I am writing today to open Pandora's box. It is about Elon Musk, a radical right-wing billionaire who bought Twitter to make it an instrument fomenting hate and bigotry in the name of "free speech." Such irresponsibility magnifies what should be as troubling to all Americans. Musk owns SpaceX, which is on a critical path for NASA and the US space initiatives.
I don't think having Musk in such an important position is right for our national security, and points to the other looming problem of Oligarchs in America.
SpaceX
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. The company manufactures the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship launch vehicles, several rocket engines, Cargo Dragon and Crew Dragon spacecraft, and Starlink communications satellites.
Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer[b] of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. With an estimated net worth of around $181 billion as of November 18, 2022,[4] Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes's real-time billionaire's list.[5][6]
Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. He attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 17, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he enrolled at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but dropped out after two days to instead pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal; Compaq acquired the startup for $307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
