What did you do in the days before your life’s biggest triumph? Perhaps it was getting married, selling a business, landing a long-wanted job, or watching years of effort come together into the thing you had always hoped it might become.
Perhaps you went out for a nice meal, or sat nervously thrumming your fingers on the table, too nervous with excitement to think about anything else.
Elon Musk is about to shepherd his newly-merged conglomerate, SpaceX, on to the stock market in the biggest IPO in history. It is set to make his net worth even more engorged.
And yet, he spent a good chunk of yesterday agreeing with some of his most unpalatably slavish followers on his own personal mouthpiece, X, that we should “deport the invaders” and “imprison the government”. He also spent part of his time stoking the worsening of race relations in the UK and Italy.
It’s why Musk – despite his recognisable excellence at running a business and building new industries – will always go down in history with a massive caveat. The Rockefeller of the 21st century should be known to history and praised for his enormous contributions to human progress: electric cars, reusable rockets, satellite internet and a willingness to force sclerotic industries to move faster than they ever wanted to.
