another capital? We all know that the capitals control the public somewhat. It can be done through media, commercials, releasing infos, PRs, funding politicians, etc. But never has a capital trolled the public so effectively and blatantly like Elon Musk. I guess he is now just another capital with personality issues, and we can go from there.