Great uncle Mvondo wasn't well-known to us children. He was this uncle that my mother and her siblings did not want to see. They thus acted as if he did not exist.
During the first part of my childhood in Fanta Citron, in Mvog-Ada in Yaoundé, Cameroon, I did not even know that my mother still had a direct uncle alive. I had never heard his name pronounced. It was my older cousin Medounga who informed us that we had a great uncle.
“That’s not true,” cousin Assala protested at the time.
“You’re lying,” cousin Mba insisted.
“That’s your way of acting important again,” said cousin Avoué. “You like to show off. It’s your way to tell us that you’re the elder, and an adult. Okay we got the message.”
Cousin Medounga smiled, her eyes darting from one side to the other. She was taunting us. She was enjoying the bombshell she had just dropped. She was the first grandchild in the family. She was at least seven years older than my second cousin Abena. She used and abused her title of eldest of the grandchildren to treat us as good for nothing and to give us orders on a daily basis. We showed her as much respect as we had for our parents.
“I’m telling,” replied cousin Medounga. “If you don’t believe me, ask your parents. He lives alone in a remote corner of the village. There is no contact between him and our parents. They hate him.”
“But how do you know all that?” cousin Assala asked again.
“I met him once. He only has one eye. He really scared me.”
This last piece of information froze us. “One eye! Just one!” we all said out loud.
In the days that followed, I reported to my mother what cousin Medounga had told us. Not only did she corroborate everything but she warned me to never to speak of her uncle again. My mother told me that he had mysteriously lost his eye. (Actually, he had suffered from an infection that was not treated, but for the locals it was witchcraft.) They had become estranged following an argument between great uncle Mvondo and my grandmother.
My grandmother, who was a widow, had gone to a gathering of all the village elders without informing her brother-in-law. During this meeting, she told the rest of the notables that her brother-in-law could no longer be part of the circle because he had no children and was therefore useless in her eyes. What my maternal grandmother forgot to say was that it was her brother-in-law who, alone in the village while the rest of the family was in the city, had fought for years so that their land would not be requisitioned by the village chief. It was he who had opposed, for the sake of his nephews and nieces, the notables who had decided to repudiate them since they rarely went to the village. It was still he who farmed, while the rest enjoyed the benefits of crops.
My grandmother’s actions shocked my great uncle. He swore that he would have his revenge. He was never the same again, my mother told me as tears ran down her face. He spent the rest of his life plotting his revenge which he partially got by getting my grandmother expelled from the council of notables. He also sold a large number of their land. He destroyed almost everything in the village that my uncles and aunties could have inherited. I don’t know If my great uncle was able to find peace. My grandmother forced her children to swear that they would never bury her in the village because she didn’t want to rest anywhere near him. They kept their promise. The “war” between my grandmother and her brother-in-law engulfed the whole family and made all parties vulnerable in the village.
Elon Musk’s radical transformation from an innovator with Tesla, celebrated by the left and the progressives, to a right-wing influencer who helped climate-change-skeptic Donald Trump win a second term in the White House is mind-blowing. He reminds me of my great uncle Mvondo.
Musk put at the service of Trump X, formerly known as Twitter, which he personally acquired in October 2022, and his financial power — more than $130 million — in the re-election campaign of the former Republican President. And more importantly, he used his name and influence to get his millions of fans to give another chance to Trump. Musk has more than 204 million followers on X as of the time of writing.
He is viewed by them as the Alpha male, the one that men, young and old, see as a role model. He has 12 children with three partners. He founded or co-founded several innovative companies like Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company and Neuralink. He is by far the richest man in the world with a fortune currently estimated at $335 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as of November 11. The second richest person, Jeff Bezos, is $107 billion behind.
How did Musk, who voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, put his name, power and fortune in the service of someone whom he called, in July 11, 2022, “too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America,” especially as he appeared to oppose everything about him?
The answer to this question is simple: Joe Biden, or more precisely, Democratic President Joe Biden.
When I worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP) as a Business Correspondent in New York and then as an Editor in Washington D.C., I personally covered Musk and his companies and assigned stories about him to my journalists.
When I joined TheStreet in early 2022 to be the Tech Lead/Editor, I refocused our coverage on Musk more as someone who saw himself as the “leader” of the world. It was clear that the innovator believed that influencers will fill the void left by the absence of charismatic leaders. He thought, through his tweets, that he might just be the one to take full advantage of the distrust that the people have towards institutions. He began to meddle in domestic politics and geopolitics in the U.S. and around the world. He was everywhere, from South Korea and Italy, to the U.K., to Iran and elsewhere. The acquisition of Twitter was the Trojan horse for his global ambition. I often called him the global CEO. (You can read my stories on Musk by clicking on this link: https://www.thestreet.com/author/luc-olinga).
But he knew he still needed to use the structure of a major party to further increase his influence. He was open to both sides, Democrats or Republicans. Biden made the choice for him. It was a small event that some would treat as nothing important that pushed Musk to the right. It has since fueled his hatred and detestation of Democrats and progressivism. He is in a process of revenge, determined to show that Biden should have never acted the way he did.
On August 5, 2021, Biden invited the CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (created from the merger between Fiat Chrysler and France’s Peugeot) at the White House to celebrate electric vehicles. Musk was not invited, despite Tesla being the world’s largest EV manufacturer at the time.
“Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Musk reacted on Twitter that day.
On September 18 of the same year, SpaceX, Musk’s space company, accomplished a daring feat: it successfully launched into space and landed on earth a crew of four non-astronauts in what was called “Inspiration4 Mission,” a first all-civilian space flight. NASA and even Jeff Bezos, Musk’s rival, congratulated SpaceX. President Joe Biden did not.
Two months later, Biden presented General Motors as the leading clean-vehicle manufacturer in the U.S., while Tesla was the world leader.
“In the auto industry, Detroit is leading the world in electric vehicles. You know how critical it is?” Biden said on November 17, 2021, while he was speaking at the GM Factory Zero Grand Opening.
“Mary [Barra], I remember talking to you way back in January about the need for America to lead in electric vehicles. I can remember your dramatic announcement that by 2035, GM would be 100% electric. You changed the whole story, Mary. You did, Mary. You electrified the entire automotive industry. I’m serious. You led, and it matters.”
Barra is the CEO of GM.
The claim was erroneous as Tesla that year delivered 1.31 million electric vehicles, compared with less than 40,000 EVs sold by GM.
Musk took it very badly. He couldn’t stop talking about it.
“The public has no idea how much Tesla and SpaceX have been attacked/undermined, because we aren’t unionized (yet offer highest pay in industry!) and this administration would rather a company be dead than not unionized,” Musk wrote on May 30, 2022.
He had had enough. That was the final blow that pushed him to embrace the conservatives.
“I support free speech, but not any one candidate,” Musk wrote on Twitter the same day. “In fact, I gave money to & voted for Hillary & then voted for Biden.”
He continued:
“However, given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he added, referring to the midterms.
From that point on, Musk became the main opponent of the Biden administration and Democrats. It didn’t help that Biden waited more than a year, after his inauguration, to utter the name Tesla, while the president’s environmental policies were in line with the mission that the manufacturer of electric vehicles had set for itself.
Like my great uncle Mvondo, Musk has been plotting his revenge. He is now accomplishing it. We are only at the beginning. He has popular support on his side via X, which he uses to feed his army of fans ready to defend him at all costs. This massive army is cross-border and exceeds 200 million followers. No other leader can currently claim such blind support from hundreds of millions of people.
Biden has released a genie that will be difficult to put back in the bottle.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.