As Elon Musk increasingly seems to be trying to establish himself as a global super villain, having decided that ownership of X is not enough, a top historian is claiming that he might well have been inspired in his ambitions by his own father’s involvement with a legendary super villain of the sixties and seventies. “Only recently we’ve had stories in the press as to how he’s been plotting to unseat Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer,” Professor Tony Burkstadder has claimed in his regular column in the Sunday Bystander. “But we shouldn’t be surprised at Musk behaving in this way, as if he has the power to topple governments in foreign countries and bend their political systems to his will, regardless of local democratic processes. After all his father was a key associate of Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE and their plots to hold the world to ransom, back in the seventies!” According to the Chair of Historical Popular Culture at the Leamington Spa School of Home Economics, Musk senior, who made the Musk family fortune from diamond and emerald mines in South Africa, was behind the smuggling ring illicitly providing diamonds to Blofeld in order to power his space laser, with which he tried to blackmail the then super powers. “You’ve surely heard of that – they made a fictionalised account of it called Diamonds Are Forever (1971),” says Burkstadder. “Now, I know that everyone will say that it was based on a novel by Ian Fleming, written back in the fifties. Well, the film might have shared a title, but the film ditched the plot, replacing it with a new, ripped from the headlines, story. It was all part of the global political elites’ attempts to convince the public that the international blackmail plot had never really happened – it was all just a movie!”
The historian has shrugged off the objections of critics who have claimed that Blofeld was an entirely fictional character. “I know that Blofeld had appeared as a character in Fleming’s books back in fifties. But, as was often the case, he used the name of a real would be super villain,” he explains. “Of course, back then Blofeld was pretty much a two-bit minor gangster, however, spurred on by the notoriety given him by Fleming’s novels and his portrayal in the subsequent films, he decided to enter the big leagues and hatched his space laser plan. Which was where Musk senior, with his access to South African diamonds, came into the picture!” Burkstadder believes that it was his father’s involvement with Blofeld which inspired Elon Musk to get into the super villain business himself. “Obviously, the first step was to become fabulously wealthy through developing a series of high tech firms with lots of government projects,” he says. “The next was to bankroll a villainous puppet front man in the form of Donald Trump, through whom he can exercise his own villainy without suspicion falling on himself – to the world he is simply a successful businessman, wanting only to benefit humanity with his products.”
Musk, however, has clearly concluded that Trump can’t be relied upon in the long term and has his own ambitions for villainy, so has decided to come out of the shadows and openly behave as a supervillain in his own right, the historian believes. “The trouble is that, so far, he’s been a really crap super villain, making very poor use of his resources,” says Burkstadder. “I mean, while Blofeld had a space laser with which to intimidate governments, all Musk does is post disinformation on Twitter and support tinpot would be fascist dictators like Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage who have no chance of ever attaining power!” The would be supervillain, moreover, seems spectacularly ill-informed when it comes to anything other than his own companies, further undermining his efforts. “Just look at his ambition to topple the UK’s democratically elected government. If he knew anything about British politics then he’d know that the UK’s political system makes it extremely difficult to get rid of a government with a decently sized majority” opines Burkstadder. “Bearing in mind the size of this government’s majority, I don’t see any prospect of it losing a confidence vote in the Commons, meaning that, regardless of any destabilising attempts by outsiders, it is likely to run the full five year term of this parliament.”
Musk’s reported plotting to somehow remove Starmer as PM is also completely unrealistic, argues the historian. “Even if Starmer could, somehow, be removed from Number Ten, what does Musk expect to happen?” he asks. “Because all that would happen would be that he’d be replaced by another senior Labour politician, unlikely to be any more sympathetic to Musk’s right-wing fantasies than Starmer.” Nonetheless, Burkstadder fears that sooner or later Musk will realise that he has the means to be a more conventional super villain. “We need to be wary of all those rockets he keeps trying to launch – believe me, one day one of them is going to put a space laser into orbit,” he muses. “Plus, there’s some evidence that he’s learned the lessons of Blofeld’s failure – his new position in Trump’s government will allow him to starve the US’s intelligence services of finance, so that they can neither detect nor defeat his scheme, while his attacks on the UK are obviously designed to try and neutralise the threat posed by MI6’s Double-O section.”
Despite Burkstadder’s fears that Musk might yet realise his potential as a super villain, threatening the world’s democracies, other commentators are far less worried, pointing to the entrepreneur’s track record to date. “I’m not worried that he’ll succeed as I’ve no doubt that Musk will be every bit as crap as a super villain as he has been in his other ventures,” says political analyst Tom Virsteg, of the Institute of Political Speculation. Just look at his the catastrophic mismanagement of Twitter, shedding millions of users, not to mention high profile advertisers, as he turned it into a social club for neo Nazis. And just how many of his rockets have exploded? Not to mention the electric cars that catch fire and/or crash when driving themselves. Need I say more?” Musk’s super villain obsessions are also far too trivial for him ever to be taken seriously, Virsteg contends. “When he isn’t peddling crackpot conspiracy theories, he seems obsessed with stuff like stopping people from changing gender and/or using pronouns or cutting his tax bill,” he points out. “He should set his sights higher – real super villains don’t threaten the world with extinction via the release of dangerous viruses, as an example, just to get a more favourable tax code, for God’s sake.” Most crucially, he argues, Musk has absolutely no understanding of human beings. “He just doesn’t grasp the fact that the majority of us neither share his own opinion of his own genius or his enthusiasm for undermining democratically elected governments,” says Visteg. “We like being able to choose our own leaders, even if, as far as Musk is concerned, they are the ‘wrong’ governments.”
