SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27
After Musk joined Twitter in
2010, it took him 18 months to
post more than a welcome note.
“Went to Iceland on Sat to ride
bumper cars on ice!” he tweeted.
Hardly anyone noticed.
In recent years, tweeting has
become part of Musk’s daily rou-
tine. He posts at all hours, pro-
moting developments at Tesla,
posting launch videos from
SpaceX. He replies to fans, snaps
at competitors, needles critics.
Asked why he devotes so much
energy to it, he replied, “Because
Twitter is fun.”
In a 2018 interview with “60
Minutes,” Musk described Twitter
as “a war zone. If somebody’s going
to jump in a war zone, it’s like,
‘Okay, you’re in the arena, let’s go.’ ”
It’s a game and a show, and a way to
promote his ventures.
He says it’s also about free
speech, but there his ideas have
been inconsistent. He tweeted last
month that he favors allowing as
much free speech as the law per-
mits. Yet he also has called govern-
ment regulation of Big Tech a likely
necessity: “If something ... could
potentially negatively affect elec-
tions or something like that ...
there probably should be some
regulatory oversight,” he told
Swisher.
Yishan Wong, who worked
with Musk at PayPal and later
became chief executive of Reddit,
predicted that Musk would be
frustrated by Twitter, arguing that
the calculus required to protect
free speech while discouraging
damaging misinformation and
abuse — especially violence
against women and minorities —
is far more complicated than actu-
al rocket science.
“The internet is not a ‘frontier’
where people can go ‘to be free,’
it’s where the entire world is now,
and every culture war is being
fought on it,” Wong wrote last
month in a lengthy Twitter
thread. “The problems are NOT
about politics, or topics of discus-
sion. They are about all the ways
that humans misbehave when
there are no immediately visible
consequences.”
Eventually, Musk would be
forced to bow to the need for
discipline, Wong wrote, pushing
the freewheeling entrepreneur
into the dour and “inevitable” role
of censor. “This will distract from
his mission at SpaceX and Tesla,
because it’s not just going to suck
up his time and attention, IT
WILL DAMAGE HIS PSYCHE.
“I think if Elon takes over Twit-
ter, he is in for a world of pain,”
Wong wrote. “He has no idea.”Musk has branched out, looking
for other ways to bolster life on
Earth.
In 2016 he launched Neuralink,
which seeks to develop brain im-
plants to be drilled into people’s
skulls — including his own, “if it
works,” he says. So far, the evi-
dence is thin. But Musk says the
implants eventually will cure ail-
ments, restore lost memories —
even eliminate the need for
words.
“You would be able to commu-
nicate far more quickly and with
greater precision” without words,
Musk said on Rogan’s podcast. He
expects to liberate people from
having to talk “in maybe five
years, five to ten years.”
Until then, Twitter offers com-
munication in 280-word snips —
and poses a challenge unlike any
Musk has faced so far.requirements. The result is a
windfall for Tesla, which posted a
$331 million profit in the third
quarter of 2020 because of the
credit sales.
Around the same time, Tesla’s
stock price began the steep climb
that would make Musk the
world’s richest person, topping
out at more than $1,200 per share
a few months after he changed his
title from CEO to “Technoking.”
(Tesla closed Friday at $769.)
When Musk talks about Tesla,
he steers clear of profit, preferring
to focus on its role in saving “all
life on Earth,” as he told podcaster
Kara Swisher in 2018.
“If we do not solve the environ-
ment,” he said, “we’re all damned.”Not rocket science
With Tesla and SpaceX estab-
lished as exemplars of innovation,factory that would become its
main manufacturing hub. But the
meticulous Japanese carmaker
sensed that Tesla was moving too
fast and cutting corners, and the
relationship soon soured. A recall
Toyota faced on a Tesla-built pow-
ertrain didn’t help.
“Basically, it was cultural in-
compatibility,” said Ed Nieder-
meyer, author of “Ludicrous: The
Unvarnished Story of Tesla Mo-
tors.” Tesla and Toyota were “kind
of like oil and water from the
get-go,” he said, and Toyota wor-
ried “that Tesla’s practices would
reflect poorly on their brand.”
Still, Musk found a way to make
major carmakers dependent on
his company. Because Tesla sells
only electric cars, it easily sur-
passes state emissions standards,
winning credits it sells to carmak-
ers that fail to meet emissionssigning an electric version of its
Smart car. Tesla electrified Daim-
ler’s vehicle to its specifications
and added a few extra perks —
which shocked the German pow-
erhouse during a demonstration
at the electric carmaker’s Bay
Area offices in early 2009.
The car “was so fast, you could
do wheelies in the parking lot,”
Musk said, according to “Insane
Mode,” a book by Hamish McKen-
zie. The Germans gave Tesla a con-
tract to make electric powertrains,
according to the book, saving Tesla
from its immediate crisis and help-
ing it win a $465 million loan from
the U.S. Department of Energy.
Newly flush, Tesla pressed
ahead with the Model S, the car
that made it a household name.
Next, Toyota bought a 2.5 per-
cent stake in Tesla and sold the
electric carmaker the Californiaaccording to investors, former ex-
ecutives and employees who spoke
on the condition of anonymity for
fear of risking their jobs by speak-
ing publicly about Musk.
In court testimony last year,
Musk denied engaging in rage
firing but said he offers “clear and
frank feedback, which may be
construed as derision.”
To make Tesla a realistic alterna-
tive to gas-burning engines, Musk
blazed seemingly contradictory
paths, pushing hard against estab-
lished automakers even as he
struck up vital partnerships with
Daimler and Toyota — just as
SpaceX had both attacked and
wooed the federal government.
Tesla was near collapse during
the 2008 Great Recession when
Musk spotted an opportunity.
Daimler, parent company of Mer-
cedes-Benz, was seeking help de-
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