‘What if Elon Musk actually did run the world?’

“I say something, and then it usually happens.” It could be Donald Trump speaking, or the King, or Jeff Bezos, or your mum when she’s cross.

But it’s a quote from Elon Musk, in a 2014 interview. At the time he was worth $2billion or so, and it was just companies and banks that jumped at his command. Today, worth north of $400bn, presidents and prime ministers pay attention too.

And what a ride that is. Tickling Nigel Farage before publicly dumping him, provoking racists, getting the chance to be in charge of his own multi-billion-dollar government contracts without the faff of getting elected, pissing off France and endorsing the far right in Germany. He’s reportedly moved into Mar-a-Lago and is so omnipresent that even Donald Trump is tiring of him.

Keir Starmer, then, is not alone. But nor is Musk, whose purchase of Twitter has seen it become even more of a cesspit than any large pile of humans usually creates. So what if his fans got what they wanted, and the world was run according to Musk?

When he lost Paypal to a boardroom coup, Musk said: “Life is too short for long-term grudges.” So that’s the Falklands, Gibraltar, Crimea, Chechnya, Taiwan, Rwanda, South Sudan, Myanmar, Iran, Israel, and the Uighurs all fixed. Although how he’ll get the Palestinians to let things drop is unclear; a tweet probably won’t cut it.

“You need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster,” Musk once said. “We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history… to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.” So that’s a headlong race to carbon-neutral, using the carbon taxes Musk also said he’d support. Of course, if it means an uptick in sales for the hyper-expensive and ultra-ugly Tesla cars and batteries, who could begrudge him?

“I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it affects the public good,” he told CBS in 2018. “We can’t have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news, that’s crazy.” So we could expect him to back the Online Safety Bill that will come into force in March and could see him fined 10% of X’s global revenue if he doesn’t remove illegal content; roll out similar in America, the land of free speech; and delete the utter bollo someone has been tweeting about rape gangs under his name.

If we hold him to his words, the world under Musk could indeed be a nicer, brighter, kinder place.

Except, well, his words tend to just flip on a dime. He’s mainly upset with Starmer because he didn’t rescind the social media law that the Tories tabled. He’s mainly pro-carbon tax because it would hurt Tesla competitors more and no-one’s really calculated the combined emissions footprint of billionaire gasbags.

Musk has stepped into the entertainment void left when Trump departed Twitter in a huff, and we all had to forego the pleasure of seeing what most irked the Giant Oompah Loompah while taking his morning dump. That was fun, laced with a hint of danger; when Musk does it, it’s not funny for the simple reason there’s no way to punish the hubris.

He can’t be sued, shunned or regulated. He cannot be recalled, de-selected or subjected to the electoral process. Even if he takes up a role in a new department of government efficiency, you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll treat Capitol Hill scrutiny like a juice zit in need of a squeeze.

Of course the counter-terrorism squad is monitoring him. So are the rest of us, because a) money talks loudest and b) if the balloon goes up, he’ll be on it.

There is only one factor limiting Musk’s domination of the narrative, and it is the one he’s already warned us against. “I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side,” he said. The world’s richest men of yore all confirm that all brilliance eventually fades. Mansa Musa’s empire collapsed, John Jacob Astor drowned on the Titanic the same as third class, even Rameses the Great is now just dust.

On top of that, personal happiness often evades the grasp of billionaires. Jeff Bezos is on his second wife, who looks like she’s on her third or fourth face. Bill Gates has read the tea-leaves and is trying to give it all away before a tin-foil hatted conspiracist gets to him. Bernard Arnault lost $31bn last year, and if that doesn’t keep him awake at night he’s not human.

Musk, all things being as equal as entropy dictates everything usually is, will fall, or implode, or have debts called in. The chances of him dying happy in his bed surrounded by 12 loving children who aren’t arguing over the money is nil, and if he doesn’t know it, we do.

The simple fact is that, like a lot of Bond villains with family wealth from emerald mining, a high IQ and a permanent victim complex, Musk has the brain of a butterfly. He flits from anti-Semitism to Auschwtiz trips to endorsing a claim Hitler was a communist, without ever sensing the dissonance.

He was anti-apartheid in his native South Africa, he’s pro-guns in his adopted Texas, he is whatever it best suits him to be, because he was bullied and beaten at school and, frankly, he’s desperate to be liked. He gravitates to the bullies so he can make friends with them, he multiplies wives and children so he’s not alone. Fundamentally, the world’s richest man thinks, despite the big shiny pile of evidence to the contrary, that the world is out to get him. He wages war against regulation when it threatens his businesses, trolls politicians if they don’t kiss his arse, and makes Nadine Dorries look like an oasis of calm and consistency.

In a billionaire, that’s called eccentricity. If it were you or I, it’d be called living under a bridge talking to a bag of damp string. And you wouldn’t trust someone like that with a spoon, never mind a country. As a rich, white, powerful man, Musk can make things happen just by saying it, he can order people to land a rocket between chopsticks, but he cannot govern because he doesn’t know how to meet someone else’s needs.

Perhaps if he did run the world, he would take a leaf out of his favourite book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and build a rocket onto which would go all the people Earth needs least: racists, tyrants, billionaires, everyone who works in insurance, and whoever is ultimately responsible for that CBeebies’ animated cry-baby Bing.

“I would like to die on Mars,” said Musk. And on that, we can agree.