Elon’s money Vs Nigeria’s money
Elon Musk is the richest guy on the planet! And he just paid 44 billion dollars for twitter. That is the same amount as Nigeria’s projected expenditure for 2023 as presented in the recent budget by the President – 20.51 trillion naira (US$43.7 billion). Nigeria’s proposed revenue for 2023 is actually less than the cost price of twitter – 9.73 trillion Naira just about 40 billion dollars!
So, Elon Musk could easily fund Nigeria for the whole of 2023! Now think, where would Elon be if he was one of the babies born at Lagos Island maternity hospital on the sunny morning of June 28, 1971? What if Elon was Nigerian?
Elon’s life
Let us go through a summary of his life. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa on the date earlier mentioned, and he started at the local university – University of Pretoria before ‘japa-ing’ to Canada at 17 years of age (Mother was Canadian). He subsequently attended Universities in Canada and later the US, eventually obtaining degrees in Economics and Physics. By age 24, he’d started Zip2 which later sold to Compaq, then X.com which would later become PayPal. In his earlier thirties, he started SpaceX and invested in Tesla. He co-founded Neuralink six years ago and now, at 51, he has bought twitter.
what if Elon was Nigerian?
So, what if Elon was Nigerian? Let’s say he was born at Island maternity in Lagos, and then went to CMS Grammar school, and then maybe … onto studying Engineering at UniLag. He probably would have been caught up in the numerous ASUU university strikes of the eighties and nineties. It’s very unlikely that he would have learnt any codes in school during that time as computers were late coming to Nigeria and access to those things were real poor in the nineties. With no access to computing, he may have gotten a teaching job in the local university or worse – one of the government secondary schools, or maybe he’ll be independent, and self-employed as a private lesson teacher.
The hustle would have been real in his thirties and early forties as he starts a family. I must say that at this age Japa would be top on his mind, its typically in the mind of most young Nigerians. He would by now have discovered social media and be a nuisance there – not much different than the way he is now, but there’s a world of difference between big boss annoyance and an ordinary tweep bother. Challenge him at your peril! Twitter would have been started by someone else in San Francisco, and Nigerian Elon would be an unknown tweep insulting everyone on his TL. About this time, he could be among the new wave of Japa-ing citizens, contemplating starting a new life, at middle age, in the West! To be fair, ‘real’ Elon was born with a silver spoon – so, we should match this characteristic in Nigerian Elon. If we do … there is the off chance that he could be the man named Dangote.