Elon Musk Is Not the Person of This Year—Or Any Other | Opinion

I wonder what Elon Musk's adoring fans will say next year, when X.com/Twitter inevitably declares bankruptcy.

Advertisers have fled the platform in droves over the past year. This was predictable—Musk hollowed out the Trust & Safety team, invited previously-banned white nationalists back onto the platform, inverted the verification system so that the only thing it verifies is the user's devotion to Musk, and repeatedly spread and shared ludicrous conspiracy theories.

Musk has replaced billions in advertising dollars with millions in subscription revenue. He has also saddled the platform with about $1.2 billion in annual debt payments. You do the math.

At The New York Times Dealbook Summit last week, Andrew Ross Sorkin tossed Musk a softball, giving him an opportunity to explain why advertisers were missing out by pausing their ad spend. Musk reacted by breaking his bat and charging the mound. He declared that advertisers should "go fuck themselves." Sorkin, taken aback, asked how the platform was supposed to make money. Musk fumbled around for a moment, then announced that the advertising boycott was going to "kill the company. ... But, the whole world will know that the advertisers killed the company. And we will document it in great detail."

Sorkin responded that the advertisers would just say "Elon YOU killed the company" (because this was a business decision. X/Twitter has become a net negative for their brands. It isn't Disney or Walmart's responsibility to keep Elon's company solvent. That's supposed to be Elon's job.)

And Musk replied "Oh yeah? Tell that to Earth... Let's see how Earth responds to that.

I'll admit I have not spoken to "Earth" about Elon's management of Twitter (lol). But are we really still pretending this is going alright for him?

I read (and reviewed) Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk a few months ago. Peel back the prose styling and "Great Man" mythologizing, and the portrait that emerges is of a brusque, risk-taking entrepreneur who had two big, low-probability bets (Tesla and SpaceX) pay off. He's a bit like a gambler at the roulette wheel whose number hits twice in a row. Maybe he has some keen insight into the game that the rest of us couldn't see. Or maybe he just likes risky bets and caught a hot streak at the right time.

Musk wasn't a particularly gifted student. He got a mix of A's and B's in college, without making an impression on most of his peers. He headed out to Silicon Valley during the 1990s goldrush years, when everyone with a business plan was becoming a paper-millionaire. He sold his first company Zip2, for a few million. He started a second company, X.com, which was trying to build an online payment system. The company merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity to form PayPal. Musk was the CEO for a while. Thiel and his colleagues thought he was a disaster and forced him out. He was still the biggest shareholder, so he got very rich off the sale to eBay.

He invested the PayPal windfall in Tesla and SpaceX. Both companies were repeatedly on the brink of bankruptcy. That's to be expected—electric cars and private space travel are tough industries to turn a profit in—but there's ample evidence that he made a range of unforced management errors.

What saved him, time and again, was his connections to other rich Silicon Valley-types and his gift for scooping up government money. At one point, the "Paypal mafia" saved SpaceX from bankruptcy because Thiel and his peers felt guilty about ousting Musk. For years, Tesla's main revenue-generator came from arbitraging California's Zero Emission Vehicle regulatory credits scheme. This isn't a genius innovator bravely succeeding where government bureaucrats fail. This is a guy funded by our tax dollars, insisting he made it on his own.

During the pandemic, Tesla became a meme stock. Musk's wealth soared tenfold. He went from a normal multibillionaire to the world's richest man—a centibillionaire. And with that much money and public exposure, the myth of Musk started to fade. In 2022, he became the first person in history to lose $200 billion. He has reduced Twitter to an empty husk of what it once was. His Cybertruck is an automotive punchline. His rockets keep blowing up, and regulators are finally starting to care.

We have a bad habit in the United States of equating wealth with brilliance. The best argument I can imagine for Elon Musk being named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" is that he has done a fantastic job undermining this faulty equation.

He may be rich, but he isn't clever. His companies have succeeded, but they've benefited from limitless funding streams and free government money. What episodes like the Dealbook interview have made clear is that, despite all that money and fame, Elon Musk is nothing special after all.

Dave Karpf is an associate professor in the George Washington University school of media and public affairs. He teaches and conducts research on strategic political communication and digital politics.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.