Elon Musk: Internet's darling to controversy's favorite child, what happened to our own Tony Stark?
For all intents and purposes, Elon Musk is the real-life Tony Stark.
An engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur, and philanthropist, Musk is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer/designer of SpaceX, co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla Inc., founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink, and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI.
He has also envisioned a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop, and proposed a vertical take-off and landing supersonic jet with electric fan propulsion that he has dubbed as the Musk electric jet.
What's his end-game? Among other things including reducing global warming, Musk wants to reduce the risk of human extinction by establishing a human colony on Mars.
As of May 2020, his work has earned him a net worth of $39.4 billion, which makes him the 23rd-richest person in the world.
Like Tony Stark, he oozes charisma, too. Just a cursory look through his Twitter page, which boasts of 33 million followers, would reveal how the 48-year-old isn't out-of-touch with the generation of today — there are dozens of memes, clever retorts, and obscure meta-references to internet subcultures.
Musk has made it a point to project an image of himself that makes him seem relatable, approachable and the kind of guy who can and will be everybody's friend.
He all but secured himself a spot in the internet hall of fame when in June 2018, he followed up on what seemed like a joke he had made on Twitter and announced his Boring Company would be producing flamethrowers that would be available to the general public.
Cleverly and self-deprecatingly named 'Not a Flamethrower,' it sold 20,000 units.
It was maybe around a month later that he went a little off the rails, and began displaying the kind of self-destructive behavior that has since earned him comparisons to another software tycoon, John McAfee.
Responding to his followers, he had offered to assist rescuers during the Tham Luang incident, where 12 children had been trapped in a cave, by arranging for his employees to build a small rescue pod and documented the entire process on Twitter.
Engineers at SpaceX and The Boring Company built the mini-submarine in all of eight hours and personally delivered it to Thailand, though, ultimately, it wasn't used in the rescue.
In the aftermath, Vernon Unsworth, a recreational diver who has been exploring the cave for six years and played a key advisory role in the rescue, criticized the submarine as nothing more than than a public relations effort with no chance of success, and that Musk "had no conception of what the cave passage was like." He also suggested that Musk "can stick his submarine where it hurts."
In response, Musk branded Unsworth a "pedo guy" and claimed he probably wasn't even involved in the rescue because he "never saw him at the cave." When he was criticized for the comment, he doubled down and tweeted, "Bet ya a signed dollar it's true."
While he eventually deleted the tweets, his gaffes did not end there.
He went on to hire a self-proclaimed private investigator who had offered to "dig deep" into Unsworth's past, only to learn the man was a convicted felon with multiple counts of fraud.
He then sent a Buzzfeed News reporter who had written about the entire controversy an email where he claimed the diver was a "single white guy from England who's been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years... until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time." He said the email was off-the-record, only to realize his mistake when the reporter posted it on social media and pointed out that "Off the record is a two-party agreement," which he "did not agree to."
To pile on the misery further, he was slapped with a defamation suit in Los Angeles federal court that sought $190 million in damages. While he was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, Musk did little to stay away from trouble in the months leading up to the trial.
Even as he publicly sparred with Unsworth, he made a now-infamous appearance on 'The Joe Rogan Experience' where he sampled a puff from a cigar that allegedly consisted of tobacco laced with cannabis.
Tesla's stock dropped after the incident, coinciding with the departure of the company's Vice President of Worldwide Finance earlier that day, and questions were raised if his cannabis use could have ramifications for SpaceX's contracts with the United States Air Force.
He has also threatened to launch a website to rate journalists' credibility because of unfavorable reporting, criticized analysts for asking "boring, bonehead questions," and tried to make Tesla into a private company.
Which brings us to these past few months, during which he has made a serious of increasingly questionable assertions about the coronavirus pandemic.
He has branded the coronavirus panic "dumb," falsely claimed that children are "essentially immune" to the virus, railed against N95 masks, and repeatedly criticized the stay-at-home orders imposed across the country by stating that the governments should "give people their freedom back."
The behavior doesn't seem to be self-serving either. Earlier this week, he managed to wipe $14 billion off the value of Tesla by suggesting that the stock price of the company was "too high" even though he has already been fined $20 million in the past by regulators for tweeting about its future in the New York stock market.
If the buck does indeed stop with Musk, he's most definitely not doing a good job of it.