“Elon, The Everywhere” is what one White House official calls him.

We’re talking about Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly known as Twitter), Starlink satellites, Neuralink and a host of other businesses that are actually making the future look like the future. He also at one time owned SolarCity, a company that transformed the solar panel industry; PayPal, a company that transformed online payments; and OpenAI, the company that is transforming Artificial Intelligence.

The question his ubiquity raises for me: Does Musk, the richest man on Earth, now have too much power over our lives? Should one person wield such enormous influence over everything from the cars we drive to space travel to social media to national security? And why does he?

NASA can’t send astronauts to the international space station or to the moon without Musk’s help. Out of 78 U.S. rocket launches in 2022, SpaceX was responsible for 61 of them.

He has four times more electric cars on U.S. roads than any other manufacturer, driving the pace of the world’s conversion to electric cars.

Musk gave Ukraine a digital lifeline with his Starlink satellites when Russia knocked out the country’s internet.

And now he owns one of the world’s largest digital public squares, and has in the name of free speech opened it up to a much wider range of information sources, many of them questionable. New research from the University of Washington showed that self-described news aggregators and open-source researchers far outperformed traditional media on X during

the Israel-Hamas war, meaning Musk is trying to take control of truth itself.

Musk has recently been accused of endorsing antisemitic tweets on X, causing a host of advertisers to flee the site, including Apple, Disney and Sony Pictures.

As a result, the White House has condemned the man that the Pentagon and NASA are wholly reliant on.

The business that worries me most is his constellation of Starlink satellites.

That’s because SpaceX now has the contract to provide satellite communications for the U.S. Space Force, based right here in Colorado, via something called Starshield.

Space Force is the newest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces charged with military operations in space. SpaceX describes Starshield as a “secure satellite network for government entities.” Bloomberg notes that Starshield will be provided over SpaceX’s existing Starlink sateliites.

But what if Musk doesn’t particularly like how the Department of Defense deploys Starshield on his satellites? What if for example, the U.S. wanted to target a munitions site in China using Starshield that is too near his massive Tesla plant in that country, and might make it harder for him to do business in China?

What leverage might foreign investors in his web of overseas holdings have over Musk and his satellites?

Not a realistic worry, you say? Musk would never undermine his own country?

In Walter Isaacson’s recently published biography of Musk, the author reported that last year, after Musk lent his satellites to Ukraine for communications, he then refused to extend Starlink coverage to Russian-occupied Crimea, preventing Ukraine from launching an attack on Russian ships there. Musk, after talking to a Russian official, was worried that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict.

His decision drew a furious response from Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who said Musk’s interference allowed Russian ships to continue firing missiles at Ukrainian cities. “As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego,” he wrote on X.

When Israel briefly cut off Gaza’s internet as part of their war strategy to eliminate Hamas, Musk announced he was going to provide it himself through Starlink, and met with widespread criticism. Musk apparently then met with the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and announced that he would “double-check with Israeli and U.S. security officials before enabling any connections.”

In other words, one self-appointed non-state actor is redefining the scope of warfare and U.S. foreign policy, bypassing presidents and governments. What if that one man is a loon? Let’s remember that although Musk has clearly pushed American innovation forward in astonishing ways, he’s also the guy who has vowed to make us a “multiplanetary species” to save us all from catastrophe on Earth.

This is the man who just said he agreed with a false claim on X that Jewish people were stoking hatred against White people. Musk in his post said the user, who referred to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, was speaking “the actual truth.”

This is the man who has named one his children X Æ A-XII and a second child Exa Dark Sideræl.

Journalist Bari Weiss recently asked biographer Isaacson precisely the right question: Is this unpredictable weirdo too powerful?

“There’s a simple answer, which is yes, he does have too much power,” Isaacson said, “but then if you want to drill down deeper, how come? One reason is this all-in hard-core intensity that causes him to make engineering things work. When I first started this book, almost every other car company had gotten out of the electric vehicle market. Elon went to the edge of bankruptcy and not only designed good electric vehicles, but he designed factories in America that can make them at scale. Just this year, he’s made a million electric vehicles, more than all the other car companies in America combined, fourfold.”

Likewise, Isaacson points out, NASA quit trying to send people to the moon 50 years ago. “Musk, this year, will send 1,600 tons of payloads and satellites into orbit, which is four times as much as every other company combined. This gives you enormous power when you’re the only person who can launch U.S. military spy satellites into high Earth orbit. Boeing can’t do it. NASA can’t do it.

“Besides just saying yes, he has too much power, the book shows: How did he accrue it?”

So, the book is not necessarily a knock on Musk for his will to power, Weiss said to Isaacson. “It’s, in a way, a knock on so many of the systems, including the American federal government, that have failed, and he has stepped into the breach.”

“One hundred percent,” said Isaacson. “We used to be a nation of great risk-takers. … But now we have become a country more filled with referees than risk-takers, more filled with regulators and lawyers and guardrail builders than innovators … And Musk is not only a risk-taker, he’s risk-addicted.”

Because of those risks, however, Musk, like so many hyperpowerful entrepreneurs and despots and dictators before him, may have already planted the seeds of his own demise and loss of power — by overreaching.

And Twitter may be his Waterloo. Since Musk bought Twitter, the number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30%, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.

The company could lose as much as $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year, and Musk told those fleeing advertisers to “Go f- — yourself” last week. The guy who was seen just a few years ago as the inspirational architect of America’s future is now viewed by many as a threat, the creator of a “gigantic global sewer,” as the mayor of Paris put it Monday, spewing disinformation, hatred, antisemitism and racism, and a “tool for destroying our democracies.”

Elon the Everywhere has suddenly morphed into Elon the Evil.

At the end of Isaacson’s 671-page book, however, the author makes the case that Musk’s achievements would not have happened if his innovative mind wasn’t braided through with audaciousness and recklessness, that he is who he is because of his faults as much as his virtues.

“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic,” Isaacson writes. “They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”