Can Elon Musk save Test cricket?
No one runs the game, we play too much cricket, and too little at the same time.
There you have it, Elon Musk likes cricket.
It should not be a big surprise, he is South African, and cricket is great. There have been various breadcrumbs over the years.
There was the time that Musk retweeted a post on Rohit Sharma. That is a pretty cricket thing to do.
Another time Google head Sundar Pichai talked about Jasprit Bumrahâs batting, and Musk replied with âNiceâ. That was followed by Mr Google suggesting they should hit up an India South Africa match together.
This is clearly a cricket fan.
While also being a man with an all-time low approval rating. He is not the first worldâs richest dude to annoy most people.
Last year, a Gallup poll had him as the most unfavourable US newsmaker. Other sites have tracked his decline in the US alone, and outside it is often lower. Billionaires - or I suppose briefly, trillionaires - are rarely liked. But he seems to be even more hated.
Recently, even he has started to backtrack on his own dodgy DOGE decisions. It seems even Elon doesnât like Elon.
So how could he change that? Is there a way to bring nothing but joy into the world that he could put his name to? Something that is not AI overlords or racing to Mars because itâs cheaper than fixing the planet we have.
What he needs is some of that sportswashing we are all talking about.
There are other sports that need help and advisors, but Test cricket is something else. Itâs a fading relic of society that is actually perfect for the modern streaming social media age. It has genuine fans and perhaps the worst marketing of any billion dollar business.
When he invented DOGE to clean up the government, he brought with him a man called Big Balls. But what Elon really needs to protect is the red ball.
Cricket is so poorly run, it is ripe for a takeover.
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Here is step one of what Elon could do to change his image, womenâs Test cricket. You saw the video at the top, Elon loves a cover drive. And who doesnât? It is almost cricketâs best drive. So who plays it the best right now? We can all argue, but letâs save some time, and go straight to a rough draft of three - Virat Kohli, Babar Azam and Laura Wolvaardt.
The first two seemingly need little saving, you can find them everywhere. Well, at least for a few minutes before Babar is out.
But the Wolf has played her cover drive in four Tests.
She might be the best bat in the history of the game by the time her career is finished, and at the moment her cover drive is being used to hit the ball out to a sweeper on the boundary. And being that she averages 51 in ODIs with more than 5000 runs, weâve seen it a lot. But in four Tests, sheâs not made many.
And itâs the world that misses out, because cover drives in Test cricket hit different. They pierce the field. They are somehow longer and more graceful. Hell, they just look better in whites. For a 50 million USD investment over five years, Musk would be sitting on a half a billion product not long into the future.
Cricket boards say that they cannot afford to host womenâs Tests, while also playing tons of first-class and List A games that are lossmakers for the men.
But part of the issue for cricket is the simple mess of it all. The ICC is in charge of menâs and womenâs cricket, except they absolutely are not. They are the organisation who hosts ICC events, which are not Tests (outside the one-off WTC, which the women donât play).
Individual cricket boards run bilateral Tests, and also T20 and ODIs. None of these boards seem to ever agree. And very rarely is democracy used.
And the ICC, or each of these cricket boards, first look after the menâs game and then the womenâs - in that order.
So cricket has no leadership, split loyalties, and women are an add on.
It means that Test matches for women have dried up. Now some of this is a good thing, as Womenâs Tests were mostly in an amateur era where the players needed permission to play. And now you have professionals around the world playing for country and in franchises.
But Womenâs ODI cricket is played all the time, and there have not been more than three Tests played in a year since 2003.
For those unaware, the ICC took over womenâs cricket in 2005. So in this international era of womenâs cricket, Tests have been almost shadowbanned.
That is a real shame, because professionalism and white ball cricket have meant that Womenâs Tests had a run rate boost. For decades, womenâs Tests were nil-all draws played with lead balls.
The runs per over usually hovered around two, as women with perfect high elbows would defend slow inswingers with the keeper up and a ring field to stop any thought of a run.
That isnât Womenâs Tests now.
The last match at Lordâs had bouncer spells, attacking batting and in/out fields. Womenâs cricket has evolved, far more dramatically than the menâs in the last few years (and the fellas are changing fast too).
But how much does this matter when you play at most three Tests a year? By the time the next match comes around, often in a different timezone, chances are youâve forgotten these new changes.
So Womenâs Tests need cash.
If you have the kind of money to, say buy a James Bond submarine car to make it work again, then I can only assume you have enough money to fund womenâs Tests around the world.
Not one-off exhibition matches, but perhaps the first tier of a properly run and planned World Test Championship. But not as a donation. If this league was run right, and sold as a package, not as bilaterals, it could easily be revenue neutral within a few years.
There is no cricket organisation that could (or would) do that. Perhaps if womenâs cricket were to split off from the major boards and run themselves for the betterment of the sport, they could raise that money. But it seems unlikely.
The people who could are billionaires and one occasional trillionaire.
But this isnât actually about womenâs cricket. Because what we have set up in our sport is a situation where increasingly the only thing that matters is T20, regardless of gender.
Hilariously often financed by older men who grew up loving Test cricket first.
Our sport is for sale, as long as you want nothing more than a quick hit.
Every time I meet a fan, I am asked about what the future of ODIs and Tests are. And no one can really answer that. They exist now, because they have for a while. But no one is really sure what to do with them. The IPL keeps growing, there are tournaments in Belgium and the Cayman Islands you probably donât know about.
Cricket has been liberalised economically. But for internationals, itâs still run by committees, if it is run at all.
At the moment, the worldâs best paid cricketers, like Virat Kohli, make their money not from the sport itself, but from outside companies sponsoring them. In the NBA, a ten year vet on a minimum contract makes nearly 4 million USD a year, more than Kohli makes from RCB and BCCI (officially at least). Babar Azam is occasionally Pakistan captain, and their most known star, while playing in cricketâs billion dollar game. And to make money, he has to become a meme for the Sydney Sixers.
No other major sport pays their players a smaller amount of the profit, meaning they are very poachable. I would say cricket is a ponzi scheme, but I think scheme is too strong a word.
No one runs the game, we play too much cricket, and too little at the same time. It is a sport that is literally eating itself, and not even enjoying the taste.
So that leads us back to the start. Cricket is so broken that only Elon Musk can save it.
Now, that is obviously not true. He did repost a tweet about Rohit Sharma, but only when he was seen in a Tesla. There was a conversation with the head of Google, but in that he only wrote the word nice. And that video of him loving cover drives is a deepfake.
I have no idea if Musk loves cricket. Considering he lives much of his life online, it seems like weâd know if he did. We know he likes caffeine free coke and toy guns. But at this point, we have never seen a signed picture of Nicky Boje beside his bed.
But what cricket has done is open itself up to people like Musk, who in our late-stage capitalist world are accruing wealth of levels never seen before.
How long before one of these people realises that they could buy huge chunks of cricket - the worldâs second most viewed sport - and just, you know, mess around with it? We have already lived through LIV golf, and the UFC had a fight at the White House.
What we have created with cricket is a sport so badly pieced together that people say they want Tests protected, without realising no one is in charge of it. The problem is thatâs exactly what billionaires look for. Most of cricket is a distressed asset waiting for a Private Equity company with plenty of borrowed money to turn it into something far more horrible.
Elon Musk may not love cover drives, but you know some do.