A timeline of events in the year of Elon Musk shows how omnipresent he has become, how his X feed has become as unavoidable as Donald Trump’s was
Hello, and welcome to Techscape. I’ve been pondering screen-time and isolation after I suffered through a recent bout of Covid. Even a few days of seclusion coupled with lengthy, uninterrupted spates of staring at screens were enough to return me to the state of mind in which I spent most of 2020. I hope all of you reading have a wonderful winter and new year, filled with the opposite of that experience: family, friends, and cheery, in-person parties.
Today in Techscape: We look back at the biggest tech story of 2024, Elon Musk, and at the Amazon workers strike in the US.
Tech in 2024: Elon Musk becomes as famous and powerful as Donald Trump
The biggest tech story of the year is Elon Musk’s rise to omnipresence and an unprecedented level of global power. In 2024, he managed to become the world’s most influential unelected man. He has the ear of the president of the United States and influence over the very agencies that would rein his companies. Those companies have become vital to the digital infrastructure of many nations. His purse makes US lawmakers genuflect or cower, his tweets make leaders around the world cheer or fly into a rage.
Since Donald Trump’s election, Tesla’s stock price has nearly doubled. Musk’s fortune, already the biggest in the world at the start of 2024, has ballooned to $440bn, per Forbes. The nearest mogul on the list, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is $200bn behind.
Musk hasn’t been shy to flex his newfound muscles of power since Trump’s election, weighing in fiercely on government appointments. His most daring move came last week, when he led the charge to tank the House’s bipartisan spending agreement, arguing it included too many giveaways to Democrats. Trump and a cadre of congressional Republicans soon followed suit, and the president-elect upped the ante by calling on Republicans to suspend the debt ceiling.
Republicans in the end did not cave to Trump and Musk’s demands, showcasing the limits of the CEO’s power, and offering a glimpse of the chaos that awaits us in 2025. Democrats responded with jabs of “President Elon Musk”. Users of X, formerly Twitter, flooded the social network with images of Musk in the White House and Trump on a dog leash. Trump responded by downplaying Musk’s influence: “No, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you.”
In the center of this week’s political storm, it’s hard to think back on how we got into this mess – and how Musk worked his way up to the helm of US politics. So let’s look back at a timeline of his year. What it reveals: Elon Musk was inescapable. In 2024, reading his X feed became as unavoidable as Donald Trump’s from 2015 to 2021. Whatever his flights of fancy were on a given day, that set the news agenda.
