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Musk’s 2024 and the Unknown 2025

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The year 2024 was undoubtedly a dramatic and transformative year for Musk, a saga of exciting adventures that left its mark in a variety of fields.

In the field of AI, xAI, founded by Musk, is like a bright new star, which has risen rapidly and stabilized its footing. Within a year, it completed its Series B and C rounds of financing, totaling more than 12 billion U.S. dollars, and the injection of such a huge amount of money has provided a strong impetus for the development of xAI. xAI has also spent billions of dollars to build supercomputers with 100,000 NVIDIA H100s in just a few months, a feat that made NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsun Huang call it superhuman, and its supercomputer scale will be doubled in the future, showing unlimited development potential. xAI’s valuation is also soaring all the way to the end of 2024, and by the end of the year, after completing the C round of financing, its valuation will be as high as more than 40 billion dollars, making it one of the strongest competitors of OpenAI. xAI’s valuation has also skyrocketed.

Musk’s attitude towards OpenAI has always been resolute, and in 2024 he has launched a series of fierce attacks. The determination of OpenAI can be seen in up to four lawsuits against OpenAI in a year, especially the fourth suit at the end of November last year, which directly applied for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to prohibit OpenAI from turning into a for-profit enterprise. He has also received support from a number of parties. First, Zuckerberg, with whom he has a history of conflict, joined Meta in its plan to stop OpenAI from transforming from a non-profit organization to a commercial company, and acknowledged Musk’s qualifications to represent the interests of the local people in this matter. Jeffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence,” also spoke out at a critical time, pointing out in a December 30, 2024 statement that OpenAI derives numerous benefits from its nonprofit status, including tax revenues, and that allowing it to change its status at will sends a very bad signal to the other players, which undoubtedly gave Musk a huge boost. gave Musk a huge boost, making his offense against OpenAI less of a rhetorical rebuke and more of a solid endorsement and more tangible influence.

A New Journey in Space Exploration

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Musk’s SpaceX also continued to write the book on space exploration in 2024. “Starship, the next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by SpaceX, conducted several test flights during the year. Among them, the fifth test flight on October 13 was particularly noteworthy, in which the rocket booster was caught by the “chopsticks” of the mechanical arm on the launch tower during landing, realizing the first mid-air capture and recovery, a milestone achievement that marks an important step forward for SpaceX towards a fully reusable rocket system. According to statistics, of the 116 rockets to be launched by the United States in 2024, 98 will be undertaken by SpaceX, with a launch mass of 1,195 tons, accounting for 80% of the global total, ranking first in the world in terms of the number of launches and the quality of the payloads to be launched, and showing SpaceX’s powerful strength and dominance in the space field.

Challenges and Perseverance in Electric Vehicles

However, Musk’s business agenda is not smooth sailing everywhere. Tesla faced a number of challenges in 2024 in the electric vehicle space. Although its annual sales broke the record, it did not meet Musk’s expectations, and fell 1.1% compared with 2023, which is the first time since 2015 that annual year-on-year sales decline is known to have occurred since 2015. Meanwhile, in the Chinese market, Tesla is also facing fierce competition, with both market share and sales growth taking a hit.

Social Media’s Troubled Breakout

In the social media space, Twitter (now renamed X), which Musk acquired in 2023, has not fared as well, with its advertising revenue of $2.5 billion in 2023 down 40% year-on-year, and despite measures such as replacing its CEO in 2024 and making various improvements to its product, it doesn’t seem to have returned a big enough return, and X continues to face a number of dilemmas and challenges in its development.

A Stormy Encounter with the Political Arena

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One of the most remarkable things about 2024 is the close alliance between Musk and Trump. Musk was a huge supporter of Trump’s campaign, not only investing large sums of money, but also utilizing the X platform to campaign for Trump, as well as working alongside him on the campaign trail and cheering him on. After Trump’s election, Musk became even more of a key figure at his side, jokingly referred to as a “co-president.” As the countdown to New Year’s rang out, Musk joined Trump at Trump’s private club, SeaLake Manor, in Palm Beach, Florida, to dance the iconic “Trump Dance Step,” a grand party that saw Musk’s presence unmatched, despite the presence of non-rich and wealthy guests.

Musk’s influence has also sparked much controversy and concern in 2024. With a multitude of companies under his belt, spanning a wide range of industries such as electric cars, aerospace, AI, social media, and more, such as Tesla, SpaceX, brain-computer interfaces Neuralink, xAI, and X, such intricate interests, coupled with his seemingly opaque and nuanced power in the Trump administration, have led to concerns about his future behavior. According to the Washington Post, Musk made more than 100 posts on X expressing his opposition to a bill when Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement on it, which was seen as him using the bill’s justification to test his influence. Yale historian Timothy Snyder also said that Trump is so dependent on Musk monetarily that he’ll be in that symbiotic relationship in the future unless he breaks it off now, and argued that “Trump’s the little guy, Musk’s the big guy,” and that “if one is Trump’s friend, one should sweat for him,” a view that also reflects concerns about Musk’s influence.

Suspenseful Spotlight on the Journey Ahead

As 2024 comes to a close, the spotlight is on where Musk is headed in 2025, with The Information predicting that Musk may try to buy TikTok, which is in crisis in the U.S. due to the passage of a new bill that would have banned it in the U.S. on January 19th if it hadn’t been cut off from its parent company, ByteDance. . And Trump’s attitude has changed in this incident, publicly expressing his love for TikTok and requesting a suspension of the ban to the Supreme Court in the last week of 2025, and some sources say that Trump may be prompted to choose his preferred acquirer in the node of the request for the split, and Musk is likely to be one of them. For Musk, acquiring TikTok and merging it into the X ecosystem would further expand X’s footprint and help him fulfill his vow of a “universal app.”

Musk’s actions and accomplishments in 2024, whether it’s his rise in AI, his lawsuit against OpenAI, his alliance with Trump, or his developments in space exploration and electric cars, have had a profound impact on the tech world and himself. And the world is waiting to see what amazing things Musk will do in 2025 and how he will continue to write his legend. In a future full of uncertainty and infinite possibilities, Musk will undoubtedly continue to be the center of global attention, and every decision and action he takes could trigger new waves and changes.

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