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Trillion-dollar man 'The rise of Elon Musk' · THE DAILY BRIEF

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  Speaker 1: EO. Musk SpaceX has launched on the stock market, making
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  Speaker 1: the richest man on Earth his first dollar Trullion Air.
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  Speaker 1: Already the most notorious and devisive businessman for his generation,
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  Speaker 1: he's now perhaps.
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  Speaker 2: The wealthiest that has ever lived. Musk, I think, is
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  Speaker 2: in a league of his own.
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  Speaker 3: It's a space company that is potentially going to invent
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  Speaker 3: a new way of building and running the whole AI ecosystem.
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  Speaker 1: With an empire that runs from electric cars to the stars.
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  Speaker 1: Has come almost unimaginable riches and political influence that runs
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  Speaker 1: from the White House. Take every lad, yes, take to
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  Speaker 1: the extreme of Britain's far right. So how did a
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  Speaker 1: South African gaming geek a mass a private fortune larger
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  Speaker 1: than the annual income of ninety percent of the nations
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  Speaker 1: on Earth? And what does such extreme concentrated wealth say
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  Speaker 1: about the world in which his companies thrive?
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  Speaker 4: Do so much for shape our democracies have never had
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  Speaker 4: to reckon with one man with a trillion dollars.
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  Speaker 1: Let's start with that number. It's big, very big, a
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  Speaker 1: one with twelve zeros, a thousand billion or a million
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  Speaker 1: if you prefer, If you stacked a trillion dollars in
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  Speaker 1: one hundred dollar bills. They would reach one thousand kilometers high,
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  Speaker 1: where Musks satellite circle a fortune you could quite literally
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  Speaker 1: see from space, propelled into orbit by SpaceX in probably
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  Speaker 1: combining a space infrastructure business, rocket satellites, and the communications
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  Speaker 1: network starlink with x Ai, Musk's artificial intelligence arm, including
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  Speaker 1: the social media platform x he claims, will power future
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  Speaker 1: revenues on a galactic scale.
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  Speaker 2: He makes incredibly bold bets. He's a risk taker. He
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  Speaker 2: takes on technologies that others have given up on.
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  Speaker 1: Musk's early tech ventures, including Papal, made him a multimillionaire,
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  Speaker 1: but since twenty twenty his fortune has taken flight, boosted
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  Speaker 1: by sky rocketing Tesla. Sher's Forbes calculate his net worth
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  Speaker 1: rows nearly tenfold to two hundred and nineteen billion dollars
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  Speaker 1: in just two years. His purchase of Twitter was followed
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  Speaker 1: by a drop in Tesla's value, but the subsequent recovery
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  Speaker 1: and surging SpaceX and Xai evaluations saw in pass half
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  Speaker 1: a trillion dollars last year, en route to become the
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  Speaker 1: first trillion dollar man. Elon must leads a generation of
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  Speaker 1: tech bros who have amassed an unprecedented concentration of wealth.
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  Speaker 1: Jensen Wang, who's in video chips power the hardware that's
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  Speaker 1: driving AI. Mark Zuckerberg, the metaboss and first social media billionaire.
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  Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has his own space
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  Speaker 1: side Hustle, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergui brid
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  Speaker 1: all based in America, all men, all a massing vast wealth,
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  Speaker 1: but all in Elon's really born in apartheid South Africa
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  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one to parents who later separated. He
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  Speaker 1: studied first in Canada then the US, before dropping out
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  Speaker 1: to concentrate on a business career like no other. His
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  Speaker 1: first startup, the city mapping website ZIP two, earned him
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  Speaker 1: twenty two million dollars when it was sold. He reinvested
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  Speaker 1: in an online payment app that merged with PayPal founded
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  Speaker 1: by Pallanteer billionaire Peter Thiel, and made around one hundred
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  Speaker 1: per cent five million dollars when that was sold to
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  Speaker 1: eBay in two thousand and two. He used the proceeds
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  Speaker 1: to help see not one, but two trillion dollar companies.
