How Musk’s political interventionism expands his business empire

Elon Musk has broken boundaries. For months, the persona of the world’s most successful businessman has coexisted with that of the guy who rubs shoulders with extremist leaders and lectures sovereign countries about their domestic affairs, with the United Kingdom and Germany as his preferred targets. This new political facet, whether corporate strategy or pure ideology, has already brought him considerable economic benefits: Tesla shares have risen more than 50% since the election victory of Donald Trump, to whom he has tied his own destiny; the valuation of his social network X.com, once in free fall, has stopped its bleeding; bitcoin and the main cryptocurrencies, in which he invests, are moving close to historical highs; and the recent rounds of financing of xAI, his artificial intelligence company, and SpaceX, his aerospace company, have catapulted their market prices.

Having conquered Washington, Musk’s battlefield has now moved to Europe, where his economic interests are no less important. He has set out to bring down the Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose government is preparing new regulations for cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, and who is negotiating with Amazon to enter the broadband business through low-orbit satellites, the so-called Kuiper Project, which would compete directly with Musk’s Starlink, now much more advanced, with 87,000 connections in the country, most of them in rural areas. This fierce fight has also moved to France and to Spain, where Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government has just granted Kuiper an operating license.

Musk’s furious attacks on leaders he doesn’t agree with go hand in hand with business agreements and the courtship of those with whom he has a good relationship. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was forced to make a public appearance on Thursday to give explanations about the negotiations she is holding with SpaceX to award the company a contract for $1.6 billion to provide secure government and military communications through the encryption of telephones and the internet, as well as the use of satellites for emergencies such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters. “There is no alternative” to SpaceX, argued Meloni.

His ties to other European leaders, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whom he met with Trump in December at the latter’s Mar-a-Lago residence, also open the door for him to block European Union initiatives that harm his companies. Musk has turned his large checkbook into a political weapon. He not only financed Trump’s campaign with $277 million. He has also urged more investment in Argentina under its libertarian leader Javier Milei, and has said he is willing to do so himself. This is in addition to his campaigning to boost the far-right AfD in Germany, including an interview with its leader, Alice Weidel, thus guaranteeing himself allies in case the far right comes to power at some point, as could very well happen in neighboring Austria.

His continued interference, however, also threatens to provoke a counterproductive rebound effect for his business interests: it has earned the rejection of executives in France, the U.K. Germany and Spain. And Brussels, a regulatory giant that already has an open file against X that could result in a million-dollar fine, has warned that the former Twitter cannot promote Musk’s political positions over others. On a commercial level, the risk is that potential clients and users of Tesla and X who disapprove of his behavior will turn their backs on him, as some advertisers have already done, and look for alternatives such as the social network Bluesky.

The rise of an eccentric

Elon Musk has risk running in his veins. The richest man in the world has taken over from a generation of traditional investors led by Warren Buffett, who is in favor of not investing money in what he does not understand and who believes in the power of time to grow wealth. Musk is the antithesis of this conservative and cautious prototype. He is reckless and witty. He does not mind flirting with bankruptcy and failure, as he himself has acknowledged. Tesla was close to bankruptcy between 2017 and 2019, and initiatives such as the Hyperloop for travelling by train at 1,000 km/h are sleeping the sleep of the just. He shuns common sense, investing and starting companies in sectors that he does not understand, at least not in depth, because almost no one has immersed themselves in them before. Relying on his impulses and intuitions, he dives into futuristic plans, whether it be sending spaceships to Mars, implanting chips in human brains to connect them to computers, or self-driving cars.

It is hard to find a cutting-edge industry in which he is not present: he has built his empire through electric car companies (Tesla), social networks (X), artificial intelligence (xAI), aeronautics (SpaceX), satellite internet (Starlink) and neurotechnology (Neuralink). And he fervently believes in the future of cryptocurrencies, in which he invests. However, his persona is divisive and polarizing. While for his devoted followers he is a genius and a visionary — a sort of contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, in the recent words of the Argentine president, Javier Milei — his detractors, increasingly numerous, see him more as a modern-day Rasputin, whispering in the ear of the most powerful man in the world, over whom he exerts his influence. And they do not forgive him for his growing far-right activism, including electoral interference, or for his lack of interest in combating hoaxes, when he is not spreading them himself.

So how does the son of an engineer and a model become the richest man in the world? Elon Musk’s fortune exceeds $400 billion, almost double that of the second richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and more than the GDP of South Africa, the country where he was born 53 years ago. Since he was a child, Musk has had two obsessions: technology and the United States. In her biography of the tycoon, Ashlee Vance documents the moment he saw his first computer in a shopping center in Johannesburg. He kept insisting until he got his father to buy it. “It was supposed to take six months to assimilate the manual. I became obsessed and spent almost three days without sleeping until I finished the last lesson. It seemed to me the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my life,” Musk told Vance.

At the age of 12 he created his first video game, Blastar, and began to entertain the idea that the ideal place to grow up was thousands of miles away, in the United States. “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon,” says his mother in Vance’s biography. She was right. Despite his father’s attempts to dissuade him—he fired his domestic help and made him perform all the chores to teach him what it would be like to “play American”—nothing stopped him. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and mathematics, he felt understood. “Being surrounded by geeks thrilled him,” recalls his mother.

With his degree in hand, Musk headed west to the epicentre of all the action, Silicon Valley, and after doing internships at a video game company and another firm that conducted research on technologies applicable to electric cars, in 1995 he founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, a kind of yellow pages where businesses could make themselves known for an internet that was still in its infancy. After all, as Musk likes to say, everyone had the right to know the location of their nearest pizzeria.

Its sale four years later for $307 million was key to the rise he was about to undertake: he was no longer a newcomer asking his father for money to rent premises. He was a dotcom millionaire. And money was burning in his hands: that same year he founded the online bank X.com, which became the genesis for PayPal. And then came the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX in 2002, Tesla in 2003, Solarcity in 2006 (which would end up being acquired by Tesla), OpenAI in 2015 — from which he left hastily after a confrontation with its current CEO, Sam Altman —, Neuralink and the tunnel-boring company The Boring Company in 2016. Then came the purchase of Twitter (now X) in 2022.

Tesla, the eighth-largest company on the planet by market capitalization, became the first electric vehicle manufacturer to rank one of its cars, the Model Y, as the world’s best-selling in 2023, and it is the company that maintains Musk’s top spot among billionaires. The $44 billion he paid for X, however, soon proved to be an excessive amount. Calculations by the investment firm Fidelity suggest that its value has dropped by more than 70% to around $12 billion. The acquisition has brought him benefits in other ways, however: the social network claims to have more than 600 million monthly active users, and Musk has 212 million followers, the equivalent of the populations of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece combined. That powerful loudspeaker, and the lack of content moderation in the name of a supposed freedom of speech, have made the network the ideal platform for Musk’s new and profitable political purposes.

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