Elon Musk Multiplies Geopolitical Initiatives, to the Great Displeasure of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

War in Ukraine, the future of Taiwan, or the Internet in Iran, Musk is on all fronts.

If I tell you that a man has just proposed, one after the other, a peace plan for Ukraine, the creation of a “special administrative zone” to settle the fate of Taiwan, and finally the restoration of the Internet for Iranian women in revolt against the mullahs, and then I ask you to guess his identity, what will you answer me?

Joe Biden? Well, no!

This man who looks like a general-in-chief is not the president of the United States. He is Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and owner of Tesla. At 51 years old, the richest man in the world (more than 200 billion dollars in fortune) holds a forum on Twitter and multiplies geopolitical initiatives that make a lot of noise, arousing the ire of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the applause of the Chinese ambassador in Washington.

This is not the first time that American billionaires have sought to play a political role without going through the election process.

With his foundation, Bill Gates is Africa's unofficial health minister. More than a century ago, Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate, tried to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm II to prevent World War I. John Rockefeller Junior, the heir to his father's oil empire, financed the United Nations in New York after the war, while former speculator George Soros has been involved in the defense of liberal democracy for thirty years.

Consensual forays, in support of Western and progressive policies But Musk is a nuisance because he is different.

First, Elon Musk does not impose moral constraints of his peers. He considers - rightly or wrongly - that he is already working for the good of humanity by preparing the migration to Mars or by developing the electric car to fight global warming. He doesn't have to atone for his brutally acquired wealth like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gates, and Soros, nor does he have to be a "philanthropist."

Musk's strength lies in his money, but also in his relative detachment: officially, no yacht, and no lavish lifestyle. Dollars are not the most essential driver for him, but the means to transform the world. His libertarian values do not lead him to isolationism, but a desire for power.

Musk is not about cars and rockets: he is about the combination of energy (batteries and solar), movement (Tesla), and communications (Starlink, Twitter). In short, a quasi-messianic project not known since Thomas Edison (1847-1931), the electricity fairy, and General Electric, carried by an increasingly megalomaniacal and uncontrollable boss. The entrepreneur is encroaching more and more on the prerogatives of the state.

Unlike the benevolent NGOs of other billionaires, Musk is, with SpaceX, at the heart of the military-industrial complex. Thanks to the orders of NASA and the American armed forces, and especially through its thousands of Starlink satellites, which allow access to the Internet from the most remote areas of the globe. It is Starlink that is guiding the Ukrainian army against the Russians and trying to restore the Internet in Iran.

Private army corps

Elon Musk is the man who makes communication possible ... or impossible, as evidenced by the non-deployment of his network in China. The Chinese Communist Party does not want it and Elon Musk, who has major economic interests in the country with his Tesla factory in Shanghai, complies.

For the moment, the SpaceX boss is following the Pentagon's lead - “what concerns the battlefield is secret defense,” he explained about Ukraine - and is asking it to take over financially, positioning itself as a service provider.

Still, Elon Musk has the trappings of a private army corps that could end up being problematic: what if the Pentagon wanted to use Starlink in a conflict involving Taiwan against Elon Musk's interests? When Elon Musk proposed his plans, political scientist Ian Bremmer quipped, “He's not a geopolitical expert.”

But the reason the case is so disruptive is that many take Musk seriously.

When Musk tweets, “I'm a big fan of Ukraine, but not World War III,” he's expressing a divided opinion. Is he completely wrong when he deems it "highly likely" that his plan (neutralization of Ukraine, abandonment of Crimea, referendum in Russian-occupied areas) "is the end result - just a matter of how many people die first"?

When he proposes for Taiwan "a special administrative zone," he recalls the complex reality of an island that has been autonomous since 1949 but has not been recognized by the West for thirty years and is not a member of the United Nations. His crude language breaks the “sacred Western union” and his private connections - Musk would have been in contact with Vladimir Putin, which he denies - make us fear diplomatic short-circuits.

In the absence of serious Republicans, Elon Musk has become one of the main political opponents of Joe Biden, who is hated for not inviting Tesla to a summit on electric cars.

However, the political adventure will remain limited. Born in South Africa, Elon Musk cannot run for president of the United States. But he can probably imagine himself as governor of Texas, like Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. The next step in the expansion of Elon Musk's power will undoubtedly be through Twitter.

How to explain that a rational man can overpay 44 billion dollars for a social network he used freely with 108.7 million subscribers? The interested party gave, in early October 2022, a laconic explanation: “The purchase of Twitter is a gas pedal to create X, the universal application.”

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