Will Elon Musk be remembered as an automotive pioneer? | John Naughton

The richest person in the world often attracts headlines for the wrong reasons. But his upending of traditional car-production methods should not be forgotten

As I write, Tesla, the manufacturer of electric vehicles (EVs), has a market capitalisation of $1.051tn, which makes it the world's sixth most valuable company by market cap. Tesla shares are trading at $1,047, which is 64% higher than at this time last year. Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of the company, currently has a net worth estimated at $300bn, which makes him the richest person in the world.

Enormous wealth, like power, acts as an aphrodisiac that warps people's perceptions of those who possess it: it's as if they're surrounded by a reality distortion field. Similar force fields have enveloped Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their time and now it's Musk's turn. Because he's uncommonly voluble on social media, especially on Twitter, where he has 65.7 million followers, his every utterance is assiduously parsed by besotted fans (all of whom call him Elon", as if he were a buddy of theirs). This gives him an influence way beyond that of any other corporate executive, influence that, on some occasions, even affects global financial markets through what the normally sober Financial Times calls the Tesla-financial complex". A closer examination of his Twitter feed, though, yields an impression of a really complex individual: a baffling combination of formidable intelligence and ungovernability - part visionary, part genius, part fruitcake and part exploiter of tax loopholes and public subsidies. And it raises the question: what (or where) is the real Elon Musk?