In just a few years, Elon Musk has gained worldwide fame, thanks to the success of his companies, Tesla, SpaceX or Neuralink, but not only. The billionaire has also built his aura by playing the cool guy, showing himself smoking a joint on live TV, joking about his many children from extramarital affairs, or claiming not to be paid for his role as CEO at Tesla. An anti-conformism that seemed welcome in the landscape of Nasdaq's big bosses.

But the other side that the whimsical entrepreneur has revealed lately is much less appealing. Since his takeover of the social network Twitter (and even before that), cracks have appeared in the costume of a man who is confident, tolerant and insensitive to criticism. It seems that it affects him deeply. He reportedly fired employees or board members via Twitter posts who questioned his new direction for the media, plundered the group's internal files for his own purposes, and hired detectives to investigate pro-union employees at his companies. He suspended the accounts of journalists who took too close an interest in him and did not share his views, and allegedly blackmailed others to restore their accounts. He made ambiguous statements about Russia in the midst of the Ukrainian conflict. He banned LGBTQIA+ groups from the network, and reopened the doors of Twitter to the most hateful, racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic things online.

Without going so far as to compare the billionaire to Ford's founder, Henry Ford, who gradually slipped into anti-unionism and basic anti-Semitism, as James Risen, my Intercept colleague, did in this paper, I'd say that Elon Musk looks like a spoiled, despotic, petty and angry little child, to whom no one has ever dared to refuse anything, and who is now unable to get his way. And as one could actually expect, the man is not cool, not tolerant, not open. He's just a brat.

As a postlude, I'll add a clarification on the title, for the attention of readers who are not immersed in popular media entertainment. In the last few movies about the cool billionaire Marvel character Iron Man, the director admits to having been inspired by Elon Musk to build the hero. And since the latter is played by the excellent and sympathetic Robert Downey Junior, he symbolizes, for people of my generation and the next, the good friend that we would like to have. On the other hand, Baby Boss is the symbol (if we pull a little) of an authoritarian and irascible baby.