What if Elon Musk Succeeds?
Elon Musk wants to save the planet, and in July that meant a boys’ soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. One diver had died on the treacherous route, and as monsoons approached and oxygen dwindled, time was running out.
Musk tweeted solutions—perhaps a nylon tube inflated like “a bouncy castle” could “create an air tunnel underwater.” The tech billionaire sent 10 engineers to Thailand; he traveled to the cave himself; he posted video of teams from SpaceX and the Boring Company (two of his businesses developing a “tiny, kid-size submarine” and delivered the vessel to the scene.
But the rescuers, rejecting the invention as impractical, developed a Musk-free plan to save all 12 boys and their coach. British diver Vern Unsworth, who played a key role in the rescue, dismissed the mogul’s efforts as a “PR stunt,” telling CNN that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”
Musk snapped. He inexplicably called Unsworth a “pedo guy”—as in pedophile—and then doubled down amid a Twitter backlash. “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true,” he wrote, with no evidence.
Musk later took back the unfounded accusation and apologized. But he’s making a habit of being shocking. Tuesday afternoon he tweeted that he was ready to take publicly held Telsa private, having secured funding that would buy back outstanding shares of stock at $420—a 15 percent premium over its then-price of $366. The stock quickly climbed but trading had to be halted as everyone from investors to the SEC tried to figure out if the Tweet was a weed joke (given the 420 reference), a potentially illegal effort to manipulate stock price, or a genuine financial disclosure of unheard-of magnitude and form.
During a conference call with Wall Street investment analysts in May, Musk, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had refused to answer basic questions about Tesla’s faltering financial prospects. “Boring, bonehead questions are not cool,” he said. Investors responded
