The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume XLVII

What is Elon Musk?

May 19, 2022

What is Elon Musk?

In case you have been out of the loop, take a guess.

Elon Musk is

B) The pheromones of college students at Elon University when in rut

C) The name of the person who has accumulated more financial wealth than anyone in the history of the world

D) All of the above

If you chose D, you are wrong. The answer is C. But I guess it is kind of a trick question because Elon Musk is a who, not a what. If you have watched the news or scrolled through the internet anytime in the last decade, you have most certainly run across his name and heard something about him. Being the richest person on Earth aims an inextinguishable spotlight so he is hard to miss.

To get you up to speed for this report, here are some highlights of how he got to be where he is. He invented Paypal and sold it for a bunch of money. He studied physics and rocket science, then parlayed his Paypal payday into founding SpaceX. That took off and he decided to get into electric cars by funding and improving upon Tesla Motors. All those investments got popular and his net worth rose to $230,000,000,000. If you hate counting zeroes, that is 230 Billion dollars. When he waltzes into the champagne room, it doesn't just rain, it pours. At least, I imagine so.

To give you some perspective, that is almost as much as the ranking #2 and #3 billionaires combined. According to the World Inequality Database income comparator it is 6,398,905 times the combined wealth of half of the 7.9 Billion people on Earth. It is just about the same gross domestic product of Portugal, or the GDP of these 55 countries combined: Bahamas, Mauritius, Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, New Caledonia, Tajikistan, Monaco, Mauritania, Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo, Togo, Eritrea, Guyana, Somalia, Montenegro, Fiji, Barbados, Maldives, Swaziland, Sierra Leone, Suriname, Djibouti, Burundi, Aruba, Andorra, Greenland, Liberia, Bhutan, Central African Republic, Gambia, Lesotho, East Timor, Belize, Cape Verde, St Lucia, Solomon Islands, Guinea Bissau, Antigua And Barbuda, Comoros, Seychelles, Grenada, South Sudan, St Kitts and Nevis, Vanuatu, Samoa, St Vincent And The Grenadines, Tonga, Dominica, Sao Tome and Principe, Micronesia, Palau, Kiribati.

It is not an exaggeration to call this an astronomical and staggering amount of wealth.

So when Elon Musk jumped up and said he would buy Twitter for $44 Billion (which is about the GDP of 30 small countries) it naturally raised eyebrows and started a lot of speculation. The first things that come to mind for anybody who struggles to pay a mortgage or cuts coupons to get by is "Why? What for? You could do so much more with forty-four billion dollars than buy a website."

So true. You could buy large swaths of land and protect them and their wildlife from everything. You could choose to assist poor drought stricken countries by building wells and investing in their sanitation and farming to help them rise up from poverty and starvation. You could give a million Tesla cars away.

But this is not a question of charity or support or conservation. It is not even about making money. It is about data. Data which Elon views as more valuable than money.

Twitter, the most used social media site there is, hovers at about 465 Million users. People quit, people join, and there are apparently a lot of robots programmed to use Twitter just to get data. That is roughly 6% of the population of Earth. When you consider that only 6% of the planet is tuned in to Twitter, is that a good deal? Twitter does not make anything. All it does is use energy. That's it. By shoving messages around, many of them which are not read at all by people who are essentially shouting into a void, all Twitter (and the internet) does is use energy.

So, what would he gain from Twitter? Is it just for folly, to allow Donald Trump back onto the forum to see what he will say? Part of the answer is yes. He has stated that he wants to Twitter to have more freedom of speech than users currently enjoy. But is that worth $44 Billion?

To figure out what is going on in Elon's head, you can't just rely on news reports, you have to hear it from Elon himself. To get a glimpse of what he thinks watch his recent interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of German digital and periodical publishing house Axel Springer.

