IT WAS HALLOWEEN 2013, and Elon Musk was back in Ireland for the first time since he was seven years old because he was promised a party. The CEO of Tesla and Space X, which were already worth over a billion dollars each, smiled nervously from the stage of Web Summit that day while confessing that the real reason he travelled 5,000 miles was for a rager.
‘I understand there’s going to be a great party tonight,’ he told the crowd when asked how he found the time to travel to a small island in Europe for a tech conference. While he was a few years away from being crowned the world’s richest man and becoming the controversial celebrity figure he is today, Musk was, even then, the most high-profile guest to grace the Web Summit stage.
Wearing a jacket with fabric sleeves and black leather on the vest, he was fresh faced and subdued, a far cry from the anti ‘woke’ crusader, ‘free speech absolutist’, Twitter owner that he has become today. But even back then the confidence he exuded was palpable as he sat, still, at the very edge of his armchair, leaning forward for nearly the entire 40-minute interview, and gesturing with steepled fingers like a politician or a cartoon villain.
Along with getting a boost from Musk’s presence, that year was a milestone for the Web Summit because it had more than doubled its attendees, going from 4,000 in 2012 to over 10,000 in 2013. Musk was an ideal guest for the time because, while slightly niche to the general public, he had a rock star quality for tech bros and aspiring digital entrepreneurs. ‘It gave a very real legitimacy to the whole event,’ one ex-staffer recalled.
Like if anything’s good enough for Elon Musk, it’s good enough for hardcore entrepreneurs which meant that we could start leveraging his name to get more interesting entrepreneurs there.
For many in the tech industry, 2013 was the year that put Web Summit, as a company and a concept, on the map. The audience was also full of its fair share of tech celebrities, including Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, who sat up front for the interview and was said to have been rapt with the discussion. For some of those in attendance, that year’s event was the first time that Dublin was establishing itself as a destination for tech, investment, digital innovation and enterprise. It made people want to work for the company.
‘I got to see a lot of people I would have idolised in tech at the time, it felt cool, like being in a little club,’ one individual said. It may have been surprising that Musk found time to travel to Dublin, but to the man sitting directly beside him, it was an unbelievable sales opportunity. Grinning from ear to ear, Enda Kenny, then Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, could hardly contain the excitement he felt at being in proximity to such a rich and powerful businessman.
Wearing a microphone headset and appearing later from a cloudy mist of dry ice, Kenny was doing his best to look the part of a cool prime minister. Earlier, he had been driven into the RDS in a Tesla with Musk behind the wheel to the sound of the James Bond theme tune. Over the course of their 30 minutes onstage, Kenny would pitch Musk on all the possibilities that Ireland held for him, such as a young and educated workforce.
The unspoken reason was the country’s low rate of corporation tax, which was a factor that had enticed an increasing number of tech behemoths like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to Irish shores. At some points, the conversation became such a shameless plug for Irish industry and enterprise that the crowd laughed at Kenny’s wink-and-finger-point diplomacy.
‘Henry Ford started off his motoring business in Cork, at the turn of the last century, and it was here for 60 years,’ Kenny said, turning to face Musk directly. ‘So if you’re looking for a good base, we’ll certainly give you an opportunity. Seriously, I’ve been saying this to you, if you’re going to come to Europe, with Tesla, we will compete with the best, so if you want to do that, you give us a chance, we’ll give you a fair hearing and our workers will not you down, believe you me,’ he added.
Kenny’s decision to focus on Ireland’s potential as a manufacturing hub was a relief to some of those in attendance who recall him describing how Irish rain was good for a person’s complexion only the evening before. Also onstage was Shervin Pishevar, one of the biggest players in the VC world, with the Uber deal one of biggest successes of his career. Around four years later, in 2017, he would go on to be accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and assault. He has denied the claims and maintained they were part of a ‘smear campaign’.
But at that year’s Web Summit, he was flying high, holding an afterparty in his room in the Shelbourne Hotel, and according to Emily Chang’s Brotopia, ended up alone with one woman on a couch there. ‘Pishevar, she said, was holding a phone – it’s unclear who it belonged to – and was smiling as he was showing her photos of genitalia of women they claimed to have slept with,’ Chang reported in the 2018 book. Onstage during the interview earlier that day, Kenny leans over with one hand cupped behind his ear when the billionaire is asked what he would do if he was Taoiseach. Musk replies by comparing early and medium-stage companies to ‘a little sapling growing in a redwood forest’.
With Kenny nodding beside him in agreement, Musk speaks in a small voice while explaining his theory. ‘You’ve got giant companies and if you don’t get a little bit of sunlight and nutrition, it’s game over,’ he says. While Musk would not go on to open a company in Ireland, the possibility that he might even consider it was thrilling in the context of where Ireland was positioned globally at the time.
Catherine Sanz is a journalist living in Dublin and the legal correspondent with the Business Post. She has previously held roles at The Times, The Sunday Times, ABC News, and Storyful. Her work has won awards in Ireland and the US. Her new book, Drama Drives Interest is out now.
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