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  Speaker 1: The first was Tesla. He became majority owner of the
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  Speaker 1: electric vehicle startup in two thousand and four, and in
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  Speaker 1: twenty ten, took it public, selling a vision of electric
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  Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles that, helped by generous subsidies, defy the skepticism
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  Speaker 1: of America's established motor industry.
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  Speaker 3: The first thing I told him, I said, I don't
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  Speaker 3: know anything about automotive. I've never done anything in there.
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  Speaker 3: And he said, well, we're not an automotive company. That
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  Speaker 3: was more than ten years.
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  Speaker 1: Within a decade, Tesla's stock price had multiplied, making it
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  Speaker 1: the most valuable car maker in the world and leaving
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  Speaker 1: four General Motors and the rest in its dust. At
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  Speaker 1: the same time, he was building SpaceX, aiming to do
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  Speaker 1: for aerospace what he'd already done to the automobile industry.
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  Speaker 2: The idea that there are already strong players in an
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  Speaker 2: industry kind of wets his appetite to disrupt them. The
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  Speaker 2: innovations are not brand new, but you know they're also
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  Speaker 2: sometimes absolutely breastations.
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  Speaker 1: Its reusable rockets have slashed the cost of launches and
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  Speaker 1: transformed the economics of space from a state level pursuit
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  Speaker 1: to a competitive private enterprise. Today, SpaceX is responsible for
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  Speaker 1: eighty percent of the mass that's launched into space, helped
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  Speaker 1: by government contracts including transport for astronauts to and from
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  Speaker 1: the International Space Station. It includes musk Starlink satellite communication network,
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  Speaker 1: the only profitable division of the com and his wildly
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  Speaker 1: ambitious pitch to potential investors including you and me, is
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  Speaker 1: the orbital data centers will slash the cost of computing
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  Speaker 1: for AI as well as enabling human colonies on the
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  Speaker 1: Moon and Mars.
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  Speaker 5: SpaceX is about advancing rocket technology to the point where
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  Speaker 5: we can extend life and consciousness beyond Earth, to the Moon,
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  Speaker 5: to Mars, eventually to alastar systems.
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  Speaker 1: There are other companies Neuralink uses brain implants to address
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  Speaker 1: long term conditions, and the boring company well It digs tunnels.
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  Speaker 1: What they all have in common is that Musk is
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  Speaker 1: fundamental to their future prospects. In the case of SpaceX,
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  Speaker 1: he is literally irreplaceable by the board.
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  Speaker 2: He's also doing it with a incredible personal control of
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  Speaker 2: the of SpaceX.
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  Speaker 1: That control makes every investment in his companies a bet
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  Speaker 1: on Elon Musk for good and ill.
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  Speaker 3: Cheese all these big things because he creates these compelling,
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  Speaker 3: inspiring vision that attracts exceptional talent that want to work
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  Speaker 3: on impossible problems.
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  Speaker 1: With great wealth comes power and influence, and Musk has
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  Speaker 1: gleefully exercised both. He's influenced the battlefield in Ukraine, making
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  Speaker 1: Starlink available to replace shattered communication networks following the Russian invasion,
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  Speaker 1: then blocked its use by the military in frontline areas
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  Speaker 1: under Moscow's control.
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  Speaker 5: So every day between now and the election will be
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  Speaker 5: awarding a million dollars starting tonight.
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  Speaker 1: At home. In the US, he spent three hundred million
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  Speaker 1: dollars propelling Donald Trump to a second term. When he
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  Speaker 1: was rewarded with a job in the White House, promising
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  Speaker 1: to cut government spending, protests and consumer boycotts of Tesla followed.
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  Speaker 1: Musk has also supported right wing nativist parties and campaigners
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  Speaker 1: in Europe. He backed the AfD in Germany's presidential election
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  Speaker 1: and supports the far right, anti immigration, anti Islam agitator
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  Speaker 1: Tommy Robinson.
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  Speaker 4: Whether you choose fans or that a band is coming to.
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  Speaker 6: You, you either fight beer or do you die.
