What happens after Elon?
A Lion can never birth a Goat, but can a Goat birth Sheep?
Circling Back
If you read our essay; Notes on X, and how to Write the Future, you would know we’re huge fans of Elon’s work over the past few decades, even more so his crippling pain tolerance despite his many enemies’ plans to destroy the name he has built for himself and his N children and K women.
We also explored his companies’ business models, asking ourselves what the role of Free Speech is in the humble mix of X and all his other companies. Going a bit further to compare his industry-wide domination with that of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates over a decade.
It is safe to say that no one in our generation has come remotely close to solving as many problems whilst creating value for themselves, investors and humanity at large as Elon has done together with his business partners over the last few decades. Now, did he have some help? Why of course! He started his first company with his brother Errol who has been by his side all through and up until his purchase of Twitter, his mentor Larry Ellison, a technology juggernaut in his own right, supported his 44-billion-dollar investment with a 1 billion dollars to complete the purchase for reasons summed up in two words “Free Speech”.
Not to beat up an already dead cow, the focus on this article is not Elon, but what lies ahead for the future of the technology industry now that we are evidently in the late stages of its dominance in the global economy.
Shall we?
Separating Technology from Business
Some people might already understand where this is going and would be of the opinion that a clear distinction need not be made. But I beg to differ for one reason; our generation is one of Founders.
We are living in an age where the ease of starting a business is as simple as owning a domain name which means at the cost of $5 you can already start your own operation and rake in thousands of dollars before bringing in the government and paying taxes. This had never been so in history, and it was only made possible because of the advent of the internet.
In times past, you would need to purchase a license from the government for as much as $200 before you can call yourself a Founder. Sure, you can open shop in your backyard or sell a piece of software from the back of your trunk and make money, but you can’t call yourself a founder till the government says so. All that changed when the internet gave everyone equal opportunity to make money and become sovereign entities in their own right. But like a friend would say:
"Rabbit holes are not all created equal" -
Into the Technology rabbit hole
Though it may seem like the technology space grew wings of its own that carried founders into unknown heights of wealth and internet stardom, this is far from the case as we explored in our previous article.
After the dot-com bubble exploded, a new era of investment-focused businessmen exposed the flaws of the internet era, helping the world identify companies that had value and the ones that didn’t until it became safer for investors to put their money into the digging of the technology rabbit hole.
So, as we can see, investors (now dubbed Angel Investors) were the ones who opened the doors for the exploitation of the technology sector by various founders and the most successful founders proved to be the ones who could not just raise the most amount of money but put the money to even better use.
From the engineers in Steve Jobs’ garage to the PayPal mafia, to Y Combinator and AngelList, several individuals drove headfirst into San Fransisco, California to prove that they had the stuff that it took to raise money and start technology companies in the hopes of one day calling themselves Founder. Some found it noble to settle for the title of co-founder to fulfil a bigger mission of creating groundbreaking technology, but one guy decided to take it far, in fact too far. He decided that he was not just going to be Founder, but Founder and CEO of not one but two of earth’s most formidable technology companies: Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).
But one common trope in these lovely stories is the inevitable power tussle between founders and operators of the business. As breath-taking as the game of technology is, the business game is one where ugly people come to make their name beautiful because no matter how ugly a man may be, money has its way of making him beautiful no matter how heinous his acts may be in getting them.
Please note: this author does not endorse the unscrupulous acts of treacherous businessmen; this section only serves the purpose of bringing the reader into awareness of their existence.
Smart but Horny
If you ask a man if he would like to be rich, he would be more likely than not to answer in the assertive but watch as his answer turns to mumble rap when you ask him what he would like to spend his money on. Though, it is possible for a man to doge this question for a few years, there comes a time where he would eventually have to answer, if not for his sake, but for the sake of those he wishes to bring into this world. Only then would he stumble into the world of politics, and in this world would he ask questions that go beyond “how much more money can we make?” to what environment would be safe for my kids to school in? or “what if this environment is no longer safe for my business?”.
Bridging the gap between Business and Politics
For the better part of the last half-century, California has been the breeding ground for young entrepreneurs whose primary aim is to bring themselves and their families out of poverty. It has created billionaires from Stanford like Elon and Thiel and top tier athletes out of UCLA graduates; like Arnold Schwarzenegger who went on to become the governor of the great city. But what happens when the city that made you rich threatens to bankrupt you?
Easy. You move.
After the San Fransisco company: Twitter threatened to sue Elon musk of $44billion over a possible breach of the takeover agreement, Elon Musk hired a New York based law firm which convinced the Delaware judge to clear him of any wrongdoing which led him to move his once San-Fransisco based Tesla Giga-Factory and SpaceX’s Starbase Office both from California to Texas.
Unlike Elon, Jeff Bezos and other founders like Brett Adcock and athletes like Syvester Stallone (who is permanently quitting California) are choosing to move to Florida, citing personal reasons but not excluding tax breaks from their list.
All this is happening while the state of California continues to implement policies that hurt its residents, throwing more people homeless on the streets. If this keeps on happening, it is unlikely that California will produce the same caliber of technology entrepreneurs it has managed to produce in the last half-decade.
Riding the new wave
When a new technology surfaces, the inevitable question of market dominance rears its head as everyone wants to know who, or what company would take the lion’s share of this newly found pie.
Since the emergence of Artificial Intelligence at the forefront of the technology space, several companies have made not-so-small bets on their ability to exploit this technology for the benefit of their investors and humanity at large.
Google released Bard, Microsoft and OpenAI released ChatGPT, NVIDIA made its investments, and even Elon introduced xAI to X as his means of riding this new tech wave. However, the question of how best to exploit artificial intelligence still proves difficult to answer.
Elon’s exploits in the technology industry were hardware-focused, and from his tweets recently, he seems to be having a lot of interactions with Brett, a hardware technology founder from the University of Florida. Could Elon be mentoring Brett just as Larry had mentored him? Or could it all just be a fluke?
I don’t know, but Figure AI just raised a whopping $675 million from several investors in its bid to introduce humanoid robots into American factories and spearhead global manufacturing efforts all the while Sam Altman is requesting a $1 trillion investment to build God.
In my opinion, this could very well be the beginning of a new era.
What do you think?