“In many ways he reminds me of Steve Jobs,” said Walter Isaacson, who wrote a book about Jobs, the outspoken Apple co-founder. On Wednesday, Musk, who is worth some $180 billion, tweeted that Discord, a freewheeling communications app that shut down a forum popular with GameStop traders for offensive language, was going “corpo,” or corporate. The jarring mix of highbrow success and a willingness to bash around on the fringes of the web has made him the consummate insider outsider. And he seems to have the internet coursing through his veins - he is fluent in meme culture, attuned to the neuroses of the web’s hive-mind, quick to reply to almost anyone and happy to throw digital haymakers at his detractors. At the same time, he hangs out with Kanye West, dates a pop star and named his most recent child X AE A-Xii. The richest man in the world is also, somehow, a hero to the anti-establishment crowd, riling up the digital masses one tweet at a time.Ī master of self-promotion, Musk regularly posts earnest messages about Tesla, his electric car company, and SpaceX, his private spaceflight company. He is at once a capitalist hero, a glossy magazine celebrity and a bomb-throwing troll with 44 million Twitter followers, inhabiting his role as the chief executive of two major companies with a bravado that most corporate leaders wouldn’t dream of.
It is a spectacle tailor-made for Musk’s live-wire online persona.
Musk’s message was seen as an endorsement of sorts from one of the most powerful figures on the web, and in the days that followed, investors bid up the price of GameStop to new highs. On Tuesday, as GameStop shares skyrocketed, Musk weighed in with a one-word tweet - “Gamestonk!!” - and a link to the Reddit forum on which much of the discussion has unfolded. The public markets are crazy.”Ī month later, Musk has inserted himself into one of the most confounding stock market dramas in years - the multibillion-dollar battle over GameStop being waged between elite hedge funds and retail investors communicating on Reddit.
And sometimes they have a good day, and sometimes they have a bad day, but the company is basically the same. “It’s like having a manic depressive who’s constantly telling you how much your company’s worth. “The stock market is a strange thing,” Musk said in an interview with Business Insider in December. Just weeks before Elon Musk became the richest person in the world thanks to the soaring value of Tesla shares, the eccentric billionaire reflected on the fickle nature of the public markets.
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