The story goes that, during the 1960s space race, Nasa threw millions of dollars at developing pens that would work in zero gravity, while their Soviet counterparts just used a pencil. A delicious tale of bureaucracy gone wild, and one too irresistible for your aunt not to share on her Facebook wall eight years ago.

Sadly, it was, indeed, just a story. Now, though, there is a real tale to match it. While billionaire and would-be Mars coloniser Elon Musk responded to news of the trapped Thai football team and their coach by tweeting each stage of his attempt to invent a miniature submarine that could also be used as an escape pod in outer space, by the time he had dropped off his contraption at the cave’s entrance, the rescuers had already started retrieving the boys using … a rope.

“The equipment they brought to help us is not practical with our mission,” authorities noted. Undeterred, Musk tweeted: “Leaving here in case it may be useful in the future.”

The image we are left with is one of a man whose internal dialogue runs like a best-bits montage of Scrapheap Challenge, Tomorrow’s World and an OK Go video: a chap who looks at the concept of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and deduces that the problem with this whole scenario lies in the design of the sledgehammer – not enough titanium in the handle, nothing in the way of flashing lights, little use in an interplanetary space mission, no aux socket. Arriving at the test site, he discovers the walnut has long since been carted off by a squirrel.

Which is unfair in some ways. For a start, his submarine could have been used. Who knows! In which eventuality, it would have seemed significantly less hilarious that Musk had offered his services. Also, while it is entirely possible that every other well-meaning self-made billionaire – Kylie Jenner, for instance – was quietly working on her or his own solution, there really wasn’t much in the way of evidence that these people were putting their ideas into action, or even that they had ideas in the first place.

So why the excitement over Musk? Well, if you have been living under a rock for the past few years (hopefully, it hasn’t been in the Hawthorne area of California or your abode will possibly have been obliterated by Elon’s boring company, the Boring Company, and its attempts to create Hyperloop, Musk’s let’s-just-call-it-ambitious vision of an underground transportation tube) … and the retweet-friendly allure of Musk’s endeavours has indeed escaped your notice, suffice it to be noted that fans say he is the real-life Tony Stark. Which is not to say Musk is a narcissistic, self-promoting arms dealer! Because he’s not an arms dealer. (Unless you count his decision last year to manufacture and sell 20,000 flame-throwers. But clearly that was just a bit of fun: a jaunty escapade!)

It would be cynical, of course, for one to suggest Musk does these things to distract attention from less flattering areas of his business – the complaints about working conditions at Tesla and delivery issues with Tesla’s vehicles as the company burns through cash. But it is intriguing to ponder just how the recipients of this jet-powered-trousered philanthropist’s efforts are selected. Not in the sense that the causes are short-sighted, more because the field of vision seems to extend only as far as the nearest smartphone screeen.

Musk offered to help the Thai cave rescue when a Twitter user asked him to help – not, for instance, after having absorbed the news through, ooh, every major news channel. And this week, when Musk was accused on social media of having jumped on an exciting, media-friendly cause when the long-established water crisis in Flint, Michigan, was still very much ongoing, he responded to the well-intentioned whataboutery by committing to fund the fixing of any homes with contaminated water. Incredible stuff, but why did it take a tweet for him to spring into action?

It could simply be the case that Musk’s rocky relationship with the media is so extreme that he doesn’t read the news at all. Or maybe he only takes requests – which would at least put him ahead of poor old Jeff Bezos, the similarly space-obsessed Amazon chief who just can’t for the life of him think of what to do with his $161bn fortune. Two months ago, Bezos explained his decision to fund space exploration by saying: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”

“The only way”! “Winnings”! “Basically it”! Imagine being so creative with one’s international tax strategies and so inventive when interpreting workers’ rights, yet somehow so blind to social issues on one’s company’s doorstep, that one is forced to despondently accept that really the only thing it would be possible to do with all that spare cash is to fire it into space.

The most charitable (irony!) way of looking at Bezos’s reasoning is that it’s a bit like turning up at a house fire, standing on the front lawn and doing the ice-bucket challenge: helpful in the long run, but not an ideal deployment of resources in the here and now. At least Musk, depending on how quickly someone on Twitter told him about the fire, would be piloting a fleet of Super Soaker-equipped space drones to the scene. Possibly wondering, quietly, in the back of his mind if those 20,000 flamethrowers were such a good idea after all.

Kylie Jenner gives new meaning to being ‘self-made’



Incredible scenes in the pages – and on the cover – of Forbes magazine this week, as it reveals that pop culture’s second-best Kylie has, at 20, become the planet’s youngest-ever self-made billionaire. Well, she will be soon: Forbes estimates the apparently entrepreneurial influencer’s worth at $900m. Most of this comes from owning 100% of a cosmetics company valued at almost $800m, all of which has sprung from a simple enough proposition: why make do with becoming the face of someone else’s cosmetics company, when you can be the face, brains and everything else of your own?

This has prompted a somewhat sceptical response from Dictionary.com, the sassiest of the online word suppliers, which offered its Twitter followers a handy definition of self-made: “Self-made means having succeeded in life unaided. Used in a sentence: Forbes says that Kylie Jenner is a self-made woman.” Indeed, the nitty-gritty of the Forbes article smudges the lipstick of the whole thing: after explaining that most of the operations are outsourced, which is fair enough, comes the bombshell: “Her shrewd mother, Kris, handles the actual business stuff, in exchange for the 10% management cut.”

“Actual business stuff”! Forbes magazine, you cheeky monkeys, please just cut it out with your impenetrable industry jargon! How will we paupers ever become self-made dollar billionaires ourselves, with no leg-up other than from our well-connected, incredibly famous multimillionaire families, if you bamboozle us with technical, high-powered insider speak such as “actual business stuff”! Perhaps we may never need to know, though, if doing actual business stuff doesn’t have any bearing on being self-made. Is this the key message Forbes is hoping to send out? Seems to be!