What makes Elon Musk tick? I spent months following the same people as him to find out who fuels his curious worldview

Tucker Carlson, Greta Thunberg, Covid sceptics, military historians, the royal family … What would my time immersed in the Twitter/X owner’s feed reveal about the richest man in the world?What ’s it like tobe Elon Musk? On almost every level it is impossible to imagine – he’s just too much. Musk is the hands-on head of three mega-companies, one (Tesla) wildly successful, one (SpaceX) madly aspirational, one (Twitter/X) a shambles. He has plenty of other businesses on the side, including The Boring Company (which makes hi-tech tunnels), Neuralink (which makes b rain-computer interfaces), and his current pet favourite xAI (mission: “To understand the true nature of the universe”). He is the on-again, off-again richest human being on the planet, his personal net worth sometimes fluctuating by more than $10bn a day as the highly volatile Tesla share price lurches up and down. He is the father of 11 children – one of whom died as an infant, and from one of whom he is currently estranged – with three different women, which to his own mind at least seems to make him some kind of family man. He has 155 million followers on Twitter/X (we’ll call it Twitter from now on for simplicity’s sake), which is more than anyone else. Only a very few people – Barack Obama (132 million), Justin Bieber (111 million) – can have any idea of what that is like.However, unlike Obama, who follows 550,000 accounts on Twitter, Musk follows only 415.That anyone can copy (or at leas...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Elon Musk X (formerly known as Twitter) Internet Media Artificial intelligence (AI) Tesla Technology Computing Coronavirus Science Greta Thunberg Tucker Carlson Autism Threads Mark Zuckerberg Source Type: news