With Friends Like Elon Musk, Who Needs Enemies?
Inside the mind of the world’s greatest narcissist.
A few days ago, news emerged that the world’s wealthiest man had shagged the missus of his good mate, Sergei Brin, the founder of Google. And what’s more, this bit of salacious information was cited in the divorce proceedings of the Russian-American.
No where in Brin’s head would he have foreseen this sort of betrayal from someone whom he counted as a close friend.
And the friendship between the two goes back to the late 90s when Brin and Page were taking major steps in building world beating technology, and Musk with Thiel were breaking new ground with finance technology in silicon valley.
The intervening years have been quite kind to these players in ways that even they would have had profound difficulty envisaging; a collective worth of several hundreds of billions of dollars with the strong likelihood of greater success ahead.
But given our protagonist’s instincts, it seemed only natural that he would covet that which wasn’t his, even if it meant destroying decades of friendship.
And this pattern of behaviour isn’t at unusual with Musk.
It was precisely why he and Jack Dorsey fell out spectacularly, when the former decided to buy Twitter, only to do a…