Analysis: Will The Real Elon Musk Please Stand Up?

Within the course of a week, the world witnessed two very different versions of Elon Musk.

On April 7, there was Musk basking in the glory of the opening of Tesla’s TSLA new manufacturing facility in Austin — an event dubbed the “Cyber Rodeo” that brought the world’s media to Musk’s stage. The Tesla chief executive owned the spotlight while wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat and dark aviator sunglasses, strutting with self-assurance as he launched his latest supersized endeavor — the new plant was not just any factory, but a Gigafactory.

This was the Musk that 82 million followers on Twitter TWTR have come to adore: brash, bold, larger-than-life, the living-breathing personification of the corporate world’s answer to a rock star, glowing in an aura that was further gold-plated by the news from earlier in the week that he acquired a 9.1% share of Twitter, making him the social media platform’s largest shareholder.

But then, there was another Musk one week later on April 14 who sitting awkwardly on a TED Talk stage while Chris Anderson pitched the softest of softball questions regarding his convoluted duet with Twitter, which by that time had devolved into a hostile takeover pursuit after he rejected an invitation to join the company’s board of directors and speak with the Twitter workforce in an unscripted Q&A session. The brash and bold cowboy-Musk of one week earlier was replaced with a somewhat disheveled, clearly uncomfortable man whose answers ranged from defensive to evasive to cryptic.

But Musk has always been something of a Rorschach test for those who consider him: some see the epitome of the can-do spirit that fuels the popular concept of the traditional American success story, while others see a problematic personality whose words and actions too frequently race down parallel tracks. With his attempted takeover of Twitter, the two sides of Musk have rotated in a simultaneous orbit around public scrutiny, with his supporters cheering on one side of his personality and his detractors magnifying the other.

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On The One Hand: Few people would discount Musk’s genius for engineering, both from a high-tech perspective and an emotional marketing pursuit. He deserves credit for expanding the electric vehicle sector from a fringe element of the automotive industry into a key focus that has reshaped how car manufacturers are aiming to the future. And his breakthroughs in rocketry via SpaceX have inspired a wave of attention to the space program not seen since the halcyon days of the Apollo missions.

Furthermore, Musk has surfed the zeitgeist with his unbridled enthusiasm over cryptocurrency, particularly Dogecoin DOGE/USD — arguably, no other high-profile person has done more to elevate that digital asset from its origins as a lame joke into a level of serious investment consideration. And the crypto crowd’s adoration of Musk is so intense that very few bother to acknowledge Musk has refused to enable crypto acquisitions of his Tesla vehicles.

Musk is also the very rare corporate executive who doesn’t self-quarantine in the proverbial corner office. Through his Twitter page, he has conducted a dialogue with the public — or, to be more accurate, he has conducted a running commentary with occasional acknowledgments to Twitter denizens who pique his interest with questions or comments related to his core interests.

From a social media perspective, Musk has been the best spokesperson for Tesla — indeed, the EV maker does not run advertisements because Musk’s visibility has given the company and its vehicles more attention than any marketing campaign could generate.

The results of this version of Musk are obvious: According to data from Experian EXPGY, Tesla controlled 69.95% of the U.S. electric vehicle market in 2021 — the closest competition, Nissan Motor Co. NSANY, had an 8.5% share of the market. And while electric vehicles account for only 4.5% of the cars on the U.S. roads, according to the International Energy Agency, the prominence brought to this sector by Musk has made them an integral part of the future of transportation.

Musk has also shown himself to be a benevolent friend to the distressed: he provided terminals from his SpaceX operations to Tonga after a tsunami devastated the island kingdom and to Ukraine after the Russians invaded their country, thus providing internet connection to nations that risked being digitally cut off from the world. And for those with a facetious sense of humor, Musk’s Twitter jabs at his critics are often priceless, whether he is dismissing the strident complaints of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as the ramblings from “Senator Karen” or challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin to physical combat.

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But On The Other Hand: Yet at the same time, Musk has a well-documented history of reckless and erratic behavior. Twice in his pre-Tesla years, he rose to the position of chief executive officer — at Zip2, a company he co-founded, and at PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL — and in both cases he was fired by each company’s board of directors for incompetent leadership. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) forced Musk out of the chairmanship at Tesla and fined him and the company $20 million each for his tweets that unilaterally claimed he planned to take the company private at $420 per share.

