Elon Musk, the self-appointed main character of the future, might be in for a rough 2024. Even if you discount Musk’s bluster and ego, the sheer variety of his interests gives him a role in conversation about the future in a way that no other individual quite occupies. The thorny questions about tech governance posed by his extreme personal control over the technologies his companies build — from space flight to digital communications — are well established. But the combined breadth and personalization of Musk’s tech empire challenge not just the governments that have to deal with it, but the man himself: Will this be the year Musk collapses under the burden of his own portfolio? Obviously there’s no way to know, and the endless grave-dancing around Twitter and Tesla hasn’t panned out that well for the skeptics so far. But 2024 will not be easy, for a host of reasons. Let’s take it business by business, starting with the one most motivated by Musk’s very public personal whims and political beliefs: the social media platform X (née Twitter). The company is privately held and no longer has a public share price, but a securities filing posted just before the new year by Fidelity Investments shows that the company believes its shares in X Holdings Corp., which includes the platform, have decreased in value by a remarkable 71.5 percent following Musk’s takeover in October 2022. That follows a parade of bad financial news for the company over the course of 2023, including a mass exodus of advertisers driven largely by Musk’s conspiratorial politics (and surely not helped by his advice that they “Go f***” themselves). None of this turmoil is likely to let up, considering the upcoming year of elections in the U.S. and worldwide that will draw on the inflammatory culture war issues Musk has made his pet causes. The financial challenges faced by X — never the most economically robust tech company, even before its sale — have led some observers to speculate whether Musk might attempt to find another buyer for the platform. That would be a blow to Musk’s ego, but it would at least lighten a load that also contains… the most significant and well-funded spacefaring effort since the days of the moon landing. SpaceX is facing its own problems, starting with yesterday’s report that the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the company for allegedly illegally firing eight workers who circulated a letter criticizing Musk. That follows a lawsuit over hiring practices brought by the Department of Justice in August 2023 (but since blocked), a California class action lawsuit on gender and race discrimination in pay — and frequent accusations of sexual harassment and an overall hostile workplace for women at the company. At the same time, SpaceX is hoping to launch a record number of space missions this year — one every 2.8 days, according to a recent report on public remarks by a SpaceX VP. And that isn’t even the full extent of Musk’s orbital ambitions. Starlink, his unrivaled satellite internet company, is increasingly finding itself at the same crux of both rapid expansion and political hot water. The most high-profile example of Starlink proving a headache for Musk came last year when his biographer Walter Isaacson shed light on the exact level of personal control Musk wields over where and how it’s deployed, most notably in Ukraine, where he did not allow Ukraine to use it for a planned attack on Russian warships. Musk also inserted himself, awkwardly, into the bloody Israel-Hamas war. He promised in October that Starlink would continue to provide “connectivity to internationally recognized aid organizations in Gaza,” prompting Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s threat to “cut any ties” with the company. (Musk later agreed to operate in Gaza only with Israeli approval.) With Starlink playing a pivotal role in global conflicts, and simmering threats poised to erupt in Guyana, Myanmar, and elsewhere in 2024, the business is likely to face more political and physical hazards. And war-and-peace questions aside, there’s still the quotidian matter of Musk’s industrial business at home. The entire U.S. electric vehicle infrastructure, not just Musk’s Tesla, took a blow this week as the Biden administration implemented new battery rules that nixed a large swath of major tax credits for EV buyers. Add to that the first Cybertruck crash, in Palo Alto last week, inevitable for any automobile but surely inviting more scrutiny when done by a truck purposely made to look like a sci-fi armored personnel carrier. Oh, also: Fortune magazine recently reported that in seven years of existence, Musk’s Boring Company has only drilled 2.4 miles of operational tunnels. It’s not all bad news, as Tesla sales have recently jumped following price cuts and Musk fended off a bid yesterday to be personally deposed in a lawsuit over a fatal Tesla crash. But the extreme levels of personal investment and control that Musk wields over these businesses create an equally extreme precarity, both for their users and their creator. As Musk goes in 2024, so will to some extent the world he is trying to build — making it all but impossible to turn away from his ongoing soap opera.
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