In April last year RNZ ran a CNN piece headlined "Everything is blowing up in Elon Musk's face".
It was a treat if you loathe the man. Musk was "the world's richest edgelord" (i.e. “someone who intentionally expresses shocking, offensive, nihilistic, or taboo opinions—mostly on internet forums—to appear cool, edgy, or superior rather than from genuine conviction”). He had lost US$100 billion in three months. Voters, customers, investors and the MAGA elite had all decided that "the Elon Musk show has lost the plot".
CNN did concede that he was still the world's richest person "by a country mile", worth US$323 billion. We were to take that as the last gasp.
The Americans were in full cry. The Atlantic ran "The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk". The New York Times ran an op-ed headlined "Elon Musk Thought He Could Break History. Instead It Broke Him." Here at home, the Listener reviewed a book titled “Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk”.
Shattered. Broken. Finished.
So how's that going?
On 12 June this year SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq. It raised a record US$75 billion, the biggest float in history, and Musk became the world's first trillionaire.
Forbes puts him at about US$1 trillion today. That's roughly three times what he had when CNN was writing his obituary, and more than double the next richest person on its list.
In February SpaceX bought his artificial intelligence company, xAI, in a deal that valued the two together at $US1.25 trillion. Tesla, whose brand had been supposedly torched, is worth about $US1.48 trillion. Even Tesla New Zealand bounced back, with revenue nearly doubling last year from $149.5 million to $285.3 million.
And this week President Trump presented him with the National Medal of Science, calling him "a national treasure" and "our modern-day Thomas Edison".
Not bad for a broken man. In fact, I would suggest Mr Edison would be flattered.
The money is the least of it. Look at what he has done for the rest of us.
Electric cars.
Before Tesla, electric cars were worthy little boxes for the earnest. Tesla made them something people actually wanted, and the big carmakers had to follow. Bob Lutz, once vice chairman of General Motors and no Musk groupie, says Musk "renewed the world's respect for American ingenuity in automotive engineering".
Rockets.
For sixty years rockets were thrown away after a single flight. SpaceX lands them and flies them again. Falcon boosters have now landed more than 660 times, and one booster has flown 37 times. Last year Falcon 9 flew 165 times, a record. By one independent tally, SpaceX put about four-fifths of all the mass the world sent into orbit.
Satellites.
Starlink has about 11,000 satellites overhead and more than 10 million subscribers in around 160 countries and territories. When Cyclone Gabrielle cut off Wairoa, the news got out through a Starlink terminal at the emergency operations centre. In Dartmoor, a local woman ran a makeshift internet café off her Starlink and connected 83 stranded people with their worried families. Ukraine has fought a war on it.
Free speech.
He paid US$44 billion for Twitter and then handed its internal files to journalists, which became the Twitter Files. He gave us Community Notes, where users rather than "experts" add context to posts. In January 2025 Meta scrapped its fact-checkers and copied him: "We've seen this approach work on X."
Autonomy.
Since September last year, Teslas here can drive themselves under supervision. In parts of six American cities, Tesla robotaxis now carry the public with nobody behind the wheel. The robotaxis have no steering wheel. And no pedals. They aren’t everywhere yet, but they are real. And give it time.
AI.
xAI built its Colossus supercomputer in 122 days, then doubled it to 200,000 chips in another 92. That machine trains Grok. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called the 122 day achievement superhuman and said any other company including his own would have taken years.
And there are the ones I've probably missed. Neuralink has more than 20 people in its brain-implant trials, people with spinal injuries who now move a cursor and play video games just by thinking. The Boring Company has been running cars under Las Vegas since 2021. Tesla is turning out Optimus humanoid robots by the hundreds each week, although they still have plenty to learn. And before all of that, his X.com merged with the outfit that became PayPal.
That's cars, rockets, the internet from space, a town square, robots and brain chips. All from one man the experts had written off.
So have the scribblers apologised?
Of course not. When Musk became a trillionaire, RNZ ran it off the Reuters wire and the Herald ran it off AFP. There was no correction, no "we got that wrong", not even a moment's reflection. They simply moved on to the next pile-on.
Everything was blowing up in Elon Musk's face, they told us.
It wasn't an explosion. It was lift-off.
And by the way, isn’t he just the man we need to fix the government? And why don’t we roll out the welcome mat for him and say make New Zealand the world’s techno country -- tunnels in Auckland, Robotaxis in Queenstown, robots in our hospitals, and so on. Our infrastructure needs, our debt, our health waiting lists, all solved. Our future would be oh so bright.
