Elon's Big Mission and Why Twitter May Be His Waterloo
Understanding the Current Chaos and His Future Chess Moves
In the wake of controversy about Elon’s decisions during the takeover of Twitter, it’s easy to react with judgement. However, I think it’s more fruitful to step back and to explore the deepest reasons he may be making these moves.
His Big Mission - the North Star that provides an overarching purpose to his life - is to colonize Mars with 1 million people and make humanity trans-planetary by 2050 or soon thereafter. It is a truly audacious and previously unthinkable goal that requires an extraordinary amount of money to accomplish. He has estimated it will required $100 billion at the barest of minimums and $100 trillion at the high end.
Given the width of that range, we have to assume that $1 trillion dollars is likely closer to the minimum and $10 trillion quite possible. Since the effort is unprecedented, it’s unlikely he could get other investors to shoulder that level of risk, especially considering there are no singular funds that are designed to invest that kind of capital into a single deal. The entire Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund is $680 billion and they only invest small amounts of that in any particular deal. Besides the budget of nation-states or Wealth Funds, which are subject to political processes, there is nothing on the planet that can make investments at the scale a Mars colonization effort would require much less with the kind of boldness that will be required.
That is why if he’s serious about fulfilling that mission, as I believe he is, that he is aiming to be able to self-fund the 5000+ voyages that he estimates are required to build a city for one million on Mars. He likely needs to become at least a trillionaire to fund this vision on his own. If we accept that vision as his North Star goal (even if we don’t share its sense of importance) it makes many of his businsess moves more intelligible. Many of his companies are designed to generate profit AND to be part of developing key infrastucture for the Mars colony.
Tesla is designed to decarbonize the transportation and energy sector on Earth AND it will be vital to have these technologies as part of the Mars colonization. However, now that the world’s automotive industry is in full-throttle competition for the future of EVs, it will be hard to exceed a $1 trillion market cap with Tesla alone and his ownership share is only 20%. So that only gets him to $200B or so of net worth that is potentially accessible.
He also owns around 50% of SpaceX, which contributes another $100B of net work but there is a limit to how many satellites the government can sponsor. He has kept the ownership here closer to his chest as he needs to make big moves that only a majority owner (or close) can make. Selling off these shares at the scale required would limit his ability to treat it as his personal property.
The Boring Company is a smaller scale investment but has developed tunneling technology that will be highly useful on Mars. Neuralink? Great for melding the minds on Mars with the technology required for colonizing a hostile planet.
Which brings us to Twitter, which initially seems off-road from the Mars vision. . On the one hand, if Twitter were to become a more sophisticated version of the global commons and monetize the traffic well, beginning to rival Facebook (market cap $550M) both in reach and ability to monetize client data, it could start to near Facebook’s advertising revenues plus they could add in the recurring membership he is aiming to get off the ground (which would increase the multiple on revenues). Those two things together could result, on a 4- 8 year horizon, in Twitter being worth north of $200B or more and he would own all of it. While this is a great return on investment it’s not highly likely to get him to $1 trillion or more by itself.
So how might he use Twitter to get $1 trillion in assets faster to fund the Mars colonization? The hidden answer, I believe, is Dogecoin. Elon’s been by far the biggest promoter globally of the meme coin and there is a single wallet, rumored to be his, that owns 28% of all the Dogecoin available (currently about $2.5B worth). While that is not chump change, how could the value of that wallet skyrocket 100 or even 400 times? Let’s say that Twitter were to succeed in becoming a high-traffic, well-monetized, trusted global town square and that it eventually rivals Facebook in social media earning power. And let’s also assume that the widely-held crypto bull prediction that virtual currencies will eventually gain a lot market share relative to the global currency market is correct. The current market cap of crypto is about $800B . By the time it represents a much larger share of global currencies exchanged on this planet (which could well happen by 2030 if adoption curves take off again, as has happened historically and is now powered by tens of billions in VC investment), crypto should surpass $10 trillion in total market cap. Where does Dogecoin come in? If Twitter dominates the global town square and it were to choose to accept ONLY Dogecoin as their crypto medium of exchange (which Elon would pitch as cheeky and fun), it is entirely conceivable that move alone could propel Dogecoin into adoption as a market leader of crypto, skyrocketing its value and market share and pushing serious development dollars behind it. And if he indeed owns 28% of Dogecoin and it becomes 35% of the total global crypto market (a bit less than the 38% bitcoin is now) plus the overall crypto market surges to $10 trillion more more, all of a sudden there is $980 billion dollars worth of Dogecoin in a single wallet, which is fairly likely to be his Now he has not confirmed that but the list of secretive candidates who could have $2.8 billion worth of the memecoin is fairly short. And there was a deposit of 420.69M of Dogecoin into that mystery wallet makes it seem like a clear “wink” from Elon that parallels other actions such as the sale price for Twitter.
