His companies have faced allegations of sexual harassment and poor working conditions in October, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137 million to a Black employee who accused the automaker of ignoring racial abuse. Such cosmic ambition rarely comes without consequences, and Musk still must answer to earthly authorities. He dominates Wall Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.
This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. stainless-steel silos-are silhouetted behind him in the setting sun. Two of his Starship rockets-gleaming, pointy-nosed, 160-ft. It’s a warm, windy December day at Starbase, his new rocket-fabrication and launch facility at the southern tip of Texas. “Sometimes I do hit some resonant notes with respect to humor,” Musk says of his puerile expressions.
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