Malaysia needs an Elon Musk

While Salim Fateh Din’s Malaysian Communications and Multi-Media Commission (MCMC) granted a 5G license to Vincent Tan’s U Mobile, cementing the old boy’s crony network under Anwar Ibrahim’s government, US entrepreneurial billionaires are driving the US forward with innovation, new technologies, and exploiting new market opportunities.

Malaysia is locked into its feudalistic crony economy, where the privileged get all the opportunities to increase their wealth. What Malaysia needs is innovation to drive the economy. Even the government says that. However, the system ensures the same people get all the rent-seeking opportunities, made possible through creating artificial barriers to entry to other competitors.

In Malaysia wealth is created through restrictive regulation, giving cronies opportunities that others can’t obtain.

After yesterday’s presidential election, one of the most influential people in the US, if not the world is Elon Musk. Musk was an immigrant to the US, and made his super-wealth through risk and innovation in areas that not only require massive capital, but newly created knowledge as well.

Musk was a co-founder of PayPal. In 2004, Musk formed Telsa to manufacture EVs. He went on to found OpenAI, a non-profit research company, Neuralink to research and develop brain-computer interfaces, and acquired Twitter, rebranding the company as X. Perhaps, one of Musk’s greatest innovations was in SpaceX, where he has been developing commercial spacecraft, and reusable rockets, which can return to the launchpad, after sending their payloads into Earth orbit.

Vincent Tan: Malaysia’s answer to Elon Musk.

While Musk has been at the forefront of technology and innovation, Malaysian tycoons have become specialists at “the art of using royal cables” to gain business and become filthy rich. In contrast, Musk is carving out a new role, working for the people to carve away government spending wastage. This is the direct opposite to Malaysia, where the prime minister Anwar Ibrahim doesn’t even see any issue with a bloated civil service which costs RM 100 billion per annum just to feed in salaries alone.

If anybody looks to be a little innovative like Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling, they will be chased away to Singapore because their skin colour is not right. Anybody in the civil service who has a new idea is sidelined because they might outshine the boss. Malaysia has a leadership succession crisis because no one is allowed to look like “PM material”.

The best Malaysia can do is appoint the prime minister’s daughter as an economic advisor, who soon ran away, and another prime minister’s daughter to the board of Matrade. Family-ties appear to be very important these days. In contrast, president elect Donald Trump has publicly pledged that no member of his family would serve the new administration.

Malaysia needs an Elon Musk to bring innovation to the economy, give Malaysia free speech, and clean up the bloated bureaucracy. Meritocracy seems to work well in other countries.

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