Anton Savage: Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter now looks like one of the best investments ever
The entrepreneur may be devoid of morals, but stupid he ain’t
Originally published in the Business Post.
Elon Musk’s purchase of – and behaviour on – Twitter left many trying out figure out if there was something we were missing, or if one of the world’s richest and most influential people was actually a moron.
Trying to answer that question, I read several books on him and his businesses and found a man who was deeply dislikeable, disloyal (firing people on a whim and treating relationships and families as disposable), narcissistic and cruel – but bright.
And particularly bright when it came to seeing future trends. Musk spotted the global shift to online retailing and payments processing when it was still years off and made a vast fortune with what would become PayPal.
He spotted the trend towards electric vehicles (and the government policies and money that would provide billions to manufacturers) when EVs were still the subject of derision. He invested in, then subsequently bought into Tesla when all it had were prototypes and ambitions – his narcissism confirmed when he sued the founders of the company he had bought into for the rights to call himself not an early investor but a ‘founder’.
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