Elon Musk Has Reached Olympus in 2022. But the Challenges Ahead to Keep Him There Are Perilous.

The hardest thing is not to reach the top, but to stay there by keeping your promises.

For his aficionados, Elon Musk is the ultimate tech boss. He is a visionary, an agitator, an adventurer, brutal and vulgar. Elon Musk is also an incendiary boss who is always on the verge of breaking down established limits to impose his own. This explains why so many people seem to worship Elon Musk now.

Not a week goes by without the head of SpaceX, The Boring Company, Tesla, or Neuralink making headlines.

First of all, the economic column, with his devastating and sometimes enigmatic tweets that serve as press releases for each of his companies. This has allowed him to surpass 100 million followers on Twitter, a figure that is quite simply colossal.

The political column, then, as his jabs at Joe Biden and the Democrats are becoming more and more frequent, a far cry from the caution, or even the discreet support shown by the titans of Silicon Valley. The celebrity press, finally, feasts on his love affairs and his long-lasting offspring. Elon Musk now has 10 children.

In a man's life, some years count double. In 2022, Elon Musk sat on Olympus. Elected Man of the Year in December 2021 by the prestigious Time magazine, he joined the very closed club of six business leaders crowned since 1927, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos having preceded him. Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine to be close to $250 billion by mid-summer 2022.

For the average person, Elon Musk's empire seems to be a patchwork. In reality, it responds to a very “Muskian” logic that espouses his messianic delusion: to offer a multi-planetary future and in particular a Martian one, to humanity. Each brick of Elon Musk's empire contributes to this: rockets for transportation, tunnels to live under the planet, robots to prepare for the arrival of humans, batteries for energy, autonomous electric cars to move around...

These crazy projects bristle at some but have turned Elon Musk into a guru for tens of millions of people around the globe. No other captain of industry has the aura of Elon Musk at the moment. But it's not far from the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock.

The future looks perilous on all fronts for Elon Musk

In 2023, the billionaire will play a big game. First of all on the human and managerial level. His repeated outrages are starting to annoy even his teams. A first: in mid-June 2022, an open and anonymous letter signed by SpaceX executives was published, denouncing the attitude and outrageous comments of the ebullient boss: “It is essential to make our teams and our pool of potential talent understand that his message does not reflect our work, our mission or our values.”

First cracks between the guru and his apostles?

In the aftermath, some of the company's top brass slammed the door. But Musk's ability to deliver and keep his insane promises also depends on his ability to attract the best in their discipline. The two being linked, financially, too, he's playing big. But the Twitter deal may be one too many.

His lightning raid in the spring of 2022 and his intention to buy the social network for a whopping $44 billion before backing out at the beginning of the summer, trampling on the contract signed a few weeks earlier, could cost him a lot. More than the billion of deductions provided in the deal if he can not raise the funds. Judges could force the sale at a time when Tesla, the real cash machine of his galaxy, is showing signs of running out of steam.

The shortage of semiconductors has caught up with the manufacturer and disrupted its production chain. Tesla's global sales plummeted 18% between the first and second quarters of 2022. More worryingly, Musk keeps lamenting that his new assembly plants in Austin, Texas, and Berlin, Germany, are "losing billions of dollars." A way to justify the slimming down he wants to impose on the group: the immediate freeze of hiring and the dismissal of 10% of its workforce worldwide.

At SpaceX, the first orbital flight of its mega-rocket Starship, which should take place in the next few weeks, will also be decisive. In particular to accelerate the deployment of its constellation of more than 30,000 telecommunications satellites Starlink. A failure and the ease with which he raises from private investors crazy amounts of money for his launcher business could be dented. With cascading effects on his other businesses.

The Boring Company raised nearly $675 million in April 2022 to develop its “tunneling machine” of the future called Prufrock-3. A revolutionary machine that already has the industry's established giants shaking in their boots.

And Elon Musk will need even more cash, always more cash, for Neuralink, but also to start the production of his humanoid robots that he promises for 2023 ... Robots that nobody has ever seen!

So many challenges that Musk will have to face in the coming months. To avoid the twilight of idols. Because the hardest thing in life is not to reach Olympus as Elon Musk did in 2022 but to stay there, or else end up going down to the Underworld (of tech).