Elon Musk is on a slippery slope

Elon Musk is heading for a crash.

It’s only a matter of time before one or another of his random enthusiasms brings him down.

But if I had the power, I would guarantee him at least two more years of solvency before he loses control of his companies, his great wealth and, possibly, even his freedom.

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My apparent sympathy for Musk gets me a lot of flak from my wife, one of my sons and most of my friends, who cannot wait to see him go under.

And the downfall is almost certainly coming soon.

As entrepreneur and Prof Scott Galloway recently remarked: “No company with over $1 billion in revenue has ever lost 60% of its revenues in a 12-month period, in a non-war period. Twitter is the worst-performing business in history.”

The X debacle demonstrates the rapid decline in Musk’s business acumen.

As any 10-year-old could have told him, if he effectively abandoned serious monitoring and opened X to every hate-filled ranter with some lies to peddle, the advertisers who are the real source of his cash flow will take their distance from his site.

But Musk told the advertisers where to go if they didn’t want to advertise on his platform, so almost all his big accounts pulled out.

Now, he is suing those same advertisers for not advertising.

In the meantime, Musk seems to be covering X’s losses by pulling money out of his most successful business, Tesla.

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So why should we care what happens to Musk?

The world owes him some gratitude for pioneering electric cars when nobody else was really working at it.

But if Tesla failed now, other electric vehicle manufacturers would fill the gap.

However, he still has another job to do and if he’s not available, it may not happen at all.

The fifth iteration of his giant “Starship” heavy lift rocket will fly soon and with every iteration, it gets a bit closer to delivering the kind of performance that will transform space flight.

Every flight so far has crashed into the sea, but that’s the development method Musk uses: launch it, find out what made it fail, fix it, and launch again.

It will probably take about another five flights before he gets it all right, so that’s around a year.

If you don’t care about the human race getting out into the universe, then go ahead and hate Musk.

But if you do care, then acknowledge that Musk needs two more years to make that future possible.