Elon Musk is making his critics eat their words

Twitter was about to crash spectacularly as the engineers were fired. Tesla was about to implode, as production targets were missed and its sky-high prices deterred buyers. His rocket ships were going nowhere, he was in court over allegations he misled investors, his fortune was deflating and to cap it all, new children kept popping out of nowhere, which is always a distraction from the day job. The gloating of the liberal Left over the downfall of Elon Musk was undisguised. His mix of libertarian politics, disruptive entrepreneurship and ruthless management was meant to doom him to almost certain oblivion. They could not wait to celebrate his demise.

Yet over the last few weeks, Musk has staged a spectacular turnaround. Tesla reported record sales this week and its share price is roaring again. Twitter has steadied and may finally be on the path to profitability. His early investment in ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool that is taking the internet by storm, showed once again what an astute investor he is. Meanwhile, he continues to run multiple businesses with far more verve and ambition than most of his grey, suited rivals manage to run one. True, Musk doesn’t sign up to the “woke capitalism” package of inclusiveness, social responsibility and political activism that is considered compulsory for chief executives in the 2020s. But in terms of sheer ability, he trumps all his small-minded critics – and he does so again and again.

There is no question that the man who last year was, admittedly quite briefly, the richest man on the planet has had a rough few months. Tesla, the stylish electric vehicle manufacturer that is the core of his fortune, showed signs of slowing down dramatically. It was struggling to meet production targets, and its premium pricing was starting to deter buyers, especially as all the traditional giants finally caught up with their own range of battery-powered cars.

From a high of more than $US380 in April last year, by Christmas Tesla’s shares had slumped to just $US110, wiping billions of dollars from its market value. His personal losses came to a massive $US150 billion, earning him a place in the Guinness World Records as the person who had lost the most money ever. His rocket company SpaceX was going nowhere fast. It turned out he had fathered twins with a senior executive at one of his companies and by the end of the year, he had up to 10 children. He was in court facing a class action from Tesla shareholders over allegedly misleading tweets about taking the company private. Perhaps most seriously of all, he was forced to go ahead with a rash $USUS44 billion takeover of Twitter, only to find he had massively overpaid for a company that was bleeding cash, had no real business model and was staffed by political activists who were more interested in censorship and campaigning than running a business and who were in open rebellion against their new owner. At times it seemed as if everything that could go wrong had gone wrong – and all at the same time.

The liberal-Left establishment never liked Musk. That is partly because he is an entrepreneur, and they are never popular with the kind of people who believe that bigger government and more regulation are the only ways to create greater prosperity.

It is partly because like much of the PayPal mafia, named after the investors who made their first fortunes from the payment site, he sympathises with libertarianism, recommending the works of Ayn Rand, the writer and philosopher the Left hates the most.

And it is partly because his restless, workaholic ambition was a permanent rebuke to lesser mortals among us.

The final straw, however, was his takeover of Twitter, the Left’s favourite forum, and a site that made hysterical virtue-signalling liberalism a global phenomenon. Surely no organisation could survive the termination of the entire “human rights” department, the abrupt demand that everyone return to the office, or the insistence that staff be “hardcore” or else get out of the way? If it didn’t crash, every company in the world would have to re-examine its staffing.