Elon Musk has become the most influential CEO in the world.
In 2022, he has combined the honorary title of the richest man in the world and that of the most powerful CEO in the world. His net wealth is valued at $189 billion as of Dec. 4, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire index. However, it has fallen by $81 billion since January.
The serial entrepreneur recently added another symbolic company to an already extensive and impressive list. Musk completed the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27. This transaction makes him a boss involved in running Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Co., Neuralink and Twitter, five companies that play leading roles in their respective sectors.
But the acquisition of Twitter and his first decisions as the owner of the social network, considered the town square of our time, increased his influence exponentially.
Big Changes at Twitter
Musk, who describes himself as a free-speech absolutist, reactivated the account of former President Donald Trump and accounts with a history of anti-transgender posts. He also announced a general amnesty for all banned accounts. For the Techno King, as he is known at Tesla, any message is acceptable, as long as it does not violate the law of the country in which it is posted.
Musk announced a general amnesty for all banned accounts, after having run a survey on the platform. That and his elimination of Twitter's safeguards against covid-19 misinformation didn't reassure many advertisers.
He also decided to suspend the account of Ye, the rapper and businessman formerly known as Kanye West, after anti-Semitic remarks.
All these decisions have earned him criticism from the Democrats and Republicans at the same time. Musk, the everything CEO, arouses passion. He has become very political, positioning himself as the custodian of the balance in politics.
It is in this context that Musk indicated on Dec. 3, during an interview on Twitter Spaces, that he feared for his life.
'Being Shot'
"Frankly the risk of something bad happening to me, or even literally being shot, is quite significant,” the billionaire told Twitter users during that two-hour Q&A chat on Twitter Spaces.
"It’s not that hard to kill somebody if you wanted to, so hopefully they don’t, and fate smiles upon the situation with me and it does not happen … There’s definitely some risk there," he added.
He said that he "definitely" would not "be doing any open-air car parades, let me put it that way.”
Musk did not say whether he had received any specific threats.
"At the end of the day, we just want to have a future where we’re not oppressed," Musk said of its free-speech stance. “[Where] our speech is not suppressed, and we can say what we want to say without fear of reprisals."
For him, "as long as you’re not really causing harm to somebody else, then you should be allowed to say what you want.”
A few days ago Musk posted an image of what he said was his bedside. There was a black gun sitting next to four soda cans. (Whether the gun was real or not is unclear.) This gun looked like the "diamondback" revolver from the Sci-Fi game "Deus Ex: Human Revolution."
There was also an open case with what appeared to be a collectible gun inside. The inside of the lid of the gun case was covered by the painting of "Washington Crossing the Delaware," painted in 1851 by the German-American Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze.
