A former Twitter employee has recalled the “bizarre experience” of interviewing Elon Musk just before the billionaire left for a night out in Dublin's Coppers nightclub.
Mr Musk, who made his fortune working for PayPal and then Tesla, was in Ireland for the Dublin Web Summit in 2013.
Such is the demand for Tesla’s electric cars he is now the richest man in the world and yesterday announced he was buying Twitter - promising users he would unlock its “tremendous potential”.
Mark Little says the billionaire is “an exceptional entrepreneur” and - perhaps unsurprisingly - that he is hugely different from most people.
“Paddy Cosgrave invited me to interview Elon Musk on stage with then Taoiseach Enda Kenny,” Mr Little told Moncrieff.
“Which was a bizarre experience trying to connect these two people.
“But he was amazing.
“At that stage he was, I remember, talked about as being the model for Tony Stark - Ironman.
“But actually meeting him [he was] more Clark Kent.
“He was very laid back, very quiet, very studious and serious and that was back in 2013.
“My famous memory of that is that we were in a pop up bar and he was leaving with another bunch of CEOs to go to Coppers - getting into this most disgustingly dirty van.
“And I’m thinking, ‘This is the man who invented the future of car travel.’
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He continued:
“But deep down he is the most exceptional entrepreneur of this generation and probably for many of them.
“So not someone you can take an automatic dislike to but at the same time he has this sort of sense about him that he would defy gravity as he does his SpaceX and there’s something slightly disconcerting about that for the rest of us mere mortals.”
Elon Musk in the Netflix documentary 'Return to Space'. Picture by: TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock PhotoMr Musk has millions of fans but also many detractors; Professor Jane Suiter of DCU told Newstalk that she was concerned that freer speech on the platform could boost “far-right, alt-right and the QAnon-type narratives”.
I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
But whatever happens - Mr Little believes Mr Musk will transform the platform, not merely tinker around the edges.
“He does think in terms of not just future generations but future consciousness.
“Obviously this is a man who wants to go to Mars - not just the Moon.
“So I think there is that sense about people like him who believe that technology can defy human bonds… I think there’s a sort of Messianic sense of [him] being put on the Earth to allow us to sort of break free of the chains of what we do in our lives.”
Main image: Copper Face Jacks on Dublin's Harcourt Street. Picture by: Mark Stedman/RollingNews.ie
