How Elon Musk Became the World’s Most Powerful Influencer

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“Underestimating Elon is not a good idea,” Bill Gates said on Kara Swisher’s podcast the other day. But really, at this point, who is underestimating Elon Musk? The man is everywhere, influencing everything (or trying to). In addition to hyping his own companies, he’s chiming in on cryptocurrency and “Gamestonk,” interrogating the CEO of Robinhood (and putting Clubhouse on the map in the process), separately inviting both Kanye West and Vladimir Putin for another Clubhouse appearance, and even slamming the operator of Texas’ power grid. And that’s just the past couple of weeks.

It’s tempting to believe that we have reached peak Musk. But I’m not convinced: To the contrary, Musk’s status as the business world’s most ridiculous and yet somehow most effective influencer is only solidifying. If anything, he’s increasingly transcending the business world, having become a cross between a public figure, a pop culture stalwart, and a living, breathing subreddit.

That last bit is crucial: Musk has a better command of social media — and online culture in general — than any actual social media company CEO. Sometimes this is calculated (particularly when it comes to hyping Tesla), sometimes it seems like pure, uncut id (the shameful “pedo guy” attack on the caver who helped rescue those Thai children in 2018), and sometimes it feels like mere trolling.