My basic thesis, then, is that Elon is making chess moves to become a trillionaire by 2030 or shortly thereafter and fund the Mars colonization himself, still on the 2050 horizon. No one else could make that big of a single bet. And he likely can’t quite get to the required funds with his other companies alone. Plus, if he sells off all the stock in his other companies, it will leave him in a disempowered place for the running of those companies (each of which has parts of the technical infrastructure required for the Mars colonization).
A Dogecoin gambit, which is what I am guessing he is planning behind the scenes, would give him the required capital he will need and he can use all the other stock he owns as collateral to secure additional debt financing.
If Dogecoin becomes the ONLY way to exchange monetary value on Twitter AND Twitter becomes THE de facto global commons, he would be well on his way to self-funding the Mars colonization.
This hypothesis would provides a bit of a different context to all the Twitter moves he is doing.
The Twitter acquisition fits into his overall plan at two levels. First, I think he genuinely believes that the intelligence of Earth’s global brain can only accelerate with the free flow of information. Twitter is, in his opinion, the global town square and all voices need to be permitted (even while freedom of reach is not guaranteed, as he recently stated). His reasoning is not about individuals or even short-term societal goals. It’s about the acceleration of humanity’s intelligence. He sees that as a Greater Good than anyone who is individually harmed in the process through unbridled and excessive “free speech.”
So that brings us back to what I think @elonmusk is doing right now with Twitter. He believes that Twitter needs to become a neutral global commons which means it cannot have a political bias. However, Twitter had a corporate culture that was 90%+ progressive or left-leaning, based on analysis of political donation patterns (98%. to Democrats)
A truly neutral global commons has to be equally welcoming to the right and not tip the scales. So Elon is consciously detonating the left-leaning culture at the company and embodying a lot of the qualities the right wants to see, which is all about freedom of expression, even when that expression is vile. And he’s flashing a big sign to welcome back almost all those who have been deplatformed as a signal to the right.
That’s part of why he is ruthlessly disrupting the norms of left-leaning companies by firing massive numbers of people, pushing the remainder with unreasonble demands, and driving out those who are offended by his methods. It is more of a cutthroat masculine approach to capitalism which better appeals on the right and which drives out more of the “woke” employees.
He has hinted that he is not planning to move the company to Texas but may create a second HQ there. That would likely become the right-leaning culture that makes the company itself more a balance of right and left.
To accomplish the ultimately neutral goal, he is promising to make the platform attractive to the right with his personal statements and provocations of the left. This will gradually reduce the power of the West coast power center and he can rebuild the corporate culture as more of a balance of left and right, with more right-leaning folks in Texas.
If this is true, he will begin hiring a large number of people in Austin after he has reduced the ranks of San Francisco so that he can rebuilt a culture more in alignment with his values, which combines some left values along with the right.
That will, in his opinion, lift the discourse ultimately. But it will go through a right-leaning period to get to the equilibrium place. I actually don't believe that Elon sees the Republican perspective as the final and correct perspective. He has spent too much of his life as a Democrat to see truth in only one side.
I think he sees that there are truths in the right that need to be championed that the left currently disparages and that need a space for public discourse in which all can participate. That is how Twitter actually could become a more sophisticated global commons, not by being a right-wing operation but by being neutral.
So he is not even attempting good governance of the culture at Twitter as he is shattering many management norms. His goal is to break down the left-leaning, progressive-celebrating hegemony in the culture. His current brutality and right-wing-friendly tweets are part of a strategy to create an ultimately balanced platform that incorporates the best of both political wings by building a dual-culture - part California, part Texas.
My guess is that he figures he is able to cut 50% of the overall staff at Twitter but to get to more culture balance, he wants to have retain even less of the original team in San Francisco as he rebuilds a more product and engineering, profit-oriented right-wing culture, probably based in the new Austin HQ.
By deliberately offending the norms of left-wing culture, he is making the platform more welcoming to the right and sending the signal they are wanted. But then he will eventually put in systems that minimize the reach of voices that are harmful, damaging or not factual. I think he does, on one level, want it to become a trusted source of truth.
I say all this while being clear that I have personally found a lot of his moves and Tweets distasteful and immature. But I get why he is doing that. He's signaling the community he needs on the platform and building the product that he is one of them.
The shock at what he is doing also has the value of driving attention to Twitter. While some of it is rubbernecking what appears to be a trainwreck, it also drives attention, which is important in making this transition.
I think the reason he seems so untroubled by all the drama is that he’s seeing this as just one chess move in the service of his larger goal of colonizing Mars. A few thousand disgruntled employees and lots of angry media are relatively insignificant in that view. He sees in Twitter the raw material to build a highly intelligent global town square that serves as a kind of planetary brain that is accelerating the innovation required to get to Mars. And by building that, if the Dogecoin hypothesis is correct, he could make himself into the world’s first trillionaire and fulfill his lifelong dream.
