When I worked in Downing Street a decade ago, I invited an entrepreneur I admired to talk to civil servants and special advisers.
I remember it being really hard to even round up an audience for the talk — the big room I’d booked ended up being half-empty.
That entrepreneur was Elon Musk, pictured — and if he was speaking at an event in London today, thousands of people would turn up. But back then, he was the little-known founder of the promising start-ups Tesla and SpaceX.
The first question I asked him in my talk was whether it was really true that he hoped to die on Mars. His answer got everyone laughing: “Yes, I do want to pass away on the red planet, but just not on impact.”
Obviously Musk has been in the news a lot recently after buying Twitter — and it pains me to say that it looks like he’s making a bit of a mess of things.
In fact, his stumbles since taking the reins at Twitter remind me of the downward spiral that our last prime minister quickly got herself into. In other words, Musk is doing a Liz Truss: steaming in hard, and ballsing things up.
Just like Truss lost the backing of global investors with her over-confident moves, Musk has managed to alienate the big advertisers that Twitter relies on for the bulk of its income.
One report suggests that Musk had a conference call with the marketing officers of some of the world’s biggest companies but he did such a terrible job of explaining his vision that some of the marketing honchos literally took the decision during the call to stop spending their advertising budgets on the social network.
And in the same way that Truss ended up doing desperate U-turns to fix problems of her own making, Musk has been reverse-ferreting all over the place.
He’s had to try to rehire Twitter employees that he’d just sacked, after belatedly realising they were crucially important. Then he was forced to go back on his plans to let anyone pay $8 a month to get a blue tick on their profile — after it was quickly pointed out that this could lead to chaos ahead of the US midterm elections, as it could mean that anyone could claim to be, say, the Californian electoral commission and tweet out fake polling results.
The venture capital investor Chris Sacco has suggested that Musk’s mistakes are happening because he no longer has people around him who challenge his ideas: “I’ve recently watched those around him become increasingly sycophantic and opportunistic. Simply put, agreeing with him is easier, and there is more financial and social upside.” To me, that doesn’t sound too far from the way Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng cooked up their disastrous mini-budget alone, having sidelined independent minds at the Treasury and the Office of Budget Responsibility.
I hope I’m wrong but it looks like Musk’s takeover of Twitter might be heading the same way as Truss’s premiership. A painful crash-landing may be imminent.
Rohan Silva? I’d rather you called me...
I’ve been travelling a fair bit in the past few months, so I’ve been lucky to avoid most of the eco protests clogging up London’s streets - although I did get caught up in one at Piccadilly Circus a few weeks ago.
It’s totally bonkers that the Metropolitan Police seem to be doing nothing to break up the demonstrations and clear the roads, but in true British fashion, at least we haven’t lost our sense of humour about the whole thing.
Apparently one of the Just Stop Oil campaigners is called Indigo Rumbelow, which prompted someone to post on social media: “Your eco protestor name is your favourite colour plus the shop where your parents bought their first television set.”
Great shout. Next time you see me, I’ll be throwing cold cauliflower soup at a priceless painting in the Tate Modern, and claiming my name is Turquoise Argos.
