ELON MUSK
TIM COHEN: Why SA must embrace Elon Musk and his Boring Company
Instead of the minimum wage and state capture, South Africans should be obsessing over innovation and problem-solving using creative thinking
Over the past week I’ve been treading a very familiar path, looking at whether South Africans are investing in Elon Musk’s company Tesla. It’s been a fun exercise.Musk fascinates me, as he does so many people. I know that although he was born in SA he has more or less disowned the country. But I still think he serves as a kind of symbol because I have a suspicion South Africans tend to have a bit of an inferiority complex about where they fit into the world. It’s a terrible generalisation, but my guess is that to the extent that it’s possible to empirically validate, it’s probably true. Perhaps it’s SA’s history and seemingly never-ending problems and failures that engenders a "chip on the shoulder" sense of the world. Anyway, Musk is the counter-proposition. If someone who is locally born goes on to achieve real greatness, then while he might have disowned us we can at least draw some sustenance from not disowning him. Unfortunately, it turns out that SA’s investors haven’t taken T...
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