@matt_horncastle I agree with you we could do with a smaller government, less bureaucracy, less tax. But a govt half the size could still spend and invest the same amount of money. Just the salary bill would be lower.
@PhiggyPhig@BillyBrown1983 Teachers were fired by summer holidays which lasted til end of Jan, by march mandates were finally dropped. They kicked them out over 2 months
@LuvAgent99@aniobrien My point! Parking with a trailer almost always require at least 2 car parks.
I didn’t say I condone her behaviour of parking in the disabled car parks. Unacceptable. Thought I didn’t need to point that out
November 2023. The most powerful companies on Earth lined up to make him kneel.
Disney. Apple. IBM. Comcast. They pulled their money and waited for the apology.
The whole press corps wanted one word out of him. Sorry.
Sorkin leaned in and offered him the exit. Just walk it back.
Musk: “If somebody’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.”
No retraction. No cleanup post at 2am. No quiet calls begging the brands back.
They wrote that it was over. That he’d finally buried his own company.
He was worth around $230 billion that night.
This week SpaceX went public.
He became the first trillionaire who has ever lived.
Forbes puts him at $1.1 trillion. Almost four times the next richest person alive.
This was never about him.
The people threatening you only hold the power you agree to hand them.
Every time you apologized to keep the peace, you taught them the price was you.
He refused to pay it once, in front of the entire world.
The world blinked first.
The crowd never remembers who knelt. It remembers who refused to flinch.
The only person who can ever make you beg is you.
History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.
Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.
And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.
You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.
The first trillionaire in human history
- Elon Musk
- Born in South Africa
- Bullied relentlessly as a kid
- Immigrated to North America
- Arrived with a backpack and a dream
- Built Zip2 with his brother
- Sold it 4 years later for $300 million
- Co-founded PayPal with the profits
- Revolutionised digital payments
- Sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion
- Bet everything on Tesla and SpaceX
- Got mocked for electric cars
- Got laughed at for reusable rockets
- Nearly went bankrupt in 2008
- Kept building anyway
- Turned Tesla into the world’s most valuable automaker
- Made EVs mainstream and transformed the automotive industry
- Made reusable rockets a reality
- Reduced the cost of reaching space by 95%
- Sparked the modern commercial space race
- Built Starlink and connected millions around the world to high-speed internet
- Turned SpaceX into the most valuable private company in history
- Bought Twitter for $44 billion
- The world said he overpaid
- He was called reckless, stupid & crazy
- Advertisers fled, media declared it dead
- Critics called it the worst acquisition in tech history
- Renamed it 𝕏
- Rebuilt the platform anyway
- Turned it into one of the most influential platforms on Earth
- Launched xAI and accelerated the global AI race
- Sent astronauts to space
- Is trying to get humans to mars
- Created millions of jobs
- Generated hundreds of billions in value
- Inspired an entire generation of builders
Before:
- Failed repeatedly
- Worked insane hours
- Slept in factories and offices
- Got bullied, laughed at and mocked
- Constantly told “it’s impossible”
- Kept building anyway
- Made it possible
Today:
- Richest person on Earth
- First trillionaire in human history
- Largest IPO in history $1.77 trillion
Most people quit when the world laughs at them.
Elon Musk built the future instead.
Love him or hate him…
Nobody has changed more industries in a single lifetime.
Payments. Cars. Energy. Space. Social Media. Communications. AI.
History won’t remember the people who said it couldn’t be done.
It will remember the people who did it anyway.
Congratulations Elon.
The first trillionaire. 🚀