TESLA IS no longer the No. 1 beloved corporate brand in America. It has dropped to 63rd place. That’s partly because of a series of incidents with the car (e.g., 467 collisions last year with 14 deaths because of alleged autopilot failures). There are now Tesla drivers on the road sporting stickers like, “Bought it before Elon went nuts.” Because the main cause is Tesla’s boss, Elon Musk.
He’s an oddball, but you may say: who cares if you’re also the world’s richest man? He is a product of the Van Wijk, Oosthuizen, Konterman, Bezuidenhout, Klopper and Jansen families. His roots are in Gelderland, in the small town of Vuren, near Lingewaal. Today, together with Geldermalsen, it is called the town of West Betuwe, but back when they emigrated, farmer Gerrit Jansen considered his origin important enough to take the surname Van Vuren. They first went to South Africa. Now they are as American as they come.
Elon Musk’s grandma Bregje was a Van Vuren. He is tall, 6’2″, exactly the average height of all Dutch men. And he is autistic, Asperger’s, according to himself. Outsiders do well not to be too quick linking such a predisposition to someone’s actions, but Musk has no filter. From time to time he throws out words and thoughts that don’t land right. Like when he argued against public transportation because there might be a serial killer among your fellow passengers. Or when he declared himself willing to overthrow Bolivia’s president if necessary, as long as he got access to that country’s lithium for his Tesla batteries.
HE IS brimming with original angles and ideas. Though that doesn’t include Tesla. That was an invention of Gerrit Teerpenning’s offshoot, Marc Tarpenning, who invented the first battery-powered bookstore, the e-reader, now better known in America as the Kindle. This Gerrit lived forty miles north of the other Gerrit, in Bunschoten, and emigrated at about the same time, in his case directly to America. Marc Tarpenning figured: if you can use a battery to build an unlimited bookstore where you can buy e-books, then you can probably also run a car on it. And so he started Tesla.
Elon Musk immediately saw the potential it offered. He was already rich because of his involvement with PayPal when it was sold to eBay for a lot of money, and he decided to invest in Tesla. In no time at all, he took charge – a by now standard phenomenon: once Musk enters the building, the other owners run. Because he is a loose cannon, unpredictable and explosive.
SAME THING in his private life. Eight children with three women, including a set of twins and triplets, from four marriages because he married his second wife twice. The first child died of sudden infant death syndrome. The youngest became the subject of a conflict with the state of California, which refused to accept Elon’s preferred baby name. He wanted to name the boy X Æ A-12, but that’s not allowed because a name cannot contain digits. So it became X Æ A-Xii, but that too ran into a wall, because the Æ does not appear in the English alphabet. The child now has X as the first name, AE A-XII as a middle name, and Musk as his last name. His sister is called Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. She listens to the nick Y.
Different, highly unusual? Yes, but what do you expect from a man who, in addition to Tesla, also runs a space company and wants to go to Mars with his SpaceX rockets. People should have sex much more often and have many more children, according to Gerrit van Vuren’s descendant. Because if we don’t hurry up with procreation, we will soon have too few people to populate other planets with. Think of it what you will, but all these antics have made Musk the wealthiest man on planet Earth no matter what. Rich enough to also buy Twitter, which has since been unmoored as precariously as its owner himself. But that’s partly because Musk fired the entire PR department at both Tesla and Twitter. There is no one around him to act as a filter. And so it’s a matter of time until the inevitable next screw-up.
