'Elon Musk or Donald Trump: who's the worst businessman of all time?'
The title of worst businessman in history definitely belongs to one of them, says Fleet Street Fox. But who has cost the most?
When Mansa Musa, the richest man in history, rode into Cairo in 1324, he brought with him 80 camels carrying 12 tons of pure gold, equivalent by some estimates to about £4bn today. He handed nuggets to beggars, paid for groceries with fistfuls of dust, and built a new mosque to pray in every Friday.
In spending so lavishly, the King of Timbuktu was single-handedly responsible for devaluing the price of gold in Egypt by 12% for more than a decade. But it had a purpose: in return for laying out just 1% of his total wealth, which was built on gold and salt mines in Mali, he crippled the only rival gold market in Africa. For a small hit, he made a vast profit, and was able to make his inherited wealth and power grow even further.
Let us compare him then to the men who are currently the richest and most powerful in the world, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, whose combined business acumen has so far resulted in the sort of economic own-goals that would make Mansa Musa piss his pants laughing.
Both men inherited fortunes, speculated with them, loaded businesses with so much debt they are technically the poorest people on the planet, yet are considered billionaires whose smallest word can send sales, stocks, or migrants flying. Last week Donald Trump announced he would invite the biggest investors in his cryptocurrency to the White House for dinner; bang goes another clause of the US Constitution, and up goes the value of his meme coins, netting him around $900,000 just for sending the email.
Yet just floating the idea of trade tariffs has knocked $90billion off the US economy, according to the latest GDP figures he's tried to blame on someone else. The next quarter results will show what happened when the tariffs actually hit, the bond markets caught a cold, and 250,000 public sector workers were fired. If merely suggesting tariffs cost double what Liz Truss managed to spaff up the Bank of England's wall, a trade war becoming manifest is going to put lettuce metaphors right out of business.
Both men have tried to sell hats; Trump has had more success, probably because they weren't quite as cheesy. He made at least $3m in 2023 from branded merchandise. That's equivalent to 60,000 people buying the $50 'Trump 2028' cap with which he is advertising his next insurrection. The army he is recruiting, and the profits made, more than replace the $400,000 a year salary he donated in his first term. Whether he will do so in his second is unknown, and anyway, a moot point.
For every single day that the president spends in his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, the government shells out $240,000, equivalent to 1.5 Keir Starmers. Trump bills secret service agents $546 a room, and it cost $60,000 just for four trips by White House staff. With the occasional summit thrown in, in his first term more than $16m flowed into his hotels, golf courses and restaurants, with millions more guaranteed by well-heeled visitors prepared to pay the £200,000 fees to be near to the president and wouldn't be seen dead in the gilt-ridden hellhole otherwise. Not bad, for properties that were due to be seized by a court last year to pay his court bonds.
But while he makes a profit, the local sheriff's department has had to spend $5m in overtime, the secret service has had to fund $2m in security upgrades, and it costs $50,000 an hour to scramble jets to intercept anyone who accidentally breaches the no-fly zone imposed over his club. In 2017 a local skywriting business was reported as having to shut down every weekend, losing thousands. Knock that, and the tax take from it and dozens of other businesses not benefitting from the disruption, and local people are losing millions while Trump's fat ass gets an ever-larger cushion of money.
You can expect the $400bn minerals deal signed with Ukraine will not profit the US as much as it does Trump's family or friends; and perhaps not even them, considering that 40% of the mineral reserves are in the land Trump is happy to hand over to Russia, Ukraine currently has zero commercially-operational rare earth mines, and bringing them online would cost hundreds of millions per deposit and take more than a decade.
And to make that possible, the US taxpayer would need to pay billions in defence contracts for someone to keep an eye on it. Of course it's a brilliant deal, so long as you don't do the maths until after Trump's dead.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, took the profits from his father's emerald mine and turned therm into an electric car company, a space exploration company, an artificial intelligence company, and destroying his own credibility. Once the darling of the financial world, he is now one of its biggest risks, to the extent that Wall Street banks have been unloading his unpaid debts at a loss just to be shot of him before it gets any worse.
And my, it HAS been bad. He bought Twitter with $44bn, about a third of it debt. He renamed it X, sacked 80% of the staff, turned it into a Far Right troll factory and its value plummeted to $9bn. To make up for this, he arranged a stock buyout by his AI firm which meant his Twitter co-investors could share the profits of a business he hadn't tanked yet, and now the two companies are worth what Twitter was when he bought it.
Then to really show his brilliance, he donated $291m helping Donald Trump to get elected, and wound up losing $156bn from his net worth as the association tanked the share price of his most successful business, Tesla. Even Trump tired of him, waving him off to "spend more time with his cars". He lost 175 times what he had invested, and if it were actual cash rather than just the imaginary sort he'd be in a concrete overcoat by now.
Tesla sales are down 13% at a time when electric car sales in general are 7% higher, year on year. Drivers trying to offload a secondhand Tesla have seen prices fall 22%. There just aren't enough twats who still want to buy a twatmobile. On top of this he's fired 250,000 people, rendered it near-impossible to use government websites, and saved less than 10% of the trillion dollars he had claimed was public sector waste. Yet despite banjaxing multiple businesses, becoming a net liability and being outed as a social media incel who has to resort to DMs, NDAs and IVF to father a legion of mini-Musks for us all to contend with in the future, he's still considered the richest man on the planet.
To some people, their litanies of failure prove Trump and Musk are brilliant businessmen. That they have financial skill, if only in enriching themselves at the expense of others, and it is therefore worth standing as close to them as possible in the hope that some of their golden shower rains in their direction.
To that proportion of the human race which is sane, however, it doesn't add up. According to the above back-of-a-fag-packet maths, Trump has made at least $354m from the presidency so far, but he's cost America at least 3 times that at $113bn, possibly 7 times if you compare the likely costs and non-benefits of the Ukraine deal. Musk, meanwhile, has squandered $191.3bn of goodwill, stripped aid from the starving worldwide, and lives by his own admission in a one-room prefab in Texas while his customers regularly ask him when, exactly, he will be leaving for Mars.
Both have moulded a world order that will continue to malfunction long after they leave orbit or get whacked by a rival. To some this proves their brilliance; to Tony Schwartz, the man who actually wrote Trump's autobiography The Art of the Deal, it's proof that unloved little boys can grow up to be proper dickheads.
These men each made a massive deal with the American people, who didn't notice what they were offering was the chance to become North Korea, only more stupid because at least the North Koreans didn't VOTE for it. Trump has cost them freedom, sanity and a world order, while Musk has merely cost his investors, staff, the US taxpayer, and all the women damaged enough to think a tech bro would set them up for life. Musk has lost more money, but is still richer than Trump, who is costing us all things that money just can't buy.
If Mansa Musa were here, it's likely that - once he'd wiped his eyes and pulled himself together - he'd offer to help Trump and Musk fund their jaunt to the red planet, and tell them they could return when they'd used their business nous to exploit its natural resources and form a new civilisation of stable geniuses capable of doing anything more useful than kissing their own arses.
Fiver says they'll die fighting over the comb.
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