Even the Wall Street Journal, which has traditionally been sympathetic to Musk’s antics, sourly noted that the Tesla board is packed with “his longtime business partners and brother … they have continued to support him even as [he] has taken steps that would have likely tanked the careers of CEOs at other publicly traded companies.”

Musk's sense of humor has frequently created the impression that he's frivolous when he should be focused. Marijuana references keep popping up in his financial proposals, with the $420 per share strategy to take Tesla private and the $54.20 per share offer to take Twitter private, and his suggestion to remove the letter “W” from Twitter's name is more in keeping with the comedy of a Russ Meyer movie than the serious ruminations of a corporate leader.

In his SEC filing for the Twitter takeover bid, Musk insisted, “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.” But his concept of free speech has limits, especially when it is critical of him.

Musk’s impatience with those who question his wisdom occupies much of the 2021 book "Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century" by Tim Higgins, a Wall Street Journal reporter who documented multiple cases of Musk firing employees and terminating agreements with contractors who raised concerns and observations that were antithetical to his judgment. Last month, Tesla employee John Bernal was the most recent individual to be fired by Musk after sharing video reviews on his YouTube channel on how the company’s Full Self Driving Beta system worked (with varying degrees of success) at different locations around Silicon Valley. CNBC reported Tesla also terminated Bernal’s access to its FSD Beta system in the Tesla electric vehicle that he owns.

And Musk’s advocacy of democracy seems to stop at the Pacific Coast — his praise for the Chinese Communist Party, which he said created an “economic prosperity” that he considered to be “truly amazing,” was extreme even by the standards of American executives trying to flatter their way into China’s economy. News that the employees of the Tesla Shanghai factory are currently living as virtual prisoners in the facility and are forced to work 12-hour days for six days a week has not raised a peep of verbiage from the otherwise chatty Musk, who was also silent on China’s restrictive lockdowns in COVID-ravaged Shanghai — in comparison, he declared far less restrictive lockdowns in the U.S. in the spring of 2020 as “fascist” and was even faulted by many for spreading disinformation during the early period of the pandemic.

In his recent interview with Anderson, Musk displayed a habit of rewriting the facts to suit his narrative. He insisted without any prompting from his host that he only accepted the SEC’s actions against him in 2018 because banks threatened not to fund Tesla if he fought the agency — he referred to the San Francisco SEC’s staff as “bastards.” He also repeated the falsehood that he was a co-founder of Tesla, blaming the company’s founding CEO Martin Eberhard for lying about him. In reality, a lawsuit settlement with Eberhard included a provision that required Musk to be listed as a co-founder, even though he was absent when the company in its earliest days.

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The Circumstances That Prevail: Musk’s SEC filing on his proposed Twitter takeover offers the positive and negative aspects of his behavior.

On the plus side, he strode into the controversy of his creation with a take-charge attitude by insisting on a cut-and-dry transaction. He informed the SEC: “My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”

But after Twitter’s board of directors announced it was considering a poison pill strategy to stave off a hostile takeover, Musk’s take-it-or-leave-it stance was jettisoned in a series of tweets where he promised to erase the salaries of the Twitter board if he gained control of the company, ignoring the contracts that the directors have with the company that specifies their compensation levels and schedules. Rather than save Twitter money, Musk would risk increasing its legal bills with such unilateral action.

Musk also told Anderson his actions were “not about economics” and toyed with denuding Twitter of the advertising stream that fueled much of the company’s revenue stream, yet he tweeted that the Twitter board’s rejection of his offer was not “in the economic interest” of shareholders. When asked about how he would be able to finance a takeover, he was intentionally opaque — his SEC filing has no information on secured funding sources. His much-discussed “Love me tender” tweet gave a coy hint that he needs extra financial help to takeover Twitter. Obviously, Musk is not one to call directly for aid.

“Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it,” he added in his SEC filing, an interesting reference to a company that has been operating since 2006, is highly profitable, and whose platform helped elevate Musk to a heliocentric vantage point.

Next Chapter: Admittedly, Musk is a complex individual — and not unlike any person, he offers different sides of his personality to different audiences. What happens next, both in terms of the Twitter takeover and Musk’s other activities, cannot be easily predicted — and perhaps that’s the way he wants it.

Even Musk seems surprised by what he can achieve without trying, once noting: "I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens."

Photo courtesy of NASA / Flickr Creative Commons