Who radicalized Elon Musk?
His ex- Wife
Elon Musk is an interesting man. The son of a wealthy South African family who made their fortune mining for emeralds during apartheid, Musk first made a name for himself as the CEO of Paypal. But it wouldn’t be until the 2010s that Musk would become a household name.
That’s when SpaceX, a private spaceflight company, and Tesla, an electric car manufacturer, really came into their own. Musk went from being a relatively unknown businessman to the real life Tony Stark. The man who single-handedly revived the space age dream and was going to bring humanity into the future.
Which is an impossible standard for anyone to live up to.
Elon Musk voiced a parody of himself on the hit science fiction comedy Rick & Morty in 2019, shortly before his fall from grace.
The cracks in his persona began showing up right away. The Hyperloop is a legitimately dumb idea once you dig into it. The Neuralink is a failure. But it wouldn’t be until 2016 that Musk really went off the rails. That’s when actress Talulah Riley divorced him for the second time.
And that’s when his brain really broke. Musk was now approaching 50, thrice divorced, estranged from his children, and with a completely made up public persona. He became desperate for any sort of relevance, for anyone to find him cool, or failing that, for anyone to just pay attention to him.
Musk accuses a heroic cave diver who rescued children stuck in a flooded cave of being a pedophile. Musk had wanted to invent some sort of submarine to rescue the children, only to be told his idea was dumb. The children all lived, by the way.
That’s why he bought Twitter. That’s why he’s fallen in with the far right. That’s why he spends his days making increasingly inane tweets. Hell, that’s why he renamed Twitter “X”, as if we’re still in the 90s.
Despite his money Musk’s personal life is in shambles. He’s not a radical as much as he is a sad, lonely, man desperate for attention and validation.
