Newspaper Reader.
Oct 28, 2025
Headline: Elon Musk’s life after Washington, from Tesla to robots and tunnels
Sub-headline: Since parting ways with Trump in June, the world’s richest man has refocused on his companies, delighting his investors.
Editor: the first two paragraphs of Arnaud Leparmentier reportage are instructive:
A tunnel beneath the Bering Strait linking Siberia and Alaska – that’s the latest idea put forward by Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, who wants to entrust the construction to Elon Musk and his tunnel company, The Boring Company. Dmitriev, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin, believes the entrepreneur’s ingenuity could reduce the cost from $65 billion (€56 billion) to $8 billion.
The world’s richest man may have emerged battered from his stint in politics in June, after his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under US President Donald Trump, but he continues to fascinate. Especially with his wildest projects: colonizing Mars, controlling the brain via Neuralink or, in this case, this absurd tunnel. The proposed infrastructure would come out near Nome, a gold rush town in Alaska that remains completely isolated, some 850 kilometers from Anchorage, and would ultimately serve only to move military troops – arguably the best argument not to build it.
Editor: Though nothing quite prepares the reader for what is to follow! Does it model itself on ‘Lost Illusions’ of Balzac and its protagonist Lucien de Rubempré? To this American Tin-Ear, much of what I read at this newspaper, is touched by what my English can only know as a literary/poetic atmospheric, though this is a vulgarization!
Keeping a relatively low profile, Musk has been working on restoring his psychological well-being. He needs to be loved, as shown by the messages he highlights on his social network X. One is from his brother, Kimbal, who helps him cope with the pressure: “It’s not that I’m the voice of reason, it’s more like I’m helping Elon find his voice of reason.” There is the one from his mother, Maye Musk, who is still modeling for magazines at 77: “When Elon told me he is going to launch satellites, he said it was to save lives. This is another example. How did he know? He sees the future. Proud mom.” Added to these is the statement from investor Cathie Wood, who has never given up on Tesla and defends the astronomical compensation of its boss, which could reach $1 trillion: “I think he’s a very good person.”
There is also the video, posted on October 10, of a meeting with Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia and a key figure in the artificial intelligence revolution thanks to his ultrahigh-performance chips: “Elon Musk is just an extraordinary engineer, and I love working with him.”
Editor: Arnaud Leparmentier embelishes on his theme:
Musk is tired of being hated, even though he insists that his companies work for the good of humanity. “Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy; this is a love of philanthropy. SpaceX is trying to ensure the long-term survival of humanity with multiple planet species; this is love for humanity. You know, Neuralink is to help solve brain injuries and existential risk with AI; love of humanity. Boring Company is trying to solve traffic, which will help most people, and that also is love of humanity,” Musk explained in a video posted on October 11 on X.
Keeping a relatively low profile, Musk has been working on restoring his psychological well-being. He needs to be loved, as shown by the messages he highlights on his social network X. One is from his brother, Kimbal, who helps him cope with the pressure: “It’s not that I’m the voice of reason, it’s more like I’m helping Elon find his voice of reason.” There is the one from his mother, Maye Musk, who is still modeling for magazines at 77: “When Elon told me he is going to launch satellites, he said it was to save lives. This is another example. How did he know? He sees the future. Proud mom.” Added to these is the statement from investor Cathie Wood, who has never given up on Tesla and defends the astronomical compensation of its boss, which could reach $1 trillion: “I think he’s a very good person.”
There is also the video, posted on October 10, of a meeting with Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia and a key figure in the artificial intelligence revolution thanks to his ultrahigh-performance chips: “Elon Musk is just an extraordinary engineer, and I love working with him.”
Chapter 1
Combative CEO
Word Count: 478
Chapter 2
SpaceX lagging behind
Word Count : 443
Chapter 3
Messianism and entrepreneurship
Word Count: Word Count: 438
Chapter 4
Army of robot workers
Word Count : 282
Reader I will attach a copy of each of the 4 Chapters of Arnaud Leparmentier commetary:
Combative CEO
Of course, still navigating on the fringes of the far right, he continues to post hateful content targeting Democrats, undocumented migrants and British Labour supporters. Still, he is much more withdrawn, and at any rate, less noticed.
