Venture II
The following section is a work of fiction and does not reflect reality in any way.
You've been on edge ever since he walked into the main engineering area and looked around with kind of a vacant sneer. You never saw the sink, you only saw the pictures. You were too busy using the office Wi-Fi to download Signal and adding as many of your coworkers as you can, sending them a single saluting emoji in solidarity, as you had done very publicly at the end of the day yesterday for the Internet to see.
Slack was no longer trustworthy, even in private channels or one on one direct messages. You'd been friends with enough people in IT long enough that you know that nothing on Slack is ever secret. The new boss seems like the kind of person who'd want to know everything that was ever said about him ever.
This morning, though, you were up before your alarm with a buzz of anxiety in your head. You know what's coming– your fob won't work. If your fob works, your login credentials won't work. If your login credentials work, you've got a meeting somewhere you've never been before. If you don't have a meeting you will wait. You might go cry in the bathroom again. You might ask Taylor for an Ativan, if Taylor is still around.
Checking your email, he's sent an email called "A Fork In The Road". Reading it you catch the highlights. High intensity. Long hours. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade. We will need to be extremely hardcore.
The final line is a question: Would you like to stay at Twitter?
A checkbox to click labeled Yes follows that, followed by Submit.
I would like to set the record straight.
Elon Musk did not make a zillion dollars from apartheid emeralds and parlay that into some kind of seed money for PayPal or whatever the shorthand the Internet uses when they come up with oh-so-clever distortions of his name that I promised I wouldn't use when I talk about him.
His name is Elon Musk, and his father is a piece of shit.
The legend of how Errol Musk came into the emerald business, according to the unreliable narrator, involves South Africa, Italians, and the sale of an airplane in exchange for a share of an emerald mine in Zambia. Elon himself didn't really deal that much in the emerald trade, despite the fact you'd like him to be some kind of Rhodesian Diamond Baron like Doctor Doom.
The only time Elon profited directly off of emeralds he and his brother stole his dad's "Walkin' Around Gems" and sold them to Tiffany and Company. Of course, shortly after the sale, they were set into rings for ten times what the boys had sold them for, which was much more than a few dime bags and whatever else boys like that did on their weekends.
Errol Musk loaned his sons $28,000 in 1995 to found Zip2, which sold to Compaq in 1999 for a whole whack of money, giving Elon $22 million so, and his brother only $15 million. So like, it pains me to give him credit, but he did it more or less "legit".
Compared to his friends, it's barely any nepotism at all.
The rest is fairly straight forward. He founds X.com to try to be a bank, and, to his chagrin, has to partner up with Peter Theil, then the owner of Coinfinity, and the rest of the boys who formed PayPal. He and Theil have a fight over something petty, and the board gives him the boot in favor of Thiel, and starts SpaceX shortly after his exit.
SpaceX, in addition to what we discussed last week, is fairly firmly in the pocket of IQT, with Mike Griffin, President of IQT, and later President/COO of SpaceX, later top of NASA.
The story goes that Mike and Elon headed out to Russia around 2002 to meet with some officials from Russia in an attempt to buy ICBMs. The logic is sound here, as the connection between weapons of war and space travel are very closely related.
Remember Operation Paperclip:
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959; several were confirmed to be former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS or the SA. (Wikipedia)
Many of the collected scientists (by the OSS, direct predecessor to the CIA) wound up on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects.
The story also goes that Elon and Mike were laughed out of Moscow and given the exorbitant price of $8 million per missile, and Elon eventually sourced his reference rockets from elsewhere. Maybe. It remains a mystery to me, and I am always happy to learn.
Elon also loves to put shit in space. In addition to the 1650+ SpaceX satellites, which constitute over 60% of all satellites around Earth, he also has the contract to move shit to the International Space Station, and as of a few days ago, has the $843 million contract to tear it down at End Of Life in about six years. He also, of course, sent a Tesla Roadster up there. For science.
I originally planned to talk about his hair situation, but over the course of my research, I found this reasonable promotional article for a hair loss clinic that did a pretty good analysis of Elon's hair, and ballpark the transplant between 2002 and 2007. So now you know.
A lot of things have been said about Elon, and when I originally started planning to write about him, I realized there was only so much work I was willing to do. Part of the problem with Elon is that he's inserted himself into the political Zeitgeist by buying up a popular communication platform and using it to spread misinformation and lies, while stoking Islamophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism, and leveraging that to get political power what is sure to be one of the most caustic political regimes to ever take power.
This power will work as a cudgel, not a scalpel, to deconstruct and destroy relationships both foreign and domestic not only for the United States, but all of its allies and partners around the world. All because daddy didn't love him enough.
The final line is a question: Would you like to stay at Twitter?
A checkbox to click labeled Yes follows that, followed by Submit.
Take care of yourselves,
Matthew