The qualities of a successful businessman, my late father used to say, correlate with those of a psychopath. This makes him sound like a raving leftie, except for the fact that he was a forensic psychologist and briefly in charge of the psychopathy unit at Wormwood Scrubs; so far as I could tell, he meant it literally.
The qualities of the tech entrepreneur are nothing like that, which is a statement I am definitely not clarifying, because the last thing you want to do is defame a rich person. But having a huge quantity of any personal trait – whether it is single-mindedness, tenacity or self-belief – can always cut both ways.
I am thinking of Elon Musk: visionary, space conquistador and scourge of the cave-diving community. It wasn’t so long ago that he was going to solve all of humanity’s problems: climate change first, with his electric cars that would one day power not only themselves, but also all the people in them – and their phones – using the sun’s bounty. Almost as an aside, he would solve inequality, pioneering a flat structure in which everyone gets paid the same (except for him). Then along came the cave: to a man who can save the world, 12 children trapped underground must be small fry. Except it turned out that what is called for in such a situation is not a visionary, but someone who knows how to dive.
That is fine; there is still plenty of work for visionaries. But then the entrepreneurial ego kicked in and, really, how could you design a Tesla without one? The cave diver – by logical extension, children-savers everywhere – must be a paedophile, despite there being no evidence. Musk’s refusal to let things drop meant that he couldn’t leave the diver alone. It is weeks later, the world had almost forgotten, but Musk is back, wondering why Vern Unsworth didn’t sue him.
The moral: don’t put too much faith in billionaires. Our newfound faith in cave-divers is going fine.
