Last December, I asked my students at Wharton to nominate and vote on topics for our final class. The runaway top choice was leadership lessons from Elon Musk. It’s become a hot topic among the corporate elite, too. At a recent leadership conference, the founder of a lucrative start-up said in passing that Mr. Musk…
One hallmark of Elon Musk’s 12 weeks in government has been his focus on Social Security. He has sent one of his closest advisers to work at the Social Security Administration. He has falsely insisted that the program is rife with fraud. And he has depicted the entitlement as a tool — a “giant magnet,”…
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has been vocal about his desire to see his country’s wealthiest son, Elon Musk, invest some of his billions at home. But his overtures have been stymied by Mr. Musk’s criticism of the South African government as racist. Mr. Musk has argued that a law requiring foreign companies to sell…
Privacy advocates say that all this data could enable the government to punish its political opponents by weaponizing information about an individual’s personal life (bankruptcies, criminal histories, medical claims) or halting the benefits they receive (housing vouchers, retirement checks, food assistance). “They have not demonstrated a single case in which fraud detection has required some…
The mischievous posters began appearing all over London in the past two months. On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the…
A Human Ranking System Intelligence testing would not arise until the 20th century, and the abbreviation “IQ” in 1922, but an early metric of intelligence was established by Francis Galton in his 1869 book, “Hereditary Genius.” Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a leading proponent of social Darwinism, a pseudoscientific effort to organize human…
Elon Musk’s close relationship with President Trump may well end up shielding him from the 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions against his companies in the United States. But something else appears to be happening for Musk in Europe. My colleague Adam Satariano got the scoop last night that X, Musk’s social media…
President Trump and Europe are clashing over tariffs, the war in Ukraine and the very purpose of the European Union’s existence. But they are also divided over free speech — with potentially far-reaching implications for how the digital world is regulated. The E.U. has been investigating U.S. companies under the Digital Services Act, a new…
“FREE MARINE LE PEN!” With this blunt call, a strange one in that the French far-right leader is walking the streets of Paris, President Trump has waded into the politics of an ally, condemning her conviction this week on embezzlement charges and her disqualification from running for public office. The conviction was “another example of…
Almost all the employees of the Wilson Center, a prominent nonpartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, were placed on leave on Thursday and blocked from their work email accounts as Elon Musk’s task force quickly shut down most of the center. About 130 employees received orders telling them not to return to the office…