I read the other day that senator Bernie Sanders criticized the wealth that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have accumulated. He said on Twitter: “We are in a moment in American history where two guys – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos – own more wealth than the bottom 40% of people in this country. That level of greed and inequality is not only immoral. It is unsustainable.”
I do think that the level of inequality a developed and democratic country like the US has reached is immoral and unsustainable, especially since much of that inequality was accelerated by successive governments’ social and fiscal policies. But that is not what I want to write about today. I leave that for another time.
Today, I use this introduction to write about my ranking of time travelers Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Yes, you read correctly. I believe these two guys have come from the future to fundamentally change things because they (or their future organizations) saw that our world is in a special space-time-history vortex that is ripe for a change, and they volunteered to travel back in time to activate the modification.
Now I am not going to give you any proofs of their time traveling, because I do not have any, but I claim they are. I want to pick one of them as the leader time traveler, so the question becomes: which one, and why?
My vote goes to Elon Musk, and I must say in my evaluation he wins by a wide margin. Here is why:
While they both have been innovative, Elon thinks and imagines on a cosmic level. He wants to go to Mars, he wants to harvest Sun’s energy, make cyborgs out of humans, make electric cars. As he formulated it recently, he is “accumulating resources to help make life multi-planetary”. Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, talks about customers and service. Very laudable, but not enough for a time traveler n°1 leadership ranking.
There is at least a second reason why Elon is the winner: Jeff Bezos’ business is mostly about software (yes he has robots in his warehouses, he has Blue Origin spaceship, he has Alexa, but the core of his technology is software). Elon Musk, on the other hand, is a full engineer: he is in rockets, electric cars, solar cells, neuroscience, software, etc. His scope is much broader, much more worthy of a time traveler leadership win.
So here you have it: I think Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are from the future who have traveled back to our times to activate the space-time-history vortex, and I think Elon Musk is the n°1 Time Traveler. What I don’t know yet, is whether they come from the same period in the future or not.
Paris, April 9, 2021
Zeejay