Businessman, statesman or simply madman?

Elon Musk is a billionaire, that’s for sure, but besides being a no doubt shrewd business man, he also seems to be turning into a politician, expressing his opinions about global issues publicly and some of them being rather controversial.

The his comments at a summit in Los Angeles in mid-September, that Taiwan was an integral part of China: That may be his opinion and, just as everyone else, Elon Musk is free to voice it, but when you are as prominent and permanently in the limelight, I would expect that one should have at least some awareness of the impact such utterances undoubtedly will have. Not surprisingly, Taiwan insisted that ‘it was not for sale’ in response to Musk’s comment.

Or take Musk’s decision to refuse a Ukrainian request to activate his Starlink satellite network in Crimea’s port city of Sevastopol last year to aid an attack on Russia’s fleet there: Sure, it is his network of satellites and he has every right to decide who uses it and who doesn’t, but in a situation such as the war in Ukraine, where Russia in blatant violation of international law invaded and occupied part of an independent country this equates to siding with Russia, the invading force.

And finally, most recently Musk’s endorsement on X (formerly known as Twitter) of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, which claims that Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

The question all this raises is a fundamental one: Should global industrialists play politics without being bound by the checks and balances that come with a formal political mandate? People like Elon Musk are undoubtedly aware of their influence on opinion-forming: shouldn’t they thus be a little more restrained in this respect?

Admittedly, Elon Musk’s shenanigans are only the latest examples of business tycoons meddling in politics, the problem is hardly new. Already in 2011, the US based and secretive Koch brothers, owners of Koch Industries faced controversy when David Koch addressed Tea Party leaders, saying, ‘The American dream of free enterprise, capitalism is alive and well.’ According to one estimate, they’ve contributed more than $100 million to conservative political causes, and a foundation that they back has trained thousands of Tea Party activists.

Or take George Soros: On September 16, 1992 Soros delivered an important message to the world. He proved the U.K.’s reluctance to raise its interest rates or to adopt a floating currency was a costly blunder. To reveal that institutional investors had become more powerful than big government, he short sold more than $10 billion in pounds, earning him an estimated $1.1 billion. The U.K. was unable to resist this fiscal quake and withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. His feat devalued the Pound and cost the U.K. treasury £3.4 billion.

Soros has also had a foray into American politics. In a 2003 Washington Post interview, Soros said removing President Bush from office ‘is the central focus of [his] life.’ He furthered, ‘[it is] a matter of life and death.’ Soros later added that, if necessary, he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush.

Particularly in the current age of social media and 24/7 online presence, messages posted on TikTok, Facebook or X (the platform formerly known as Twitter, which is incidentally owned by Elon Musk) reverberate much more around the digital sphere, reaching much larger audiences than the utterances of George Soros and even the rather discrete David Koch would have in their days.

Elon Musk has been known for his sometimes rather controversial comments namely on X, the platform he owns. And maybe he bought it exactly for that reason, to be able to voice his extravagant views when no other media outlet right in their mind would publish his opinions directly (obviously it is an other story for the media to simply report on something which was published elsewhere).

Others have been known for outlandish statements and it is then a darn hard job for us, the general public who tries to make sense of an increasingly complex world to forge its own views based on a multitude of probably mostly biased sources. But try we must! Yet it would be helpful if certain public figures were a bit more aware of their influence on opinion forming and thus sometimes would exercise a bit more restraint as far as their personal musings are concerned.