Not long after commandeering Twitter in October for a sum of $44bn, Elon Musk – who is also the CEO of SpaceX and the self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – dispatched an ultimatum to Twitter employees giving them two options. The first was to commit to being “extremely hardcore” and working “long hours at high intensity”. The second was to quit.
Musk had already fired approximately half of Twitter’s workforce – since anyone with a mere $44bn to spare on buying a social media platform is clearly in the business of pinching pennies. . . .
On the surface, writing about Musk should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The 51-year-old US-based South African live-tweets his bowel movements, makes penis jokes, gets off on anti-Black racism, and builds not-so-self-driving electric cars that crash into parked emergency vehicles. Unfortunately, this particular fish happens to be the richest person on the planet, who wields disproportionate control over terrestrial matters like the stock market and Donald Trump’s Twitter presence and who is now determined to make humanity a “spacefaring civilisation” as well – whether we like it or not.
As Musk told Time magazine, which shamelessly crowned him “Person of the Year” in 2021, the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”. According to Time’s obsequious writeup, Musk predicted colonising Mars within five years. Eventually, rocket ships would shuttle 100 people at a time to the Red Planet and then travel back to Earth, powered by Made-in-Mars fuel. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.