The Elon Musk Enigma: You Can't Put Him In A Box

If you asked me who Elon Musk was a couple of years ago, I would have scratched my head and said, "Elon who"? Then I noticed these cars on Perth roads called Teslas which were electric and found out that Musk owned the company. Today everywhere you go, you see them.

Around the same time, I heard about Space-X—also owned by Musk—which was launching rockets into earth orbit. I thought, ho-hum, I lived through the dawn of the space age starting in the 1960s when America put men on the moon. Okay, so Musk's rocket is reusable.

Today, Musk is a household name. He is the world's richest man, and Tesla is valued at $1trillion—four times the value of Toyota.

After finding out that Musk co-founded Paypal in Silicon Valley, my initial impression was that Musk was just another Big Tech leftist, much like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Dorsey. I have since realized that you can't put him in a box. 

Just putting Tesla and SpaceX together seems a bit contradictory. Electric car—green, climate change, saving the planet—meets the Falcon rocket, powered by kerosene, a derivative of oil—that evil fossil fuel. So is Musk green or just when it comes to certain things? 

Actually, Musk has said that we need oil and is opposed to Biden's war on fossil fuels. In 2021, Musk said this on the Joe Rogan podcast: 

"I'm not in favour of demonizing the oil and gas industry. We're gonna need to burn fossil fuels for a long time. The question is just at what rate do we move to a sustainable energy future?"

The Tech giants—Facebook, Twitter and Youtube—have collectively engaged in censorship and banning people like Tucker Carlson of Fox and ex-President Donald Trump. Along comes Elon Musk, who buys Twitter to be a platform for free speech. At least that is what he says. Let's hope that is true. Today, we live in a place where information is disinformation, according to the whims of those running mainstream and social media. We see this with Covid. Accurate information from doctors and scientists about all things Covid are deemed to be disinformation by the likes of Twitter. Why? Because some preset algorithm determines that this is so.

Will Musk follow through and make Twitter a totally free platform? It remains to be seen. The knives are already out for Musk. So those who want to restrict speech are worried.

Recently I heard Musk speak about something I discussed in one of my previous articles about the earth's population––that it is on a trajectory to start declining. Currently, the young have fewer babies by choice. Also, technological devices emit low-grade radiation and chemicals in our environment have a detrimental effect on fertility.

The existing narrative is that we must reduce the human population for sustainability. Musk says the opposite is true.

We are at risk of destroying humanity on our current path because, by 2100, the human population will rapidly decline. This is at odds with fellow Technocrats like Bill Gates.

Musk's involvement with a company called Neuralink seems at odds with a concern for humanity and nature. You see, with Neuralink, Elon Musk is on the Transhumanism bandwagon. His plan is to merge humans with machines by inserting brain implants. The idea is to heal traumatic brain injuries and let paralyzed people walk again. He describes it as a "FitBit in your skull." He argues that brain chips are needed for humans to keep pace with increasingly intelligent computers.

Now we come to a moral question how far down that path we go and can technology end up ultimately damaging us. When do we stop being human, and when do we become machines? Can anything go wrong going down this path? Have we seen this before? We've seen how mRNA vaccine technology has gone off the rails. 

So is Elon Musk a friend or foe?

In the 1950s, there was a TV show called "To tell the truth", in which a panel tried to guess which one out of three people was a person who had a unique talent. Before revealing the individual's identity, the moderator would say, "Will the real…please stand up.

So I say, will the real Elon Musk please stand up.