Elon Musk is definitely not to be underestimated. Defying widespread skepticism about the commercial viability of electric vehicles, he challenged the incumbent auto giants and built up a company, Tesla, that now has factories on three continents which, in 2021, produced almost a million vehicles. “He has almost single-handedly created the electric car zeitgeist,” the Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Higgins wrote in his book “Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century,” which came out last year. “He embodies it. To many, he is it.”
Higgins’s book demonstrates that when Musk, who is now the world’s richest person, based on the value of his stake in Tesla, decides to do something—be it building commercial electric vehicles or colonizing Mars—he will move mountains to make it happen. Last week, Musk announced that he wants to buy Twitter, and he is prepared to pay its shareholders about forty-three billion dollars for the privilege. Musk’s announcement, which came in a security filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, created a political and media firestorm. Some conservative commentators hailed a declared intention to protect free speech, but many social-media experts warned that dismantling Twitter’s efforts to regulate harmful content could unleash a fresh tide of misinformation and online harassment. At this stage, however, Musk still hasn’t answered two basic questions that his latest gambit has raised.
The first one is…