This interview reveals some of his thoughts on the human race and getting us off of this planet before it is too late to do so. He wants the human race to survive and has put himself in the unique position of being able to advance the possibilities. Without sharing any spoilers, this latest interview shows a man who is thoughtful and humbled by his wealth and success. He does not come across as the outrageous personality who once sold flamethrowers, toked Joe Rogan's blunt, or found out the hard way that jokes about pedophilia are not cool. Instead, he answers tough personal questions that anyone would have a difficult time answering. He expresses his desire for colonizing Mars and explains why it is important. He shares insight on advances in artificial intelligence and the possibility of downloading human brains into software that can be self aware.

It is all quite fantastic, but is it possible? How do you even go about achieving such objectives? He doesn't talk about it, but I think I know the answer. You buy Twitter.

Every social media user clicks a box to have an account whether they read the fine print or not, and somewhere in the legalese attached to that checkmark, you give up data about yourself that may or may not be used for purposes that you may or may not understand. It is simply statistical analysis.

How is that valuable?

I am so glad you asked. Even though Twitter only accounts for 6% of the population of the planet. It is more than a litmus test for human behavior, it is a barometer for it. If Elon is able to eliminate the fake accounts, and let everyone say what they want without fear of repercussion, it is going to expose some truly frightening things. Think about what it will be like when hatemongers don't get their Tweets deleted, or what happens when people rally one way or another for whatever cause they believe.

Twitter is already expressly reactionary. The reason for tweeting is to get a reaction. For those reacting to other tweets, it is again, to get another reaction.

So, what can we learn from this?

The better question is what can artificial intelligence learn from this?

To be able to reach beyond Mars, which we know we are able to do, to save the human race before the inevitable demise of the Sun, we are going to have to send robots out into the universe and teach them to behave like we do. We will also have to teach them the difference between right and wrong regardless of what is popular. While 6% of the population does not take every human behavior into account, it is a fair slice, and the best we can get. There is no better database of reactionary human behavior than Twitter. Facebook does not compete on the same level because in order to find out anything substantial about anyone, you need to "friend" them. Not so with Twitter. For a gold mine of data this is as pure as you can get.

But what of Elon? We know who he is, but the initial question remains.

What is Elon Musk?

A visionary? A savior? Just a rich guy who only gets richer? How he sees himself is complex, so I can't say, but I imagine he must feel like a Sheriff. Not a King, not the Boss, not an Oracle, but a guy who knows if he makes an effort to do the most important thing he can think of, it will save humanity.

Being a Sheriff is a complex situation. You are bounced into moral dilemmas daily, sometimes with conflicting consequences, depending on whatever decisions you make. Sometimes there are no good answers. There is a dialogue exchange in the TV show Fortitude where somebody asks about Sheriff Dan Anderson, "Is he a good Sheriff or a bad Sheriff?"

"Nobody knows. To live in Fortitude, everybody must have a job, so there is no crime, so there is nothing for the Sheriff to do. no laws to enforce. So nobody knows if he is a good Sheriff or a bad Sheriff."

Side note: Please watch Fortitude and thank me later. The first two seasons are on Amazon, but the third and final season are hard to come by. I don't see that they are streaming anywhere in the US yet, but I got the DVDs, and let me tell you, Dennis Quaid gives the performance of his career. It is jaw dropping action, well worth watching.

Back to Elon and Twitter. It is important to look at the long game, like Elon does. Twitter dominance is to study human behavior to apply to artificial intelligence so that they can explore the universe as we would, maybe even taking embryos into space, to save the human race. For now, most people will consider this as sci-fi as Fortitude, but what if it works? Does Elon Musk fall into the category of a Sheriff, albeit self-appointed, to make the life and death decision for life as we know it?

If so, does that make him a good sheriff or a bad sheriff? If we get off this planet to colonize others, and do it successfully, will it be at the expense of other life forms, the same way we trampled and colonized Earth? And if we become a race of alien invaders, will those we meet see us as the enemy?

Will we spawn good Sheriffs or bad ones?

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