That’s why he’s willing to create such chaos and offend so many people. There are higher goals, in his mind, at play and getting there requires crushing some individual dreams along the way. A right-left balanced Twitter that has a supercharged engineering and product team driving it to be the highest-traffic engine on the planet is worth offending some lefties in his calculus.
So what is the fatal flaw? In seeking to amplify voices on the right, he has made all the signals to the right that he is now joining them in culture wars against the left. And he has made virtually no acknowledgements of the value and importance of the left. I think he is doing that because he himself is profoundly tilted towards a more “hypermasculine” approach that is more combative. It was interesting to me in reading about his first marriage how he stated to her that he was the alpha in the relationship. He is essentially operating from a dominator paradigm and he is proving to be thin-skinned about direct criticism of him, which is then pushing him further right.
In the process, he has become over-identified with the right-wing culture and rather than create a truly neutral global commons, he is going to fail in his ambition. There are multiple new options like Post.news that are springing up to take over the function and become a trusted Twitter 2.0. He will lose the hegemony on the role that Twitter has played and drive out many of the creative culture leaders who made the platform strong.
Perhaps most importantly, in order to drive towards his vision, he is also empowering the increasingly anti-democratic forces that are arrayed on the right. He could not choose a worse time to turn Twitter into a right-wing haven, right as the Trumpified right is aiming for an autocratic takedown of American democracy.
He is fanning the flames of controversy in order to make Twitter ground zero in the culture wars but he is not only advanacing the demise of Twitter as a trusted platform, with advertisers and creators leaving in droves, he is also likely to expose a whole lot of his own disowned shadow side, such as the very compelling investigative work that shows he lied about his academic background and credentials.
By “overshooting” towards the right, he is going to have a whole lot of forces do battle with him, expose his weaknesses and turn their attention on empowering competitors. This will, I believe, ultimately be better for all of us to have other platforms that are more consciously designed and managed than one that operates as a kind of dictatorship. A dictator cannot control the global town square at his whims. Enough people recognize that as a problematic that he is stirring massive forces against him.
Where does it all lead?
To a multi-platform competition to be the new trusted global town square, which then undermines his bigger goal of colonizing Mars. In short, I think his own hubris and attraction to be a culture warrior for the right will actually lead to a cultural backlash that may even propel him out of his CEO role at Tesla (his brand will be too toxic for the company to tolerate at some point) and to Twitter becoming a diminished player in the space. He will, in short, probably orchestrate his own fall. He will have made common cause with some of the worst enemies of democracy and truth and civility and the trust will not be re-earned easily.
Could he turn the trajectory around? Perhaps, but it would require some real self-reflection and in the meantime, the competitors will grow quickly as few people want one person to control discourse. If I were to place a bet, I think he’s going to have a serious fall, not only with Twitter but with his larger plans to colonize Mars because of the hubris and arrogance that comes with power. He needs humility, wisdom, and care to balance his braggadocio. By siding only with those who cheer his excesses, it is gratifying to his ego but it will cost him dearly.
And, in the end, we’re better off with a healthy competitive landscape vying to be the trusted global Town Square rather than a monopoly led by a man blinded by a high self-opinion and grandiose sense of infallibility.
Like Icarus, he is trying to fly too high without doing the inner work to steward something as important as our collective search for real truth and empowering conversion.
Mars is archetypally always associated with the masculine and his colonization of Mars is a kind of hypermasculine dream that may well force him down into the humbling defeat as so many of the grandiose men of history have eventually face. If we’re lucky that could lead him to become a wiser man rather than simply the richest guy on the planet.
The final chapter has certainly not be written here but I think there are few people who can really speak truth to him and that without some checks and balances, his ego is created the conditions for a massive failure that ironically leads to something better for humanity - an upgrade in how we do our collective debates and engage our collective search for a better operating system for humanity.
This was an absolutely incredible read.
An extraordinary read bringing truth to this man’s fallen, small mind into a time of revealed male authority and their need for dominance, so long in our history, but finally being exposed and now crumbling. We’ve long denied our soul wisdom, within each of us, always, already here to guide each of us for more balance and harmony, so that this one sided control, that has played out for eons of time, today is finally reaching its pinnacle. We still live within uncertainty how it will all play out. We witness today the preachers and politicians and the over grown capitalist structures, all fighting hard to keep this control. I have deep faith in our consciousness becoming more aware, becoming more soul awakened, and becoming more oriented towards a Divine Love. within us all, to emerge through taking chaos to more peaceful means to live together. Power of Divine loving beauty within tames the power of beastly control without…