Elon Musk, the Twitter deal and his quest to save 'all life on Earth?

What Musk really wanted was the big payday that would let him focus on his lifelong ambition: to save humanity through space exploration, electric vehicles and solar energy.His next ventures — SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, Neuralink — finally propelled Musk toward the goal he’d set when he was 14 to be at the cutting edge of making human life “exciting and inspiring.”Now Musk is pivoting once more, taking on one of the most prominent and problematic symbols of the Internet age, Twitter. But it carries a legacy of intangible problems — misinformation, censorship, harassment, some starring Musk himself — far from the concrete realm of rockets and engines.Early Friday, amid doubts that he could muster the cash, he tweeted that the $44 billion deal was “temporarily on hold.” The tweet said he was seeking “details” to support Twitter’s claims that fake accounts known as bots make up less than 5 percent of users. He read constantly, often 10 hours a day — science fiction, history, encyclopedias.After the divorce, Musk spent two years with his mother, then took it upon himself to move in with his father, who “seemed sort of sad and lonely,” as Musk told Ashlee Vance, author of “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” But Errol treated young Elon poorly: Kimbal said the father engaged in “psychological torture” against his older son. His search led him to Martin Eberhard, founder of Tesla Motors, which aimed to build an electric car for everyday consumers.The path to success at Tesla was typically stormy: Musk pumped in millions and eventually fired Eberhard, who sued him, after which Musk called his erstwhile partner “the worst person I’ve ever worked with.” (Eberhard’s libel suit against Musk was settled out of court.)Musk became more hands-on, seeing Tesla’s first vehicle, the Roadster, through to production. As in other industries he’d entered, Musk struck people in the auto business as impulsive and at times tyrannical, given to sudden terminations known as “rage firings,” according to investors, former executives and employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of risking their jobs by speaking publicly about Musk.In court testimony last year, Musk denied engaging in rage firing, but said he offers “clear and frank feedback, which may be construed as derision.”To make Tesla a realistic alternative to gas-burning engines, Musk blazed seemingly contradictory paths, pushing hard against established automakers even as he struck up vital partnerships with Daimler and Toyota — just as SpaceX had both attacked and wooed the federal government.Tesla was near collapse during the 2008 Great Recession when Musk spotted an opportunity. Tesla electrified Daimler’s vehicle to its specifications and added a few extra perks — which shocked the German powerhouse during a demonstration at the electric carmaker’s Bay Area offices in early 2009.The car “was so fast, you could do wheelies in the parking lot,” Musk said, according to “Insane Mode,” a book by Hamish McKenzie. A recall Toyota faced on a Tesla-built powertrain didn’t help.“Basically, it was cultural incompatibility,” said Ed Niedermeyer, author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.” Tesla and Toyota were “kind of like oil and water from the get-go,” he said, and Toyota worried “that Tesla’s practices would reflect poorly on their brand.”Still, Musk found a way to make major carmakers dependent on his company. The result is a windfall for Tesla, which posted a $331 million profit in the third quarter of 2020 because of the credit sales.Around the same time, Tesla’s stock price began the steep climb that would make Musk the world’s richest person, topping out at more than $1,200 per share a few months after he changed his title from CEO to “Technoking.” (Tesla closed Friday at $769.)When Musk talks about Tesla, he steers clear of profit, preferring to focus on its role in saving “all life on Earth,” as he told podcaster Kara Swisher in 2018.“If we do not solve the environment,” he said, “we’re all damned.”With Tesla and SpaceX established as exemplars of innovation, Musk has branched out, looking for other ways to bolster life on Earth.In 2016, he launched Neuralink, which seeks to develop brain implants to be drilled into people’s skulls — including his own, “if it works,” he says. Yet he also has called government regulation of Big Tech a likely necessity: “If something … could potentially negatively affect elections or something like that … there probably should be some regulatory oversight,” he told Swisher.Yishan Wong, who worked with Musk at PayPal and later became chief executive of Reddit, predicted that Musk would be frustrated by Twitter, arguing that the calculus required to protect free speech while discouraging damaging misinformation and abuse — especially violence against women and minorities — is far more complicated than actual rocket science.“The internet is not a ‘frontier’ where people can go ‘to be free,’ it’s where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it,” Wong wrote last month in a lengthy Twitter thread.