Elon Musk
The South African-born billionaire whose serial bets on electric cars, rockets, and a renamed Twitter made him the most-followed person on Earth — and the most polarizing.
Origin
Elon Musk (b. 1971) made his first fortune from Zip2 and PayPal, then poured it into Tesla (electric cars) and SpaceX (reusable rockets), both of which beat long odds. He bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, renamed it X, gutted its staff and moderation rules, and made his personal politics part of the product. By the mid-2020s he was a top US presidential donor, a federal-cost-cutting commissar in the second Trump administration, and the most-followed account on his own platform. The Mars rhetoric, the Neuralink demos, and the personal-feud posting style are all of a piece.
Modern usage
'Going Musk on it' has become slang for sudden, public, often punitive corporate intervention — mass layoffs by tweet, brand changes overnight, public feuds with employees. 'Mars-pilled' describes anyone who's bought into long-shot interplanetary ambition. He's now the live test case for the question 'how much should one founder's politics shape what their products will and won't carry?'
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