Musk vs Forrest: The clash of eco-titans and their enormous egos

Australia’s biggest eco-crusader, Andrew Forrest, is never short of words when dealing with his detractors but the mining magnate’s decision to pick a fight with fellow environmental evangelist, Elon Musk, seems like a missed opportunity.

Logic would dictate that the two business titans should be natural allies. But the headbutting between, arguably two of the world’s highest profile headline makers, points to a fundamental difference in vision.

Forrest was in New York this week, using the stage created by US president Biden’s First Movers Coalition and the United Nations Global Compact, to put some numerical flesh around the bones of Fortescue Metals’ strategy to decarbonise its operations by 2030.

But in what has become a battle of environmental bona fides between Australia’s richest man and America’s richest person (as identified by Forbes), their wildly different views on the best technology to save the planet has become apparent.

For Forrest, with a platform of this size, the opportunity to take a swipe at Musk (whose public debating prowess is generally confined to Twitter) was too tempting to pass up.

In an extraordinarily candid outburst to the media, Forrest reportedly suggested Musk was ‘just a businessman’ rather than “a real climate avenger”.

The genesis of this battle appears to be Musk’s dismissal of green hydrogen as the technology weapon to fight emissions.

Musk, whose wealth has been generated by spearheading the push to electric vehicles via the creation of his company Tesla, doesn’t agree and has gone so far as to describe green hydrogen as “mind-bogglingly stupid”.

Forrest couldn’t let that invective slide. He told the Financial Times, “He [Musk] knows that, almost every time a Tesla is plugged into almost every grid in the world, it is just burning coal and oil and gas….I mean, it is doing nothing for the environment. So, his ‘mind-boggling stupid’ is whitewash.”