If you look at it positively, then you can only admire that this Elon Musk is actually afraid of nothing and nobody. “I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to a man-to-man fight,” wrote the head of the carmaker Tesla and the aerospace company Space-X a few days ago on Twitter. According to the US billionaire, whoever wins the duel can decide how Ukraine will continue.
Elon Musk regulates with his fists what the West can’t do with sanctions, arms deliveries and political threats: Such a proposal can be described as courageous – or as the pinnacle of cynicism in a vita that is certainly not lacking in cynical moments. Not even a war, not even the suffering of millions of people, so this reading would go, can prevent the richest man on the planet from pushing himself to the fore and abusing the sad world situation for his own PR stunt.
Genius and madness, pioneering spirit and hubris – there is probably no other entrepreneur in the world who combines all these contradictory qualities as much as the son of a South African mechanical engineer and a Canadian-born model. Musk’s colorful personality has been the subject of all sorts of controversies for years, but it was also the cornerstone for building a corporate empire that has actually changed the world: Space X rockets carry people to the International Space Station ISS and thus take on a job that NASA, the most important space agency in the world, is no longer able to do. The Starlink satellite service provides Internet connections to remote or bombed-out regions of the world such as Ukraine. Tesla builds cars that are not just a status symbol for many buyers, but that have brought the car industry the biggest upheaval since assembly line production was invented.
The progress can be viewed in Grünheide, Brandenburg, a few kilometers east of the Berlin city limits, where Musk is opening the carmaker’s newest “Giga-Factory” this Tuesday. The work is exemplary for the way in which the Tesla boss creates facts and constantly pushes politics in front of him. Where investments have been debated elsewhere for years, within two years he had a factory built for six billion euros in the sands of Brandenburg, although until a few days ago he did not even have a final building permit and environmental organizations have been in court for a number of times because of possible effects on the water supply went. Musk reacted to the complaints, as he almost always reacts to criticism – with cheekiness and mockery: Brandenburg is by no means a region that lacks water, he explained, “otherwise hardly any trees would grow here”.
Musk thinks little of state rules and democratic processes
Although many politicians are always at loggerheads with the eccentric businessman, although Musk recently described US President Joe Biden as a “wet sock puppet” and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Hitler”, the powerful are often not far away when the computer and technology nerd from far away Texas: With Olaf Scholz and Robert Habeck, both the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor wanted to attend the opening of the plant in Grünheide on Tuesday.
This is also remarkable because Musk has repeatedly made it clear what he thinks of politics, democratic decision-making processes and state rules: nothing at all. For years he has been at odds with the US Financial Markets Authority because time and again he has been driving the stock markets with tweets that no one knows whether they are serious or not. He described the corona restrictions as state supervision, criticism that he hardly pays any taxes despite his assets of around 340 billion dollars at times, he countered by letting his fans vote online whether he wanted Tesla shares worth more to sell than $10 billion.
Musk follows in the tradition of libertarian US entrepreneurs who believe that all government regulations restrict their entrepreneurial freedom and that the world would be a better place if innovative company founders alone were in charge. Another representative of this genus is the German investor Peter Thiel, with whom Musk once founded the PayPal payment service. Both created the basis for their current billion-dollar assets.
With the new plants in Grünheide, in Shanghai, China and just outside the Texan capital Austin, the former physics and economics student now wants to take the next big step and develop Tesla from a niche to a mass manufacturer. It is no coincidence that he is locating his European factory in Germany of all places, the land of Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW and Audi. Rather, it testifies to a level of self-confidence that perhaps only someone who was bullied and beaten by their classmates as a child can develop – and then showed it to everyone. Musk may like the fact that the bosses of the established manufacturers in Wolfsburg, Stuttgart, Munich or Ingolstadt blink nervously when his name is mentioned, but it doesn’t satisfy his ambition. He has long had goals in mind that reach far beyond Brandenburg and Shanghai. “I want to die on Mars,” the rocket builder once said, “just not on landing.”