Nah. Let’s throw rocks at him. What was it our brains of the Greens Tamatha Paul said this week? That’s right: "Anybody who is a billionaire did not become billionaires because they earned it or because they deserve it." Their wealth "is parasitic. That means it grows and it infects and it eats everything in its path."
Yes. That’s the brains of the Greens. And our media are right there with her.
The Americans were in full cry. The Atlantic ran "The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk". The New York Times ran an op-ed headlined "Elon Musk Thought He Could Break History. Instead It Broke Him." Here at home, the Listener reviewed a book titled “Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk”.
Shattered. Broken. Finished.
So how's that going?
On 12 June this year SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq. It raised a record US$75 billion, the biggest float in history, and Musk became the world's first trillionaire.
Forbes puts him at about US$1 trillion today. That's roughly three times what he had when CNN was writing his obituary, and more than double the next richest person on its list.
In February SpaceX bought his artificial intelligence company, xAI, in a deal that valued the two together at $US1.25 trillion. Tesla, whose brand had been supposedly torched, is worth about $US1.48 trillion. Even Tesla New Zealand bounced back, with revenue nearly doubling last year from $149.5 million to $285.3 million.
And this week President Trump presented him with the National Medal of Science, calling him "a national treasure" and "our modern-day Thomas Edison".
Not bad for a broken man. In fact, I would suggest Mr Edison would be flattered.
The money is the least of it. Look at what he has done for the rest of us.
Electric cars.
Before Tesla, electric cars were worthy little boxes for the earnest. Tesla made them something people actually wanted, and the big carmakers had to follow. Bob Lutz, once vice chairman of General Motors and no Musk groupie, says Musk "renewed the world's respect for American ingenuity in automotive engineering".
Rockets.
For sixty years rockets were thrown away after a single flight. SpaceX lands them and flies them again. Falcon boosters have now landed more than 660 times, and one booster has flown 37 times. Last year Falcon 9 flew 165 times, a record. By one independent tally, SpaceX put about four-fifths of all the mass the world sent into orbit.
Satellites.
Starlink has about 11,000 satellites overhead and more than 10 million subscribers in around 160 countries and territories. When Cyclone Gabrielle cut off Wairoa, the news got out through a Starlink terminal at the emergency operations centre. In Dartmoor, a local woman ran a makeshift internet café off her Starlink and connected 83 stranded people with their worried families. Ukraine has fought a war on it.
Free speech.
He paid US$44 billion for Twitter and then handed its internal files to journalists, which became the Twitter Files. He gave us Community Notes, where users rather than "experts" add context to posts. In January 2025 Meta scrapped its fact-checkers and copied him: "We've seen this approach work on X."
Autonomy.
Since September last year, Teslas here can drive themselves under supervision. In parts of six American cities, Tesla robotaxis now carry the public with nobody behind the wheel. The robotaxis have no steering wheel. And no pedals. They aren’t everywhere yet, but they are real. And give it time.
AI.
xAI built its Colossus supercomputer in 122 days, then doubled it to 200,000 chips in another 92. That machine trains Grok. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called the 122 day achievement superhuman and said any other company including his own would have taken years.
And there are the ones I've probably missed. Neuralink has more than 20 people in its brain-implant trials, people with spinal injuries who now move a cursor and play video games just by thinking. The Boring Company has been running cars under Las Vegas since 2021. Tesla is turning out Optimus humanoid robots by the hundreds each week, although they still have plenty to learn. And before all of that, his X.com merged with the outfit that became PayPal.
That's cars, rockets, the internet from space, a town square, robots and brain chips. All from one man the experts had written off.
So have the scribblers apologised?
Of course not. When Musk became a trillionaire, RNZ ran it off the Reuters wire and the Herald ran it off AFP. There was no correction, no "we got that wrong", not even a moment's reflection. They simply moved on to the next pile-on.
Everything was blowing up in Elon Musk's face, they told us.
It wasn't an explosion. It was lift-off.
And by the way, isn’t he just the man we need to fix the government? And why don’t we roll out the welcome mat for him and say make New Zealand the world’s techno country -- tunnels in Auckland, Robotaxis in Queenstown, robots in our hospitals, and so on. Our infrastructure needs, our debt, our health waiting lists, all solved. Our future would be oh so bright.
Nah. Let’s throw rocks at him. What was it our brains of the Greens Tamatha Paul said this week? That’s right: "Anybody who is a billionaire did not become billionaires because they earned it or because they deserve it." Their wealth "is parasitic. That means it grows and it infects and it eats everything in its path."
Yes. That’s the brains of the Greens. And our media are right there with her.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
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