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  Speaker 1: Must control of social media platform x has given him
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  Speaker 1: a key role on the front line of the culture war,
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  Speaker 1: and under his ownership, the former Twitter has become an
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  Speaker 1: increasingly polarized forum, and the most notable function of its
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  Speaker 1: AI was its ability to produce new defied images with
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  Speaker 1: none of the controls present on other AI applications. After
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  Speaker 1: British MP Jess Asato criticized Grok, her image was doctored
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  Speaker 1: and she is now suing X in the High Court.
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  Speaker 7: There was one particularly disturbing video that was made of
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  Speaker 7: me through Grock, which had me surrounded by a group
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  Speaker 7: of men chloroformed so I fainted and then my skirts
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  Speaker 7: were lifted up at the end.
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  Speaker 2: Of a sexual assault.
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  Speaker 7: Well, there is no truth seeking in allowing people to
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  Speaker 7: take images of women and strip them.
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  Speaker 1: Must interventions have intensified the fundamental question raised by his fortune.
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  Speaker 1: Should one person control so much wealth and what checks
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  Speaker 1: are there on how he or any member of the
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  Speaker 1: contemporary mega rich might use it.
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  Speaker 4: The reason why Elon Musk has so much influence over
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  Speaker 4: our politics is because he has so much wealth. Right,
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  Speaker 4: I think this connection has to be made that you know,
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  Speaker 4: democracy doesn't get undermined in isolation. It gets undermined when
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  Speaker 4: it's enabled by extreme levels of wealth.
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  Speaker 1: John Caldwell is a British billionaire who made his fortune
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  Speaker 1: from the Phones for You retail empire, and he pledged
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  Speaker 1: to give most of his money away.
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  Speaker 6: But if I was Elon Musk and became the trillionaire,
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  Speaker 6: I would have been probably and this is easy to say,
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  Speaker 6: where it's almost certainly true that I'd be pledging ninety
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  Speaker 6: nine point nine percent of my wealth to charity. It
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  Speaker 6: would still leave me with over a billion pounds. And
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  Speaker 6: why do I need more than a billion pounds when
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  Speaker 6: so many people around the world are starving to death
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  Speaker 6: and have got nothing.
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  Speaker 1: The Elon Muski's a visionary is not in question. He
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  Speaker 1: has built a series of disruptive companies, created thousands of jobs,
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  Speaker 1: and generated billions of dollars in value. With fortune has
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  Speaker 1: come a celebrity profile and scrutiny of his erratic, unconventional
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  Speaker 1: personal life, including prescription drug use, depression, and at least
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  Speaker 1: a dozen children by four different mothers. SpaceX is his
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  Speaker 1: most outlandish gamble yet. But is it a heroic enterprise
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  Speaker 1: for here man humanity or a huckster's hype.
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  Speaker 3: Space Secus is going to be on an incredible rides
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  Speaker 3: in terms of business success operational success.
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  Speaker 2: He talks about a kind of a market that's somewhere
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  Speaker 2: above twenty five trillion dollars. You know, it seems barmy,
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  Speaker 2: but that's clearly the play that he's the pitch that
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  Speaker 2: he's making to investors.
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  Speaker 1: For all the interplanetary bluster, SpaceX is a wager on
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  Speaker 1: Musk and AI field, in which he lags behind otropic
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  Speaker 1: Google and Open Ai. Hesler faces challenges too, Already eclipsed
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  Speaker 1: by Chinese ev manufacturers, must rest on its commercially unproven
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  Speaker 1: cyber cabs and Optimus robot projects. For twenty years, betting
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  Speaker 1: against Elon Musk has proved a costly mistake. Time and
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  Speaker 1: competition may yet catch up with him. A market crash
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  Speaker 1: or a collapse of confidence in his powers of foresight
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  Speaker 1: and delivery could bring SpaceX back to Earth. He might
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  Speaker 1: even have to get by on mere billions, but for now,
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  Speaker 1: investors remain entranced by the upside of Elon, their doubts
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  Speaker 1: round out by the dollars