Three days before the presidential election, the most powerful, the most unpredictable, the most dangerous man in the American political landscape is not Donald Trump, as his adversaries are trying hard to demonstrate, since he can still lose , but the one who put all his weight and linked his future to the success of the Republican candidate: Elon Musk. The only brake on the ambitions of this technology and business genius, the founder of SpaceX, Starlink, XAI and Tesla which in 20 years made him the richest man in the world, is his origin. : born in South Africa, 53 years ago, he will never be able to be elected president of the United States. A naturalized American, he voted Democratic for a long time – Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden in 2020 – but this time he swears only by Trump, to the point of dancing alongside him, navel exposed, during an electoral rally in Pennsylvania , to the point of suddenly injecting $75 million into his campaign treasury, to the point of offering $1 million per day, in this key state, to the winner of a lottery who undertakes to support the second and the first amendments of the Constitution: the right to bear arms and freedom of expression.
An evil genius on the rise?
Musk interprets this freedom and uses it radically as the evil genius of this electoral campaign: owner for 2 years of the social network Twitter renamed frantic, insulting his political opponents, starting, of course, with Kamala Harris, also threatening his competitors when they dare to criticize his ambitions in space, electric automobiles or the connected brain. How to explain this rise? These staggering successes in highly regulated industrial sectors? This supremacy in the space domain which makes it an essential partner of NASA? How was this corrosive power of communication and influence created, which goes so far as to transform the already well-eroded mechanisms of American democracy? Why this posture, or these convictions which place him in this libertarian current which has continued to irrigate the American intellectual landscape? Idealist or pragmatist, gamer or strategist, good and bad genius – who is Elon Musk?
Our guests:
Asthma Malla signed in February 2024 Technopolitics, how technology makes us soldiers published by Seuil;
Albéric Tellier published The essentials of innovation management to Ellipses editions in 2022;
Thierry Aimar is the author of The society of regression: communitarianism attacking the individual published by Editions de L’Aube in 2022;
David Colon signed the work The information war: states conquering our mindsPrize of the Revue des deux mondes 2024, which reappears on January 9, 2025 by Tallandier editions.
