Musk's Gameplan

What's Elon Musk really up to by being so obnoxious?

 

Elon Musk isn’t just being difficult for the sake of it – there’s a method to the madness. His antics might look like chaotic outbursts, but peel back the layers and you’ll see a more calculated pattern emerge. Musk is playing a high-stakes game where attention, influence, and legacy are the currency. But why the endless provocation? Let’s break it down – before he launches tweet, at us.

Musk has crafted an image as the world’s most unpredictable tech mogul. He’s built a loyal following by being the maverick genius who doesn’t follow the rules. It’s part of a broader strategy to make himself harder to pin down and harder to hold accountable. After all, it’s tough to corner a man who’s already on Mars in his mind.

Take his acquisition of Twitter (now X, although few actually call it that and the posts are still tweets, not Xs). He turned a perfectly functional platform into a firestorm of controversy – and still managed to convince people it’s all part of a master plan. It’s like buying a car, crashing it into a tree, and then insisting you’ve invented a new form of urban landscaping.

This unpredictability isn’t just about ego; it’s about legacy. Musk wants to be remembered as a revolutionary figure, not just a businessman. The problem is, revolutions often leave a mess – and someone’s got to clean it up. In Musk’s case, it’s the remaining Twitter employees, assuming there are any left by the time he’s done.

Musk seems intent on testing how much he can get away with, whether it’s regulatory boundaries or social norms. From Tesla’s self-driving promises to his decisions about where Starlink can operate in war zones, Musk is carving out a new role for billionaires: unelected geopolitical actors. Because when you’re richer than some countries, why not start behaving like one?

He’s positioning himself as a man above the rules – one whose decisions can shape world events. But with great power comes little accountability, it seems. After all, if it all goes wrong, he can always escape to one of his rockets and claim he’s conducting vital Martian research – a noble mission to ensure humanity survives, assuming he hasn’t already made Earth uninhabitable in the process. It’s all part of his grand vision: if you can’t fix the planet you’re on, just move to a different one.

Musk seems to be following Dominic Cummings' philosophy that to rebuild something, one must first destroy it. Cummings famously championed this approach during his time as a key adviser to Boris Johnson, pushing for radical reforms by bulldozing through established norms and institutions. Whether Musk’s target is the the Republican Party, the USA, the global world order, or just social media, the wrecking ball is certainly swinging. The only question is: what exactly does Musk want to rebuild? Is it the crumbling foundations of the USA, or the entire global world order? There’s a tantalising possibility that he believes he’s doing it all with some noble intent, though the rest of us are left picking through the wreckage to figure out what that might be.

And then there’s the irony of Trump hypothetically sending Musk to broker a trade deal with the UK – while Musk simultaneously tweets calls for the overthrow of the UK government. Musk's tweet about Scotland needing to 'secede from the UK' is just one example of his penchant for stirring political pots he's not even cooking in. It’s like sending a pyromaniac to negotiate a fire insurance policy. But that’s the level of absurdity we’ve reached in global politics: the billionaires are now the wildcards, and nobody seems to know who’s holding the deck. You couldn’t make it up, but that’s the level of absurdity we’ve reached in global politics.

When things aren’t going well, Musk knows how to distract. Bad Tesla production numbers? Starlink controversy? What better time to post an inflammatory tweet or make an outlandish claim? It’s like tossing a grenade into a room to change the conversation – effective, but not exactly subtle.

It’s classic PR: create a spectacle to bury the bad news. People remember the circus, not the financial report. And in Musk’s circus, he’s the ringleader, the clown, and the chap walking the tightrope – often all at once.

So what’s his goal? Musk’s long-term ambition is to reshape civilisation – think Mars colonies and AI regulations. But his short-term behaviour points to something simpler: preserving his relevance. After all, why be remembered for one or two groundbreaking companies when you can be remembered for crashing the entire internet’s mood with a single tweet?

By staying obnoxious and unpredictable, he guarantees he’s always part of the conversation. Love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. He’s like the internet’s version of Marmite – except, instead of a savoury spread, he’s serving up a buffet of chaos.

I do have a faint suspicion that he's taking a wrecking ball to the far right, no matter where. He's managed to ingratiate himself with that end of the spectrum, but now seems intent on causing it as much harm as possible. Could it be remotely possible he's clandestinely aiming to destroy the far right from within? His chaotic behaviour, frequent platforming of controversial figures, and apparent disdain for traditional institutions could be part of a deeper, subversive strategy to collapse extremism by amplifying its absurdity until it self-destructs.

In Musk’s world, there’s no such thing as bad press – only attention. And he’s getting plenty of it. After all, why worry about public opinion when you’ve got a backup planet?