Musk has stopped attacking Donald Trump and no longer talks about creating his own party. While he did not attend the dinner for top tech executives at the White House in early September, he greeted the president in Arizona during the tribute to Charlie Kirk, the MAGA influencer who was killed in Utah on September 10. For now, though, he appears to have left behind his period of extreme politicization. Musk has not returned to Washington since May, and tracking of his private jet shows him shuttling between Texas; the San Francisco Bay Area; and occasionally Vancouver, Canada, where Neuralink is being tested. He has returned to focusing on his industrial ventures: SpaceX, Tesla and xAI.
Investors have breathed a sigh of relief, as exemplified by Dan Ives, a prominent American tech analyst at the financial group Wedbush. “You’re seeing a much different Musk than from the dark days during the Trump administration, when a lot of that brand damage [to Tesla] happened, and he took his eye off the ball. I think Musk is back to wartime CEO, laser-focused on bringing Tesla into the AI revolution chapter,” Ives said.
Investors have believed it. The share price has doubled since its April lows, and Tesla is now worth $1.43 trillion, about five times more than Toyota or 120 times more than Renault. “I think the stock has reflected that the biggest asset for Tesla is Musk,” said Ives. Third-quarter results published on Wednesday, October 22, confirmed that the company is in recovery, with a performance much better than the disastrous first half of the year, but still mixed: Year-on-year, sales jumped by 12%, boosted in the United States by the scheduled end of tax credits for electric vehicles. But net income fell by 37%, notably due to lower prices and the costs of transitioning to robotics and AI. On the New York Stock Exchange, Tesla’s share price was down 3.3% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
His other private companies are also worth fortunes. SpaceX, which in 2024 carried out half of all space launches, sending 84% of the world’s satellites into orbit worldwide, was valued at $400 billion this summer, according to Bloomberg (for comparison, LVMH is worth around $360 billion).
Finally, xAI, formed from the merger of X and Musk’s AI start-up, was valued at $200 billion. The days when Musk was crushed by debt after buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 are long gone. As a result, he is by far the richest person in the world, with a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at nearly $460 billion, after briefly surpassing $500 billion.
Word Count: 478
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
SpaceX lagging behind
But isn’t Musk deceiving investors, making impossible promises all over again, like conquering Mars, building self-driving cars and making robots? In reality, to properly analyze the entrepreneur, it’s necessary to invert the Chinese proverb, “When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.” It’s not the moon that matters, but the finger. While Musk claimed he would conquer Mars, he was actually colonizing low Earth orbit with his Starlink satellite system and crushing Europe’s Ariane program.
While he was extolling the virtues of the self-driving car, he was reinventing the Ford Model T, with a handful of electric models selling more than seven million units, manufactured in four giant factories. And while he was championing Twitter’s so-called freedom of speech, he was amassing data for his AI robot, Grok, within xAI. These achievements led investor Wood to say, “I think he’s the Thomas Edison of our age.”
Except that those achievements are now in the past, and the era of monopolies is over. Other satellite constellations, such as Eutelsat, are set to compete with Starlink; Tesla’s share of the electric vehicle market has dropped below 40% in the US, after peaking at nearly 80% in 2020, as competitors caught up, while the brand has suffered a serious decline in Europe. Now, attention must once again turn to the Moon. And there, unsurprisingly, things are much more difficult.
SpaceX is something of an exception. The company, which revolutionized the space industry with its reusable launchers and low-cost launches, claims it will conquer Mars. Still, NASA has concerns about whether it can even reach the Moon. On October 20, its interim administrator, Sean Duffy – who also serves as Trump’s transportation secretary – announced that he was considering turning to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s company.
He explained that Musk’s rocket, which is intended to land astronauts on the Moon and serve as a launch base for Mars missions, is highly complex, with unprecedented challenges such as in-orbit refueling and transporting 100 metric tons of cargo. “I love SpaceX. It’s an amazing company. The problem is, they’re behind. They’ve pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China,” said Sean Duffy on CNBC on Monday.
