Last week, Belfast was twinned with Mars. The wormhole through which they were connected is Elon Musk’s ability to fabricate fantasies from his own dark materials. He simultaneously helped foment a pogrom and hoovered unprecedented sums of money from investors mesmerised by his vision of humanity’s future.

This is new. Henry Ford, for example, was a rabid anti-Semite who promoted anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. But he was long dead before Ford became a public company.

Yet even if we could, for the sake of argument, imagine Ford promoting the poisonous fakery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the same week as his car company was launching its initial public offering of shares, it wouldn’t be the same as what Musk did last week. Investors might reasonably have felt that Ford’s vile ideas were separate from his genius for making automobiles.

What’s different about Musk acting as a far-right agitator while sucking in $75 billion in an IPO that valued SpaceX at $2 trillion is that there is no such separation. As one investment banker told the Financial Times, SpaceX became the largest IPO in history because “there’s no other company that can turn fiction into fact”.

Combination of entitled fans and big-stadium fatigue sees Leinster’s appeal fall sharply

Irish Rail staff ‘appeared openly shocked by conditions’ aboard overheating train

Ciara Mageean in her own words: ‘I was told she didn’t want to coach me any more’

GAA draw: Dublin to face Donegal in early Sunday throw-in at Croke Park as fixture details confirmed

Turning fiction into fact is what Musk the........

© The Irish Times