Musk’s retort to Duffy, a champion tree climber, stung on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday: “Should someone whose biggest claim to fame is climbing trees be running America’s space program?” Still, the challenges ahead are immense. “The number of technical hurdles SpaceX has thus far overcome pales in number and complexity to those that lay ahead,” wrote three former senior NASA officials, Douglas Loverro, Doug Cooke and Daniel Dumbacher, in the journal SpaceNews in early September.
Word Count : 443
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Messianism and entrepreneurship
For Tesla and xAI, Musk has one obsession: the AI revolution. The South African-born entrepreneur is driven by his unquenchable hatred of Sam Altman, with whom he co-founded OpenAI – the creator of ChatGPT – at the end of 2015, before leaving the organization. Musk has accused Altman of turning OpenAI into a profitable company even though it was originally a nonprofit organization.
According to a New York Times investigation published at the end of September, Musk has dedicated most of his time in recent months to xAI, completely overhauling his teams and preparing for battle to create an AI that is not “woke,” as he accuses ChatGPT of being. Once again, Musk displayed a blend of messianism and entrepreneurship. “We are the only company where the mission is truth. If you force the AI to lie or believe things that are not true, you’re at great risk of creating a dystopian future,” he told xAI employees in a speech.
This ideological battle has led to notorious glitches: In July, after a program update, his chatbot Grok made antisemitic remarks, praising Adolf Hitler and suggesting that people with Jewish last names were more likely to spread hate online. As for Musk, he mainly seems stuck in the 1980s, the era of his adolescence, in a world of science fiction and eroticism. He keeps posting several of Grok’s creations: science fiction imagery and many depictions of women – sensual, curvaceous, provocative – intended for so-called “virtual romances.”
This development relies on energy-intensive supercomputers, located in Memphis, Tennessee. “Just as we will be the first to bring a Gigawatt of coherent training compute online, we will also be the first to 10GW, 100GW, 1TW…” he posted on X on September 23. However, many experts believe Musk is lagging behind. “Musk is someone I wouldn’t bet against,” cautioned Ives. “[OpenAI] has the scale and scope to play catch-up to Antropic. OpenAI clearly is going to be the leader. There’s trillions that are going to be spent in this AI revolution, and Musk wants to make sure that he’s at the front of the table.”
Tesla’s future also depends on AI, which, in the eyes of its most fervent enthusiasts, can justify the company being valued at 260 times its current profits. The company plans to offer its shareholders the chance to take a stake in OpenAI, and Ives does not rule out that Musk could eventually bring his various companies together under a single holding company. Pessimists point out that fully autonomous cars are constantly announced and repeatedly delayed, while the fall 2024 demonstration of the Optimus robots was staged, with their speech remotely controlled.
Word Count: 438
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Army of robot workers
Nevertheless, the success of his competitor Waymo (Google), a specialist in driverless taxis, highlights how far Musk has fallen behind, but also confirms that this path will soon open. In addition, Musk believes in building an army of robot workers and wants to produce one million per year within five years. “Humanoid robots are going to be a major factor in Tesla’s growth story. Optimus is going to play a huge role in factories, as well as for everyday consumers in their lives,” added Ives.
For all these projects, money is needed – and a lot of it. On that point, Musk has repeatedly claimed that becoming wealthy is not his goal – he is not known to own a yacht, an art collection or luxurious properties, nor does he have extravagant passions, apart from a McLaren he bought for $1 million in 1999. This allowed him to bond with Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, also a fan of British supercars.
Yet he fought tooth and nail to secure his $1 trillion compensation at Tesla. Officially, it was to have free rein by controlling a quarter of the company’s capital. “I don’t want to find I have so little control I can be easily ousted by activist shareholders,” he said in July while admitting that he shouldn’t have so much control over Tesla that the board can’t fire him if he goes “crazy.” At the end of April, his board, according to The Wall Street Journal, had threatened to start a search to replace him. “It was not sustainable for Musk to stay in the Trump administration and also be CEO of Tesla,” said Ives. “He had to choose, and gladly he chose Tesla.”
Word Count : 282
Newspaper Reader.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 