Elon Musk Is NOT Your Friend
Man, people love Elon Musk don’t they? You know, the funny meme man, the real life Tony Stark. Musk has such a weird sycophantic following. God he’s so great, with all his talk of space travel and renewable energy and self-driving cars — a true pioneer. He’s always doing something that Elon, hosting Saturday Night Live, tweeting funny things, creating flamethrowers, setting up candy shops (yeah seriously). To quote Kanye West, “If Elon has a bad week, we have a bad life. Leave that man the f*ck alone.” Jeez, I really wish I was friends with the ol’ Elongated Muskrat, seems like the kind of guy I could grab a beer with. Except, uh, wait, he absolutely is not.
I mean have you seen some of his tweets? Don’t get me wrong, Elon Musk isn’t your friend because of some bad tweets — believe me there are a lot worse reasons why he sucks. But his Twitter page is home to some of the most attention-seeking content anyone could put out onto the internet (hyperbole of course, but just give them a read). For example:
Or when he tweeted “The coronavirus panic is dumb”, and then “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in the US too by end of April [2020].” Wow, that sure didn’t age well Elon, given, as of July 2021 there are in total 34 million cases of Covid-19 in the US, and 608k deaths. But as I said, this isn’t about his terrible tweets — it’s about him.
Let’s return to that Tony Stark comparison. Tony Stark, the suave, very pretentious, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, is just the embodiment of a fantasy where pompous jackasses with bad PR ultimately are the ones who “save the world”. We absolutely love that trope, the Edison or Sherlock Holmes types — who don’t play by the rules of ‘civilised society’ but boy do they get results. Society only constrains the abilities of these geniuses. But this also isn’t about the internet or pop culture persona of Elon. Musk is bad, but not just because he tweets bad. Sure, Tony Stark saved the world, but Iron Man is also a fictional character. Is Elon Musk really helping us, or is he hindering us? Putting aside his personality and the memes, is Elon helping the world? And should we, as advised by Kanye West of all people, leave him the f*ck alone and step aside, while he ‘saves us all’?
Let’s start with his most obvious accomplishments. Getting off on a great start: he is the pioneer of electric cars…if you don’t count the plenty of other electric cars (i.e. the Ford Ranger EV, GM EV 1, Honda EV+, Nissan Ultra EV etc. etc.) that came out in the 90s. Okay…well at least he had the first Lithium ion powered highway legal car — which was a $100k sports vehicle called the Roadster. Alright, so maybe not extremely affordable, but hey it was the first mass produced highway legal electric…right? Nope, that was the Mitsubishi i-MiEV. So yeah, not the pioneer of electric cars, and in fact loads of companies such as Toyota and Nissan had already started pursuing electric cars, but he did found Tesla. What? He didn’t do that either? Tesla was founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpennings in 2003? Musk gave them money and then they made him a founder? Okay well, he did help them build the aforementioned Roadster, and by help I mean, he suggested they use carbon fibre on the doors.
Musk is hardly a pioneer: he only has his name on 3 patents. First being the design for a car door, the second being the design of a car body, and the third being the design for Tesla’s charging port. That last one is important, because it’s not like such large cable ports didn’t already exist, and his patent is only on the connecting point — not on the cable or any of the tech. He only ‘invented’ the shape and locking mechanism of the charging port. This seems like it might have to do with the fact that you can’t charge any electric vehicle at a Tesla station, only Tesla cars (unless you can find an adaptor). One of the things Musk pushed for early in Tesla production was as many charging stations as they could make — charging points being one of the largest missing components in the switch to electric. Meaning, the reason Tesla sells so many cars, is because their charging stations account for 40% of the stations in the US. Plus, as important as electric cars are, they are only as good as their power supplies, and if their batteries are charged from fossil fuels (which a lot of them are), then they are useless for the environment. Their construction process in addition to the fossil fuels used to charge them, doesn’t make them that much better for the planet than a normal car. Do not misunderstand me: electric cars are good. But Musk is less concerned with switching the world to electric cars, so much as he wants to switch it to his electric cars, even if that means screwing over more affordable electric car companies whose tech is incompatible with his monopolised charging stations. If you really want everyone to have an electric car, and you’re a billionaire, why not develop an affordable way to convert existing gas-powered cars to electric ones, and then let them use the charging stations you’ve set up all over the place. Just a thought. But he won’t do that, because he’s a capitalist, just another CEO trying to dominate an industry: not your friend.
I saw on Instagram the other day a video of someone speaking to Elon at a Q&A. The guy opened by saying he was a genius just like Elon, and saying he wanted to work alongside him in Tesla. Elon laughed the situation off, but I think this is a great Segway to my next point. You are not Elon Musk’s friend, and even by some off chance you end up working for him, you are even less likely to be his friend. Especially if you are an employee who wants to unionise, or god forbid, talk to the press. As reported in Zeke Faux and Matt Robinson’s ‘When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistbelower’ for Bloomberg, Elon attempted to destroy the life of one of his employees by suing them for $160 million, before having his people call in a fake spree shooting threat in the employees name. He then accused the reporter who covered the initial story of taking and giving bribes, accusing said reporter of “serving as an inside-trading source for one of Tesla’s biggest short-sellers” and stating that an “ex-Tesla employee just went on record formally claiming you [the reporter] bribed him & he sent you valuable Tesla IP in exchange.” He continued to harass this reporter on Twitter, even attempting to get her fired.
However, this was not the first or last time Elon would run up against journalists. Back in 2018, over Twitter of course, Musk announced: “Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda…” Yes Elon, because the accuracy of news should be rated by a public who believes in fake news, and has what a Stanford study described as a “dismaying” inability to discern fact from fiction when it comes to reporting — an inability that Stanford called a “threat to democracy”. Elon discussed how bias will be removed from the ranking algorithm — and if you want to read more on how removing bias from algorithms is extraordinarily difficult, check out my article ‘The Revolution Will Be Analysed’. Wow, I can think of zero ways that a public truth ranking website could be manipulated and abused. While discussing the voting system for this website, he praised the voting system of Reddit. “Reddit is great” he says. Yes Elon, Reddit is great for satisfying videos or funny memes, but not really for telling the truth. It’s great at falsely accusing people of the Boston bombing though. Yeah, that’s gonna get a downvote from me.
Musk’s Pravda never properly got off the ground…thankfully. Though its important to note that the announcement of the website came after months of increasingly bad press coverage over Musk’s working conditions, defiance of unionisation, concerns over Tesla’s autopilot, and most importantly, failure to report accidents within Tesla factories. Specifically, Reveal had partaken in an investigative report which found that Tesla “left injuries off the books” in their factories. Elon responded by tweeting: “Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn’t advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world’s biggest advertisers.” When Jessica Huseman of ProPublica (winner of multiple Pulitzer and Peabody awards), pointed out that “Reveal is a non-profit, suffering from none of these problems,” Elon responded “No, they’re just some rich kids in Berkeley who took their political science prof too seriously.” This from the billionaire who literally grew up with emeralds in his pockets (that may or may not have been acquired by his father through the South African Apartheid).
Without a doubt, there are legitimate criticisms to be made about the press and about fighting fake news, but maybe Musk’s efforts would have been better placed in supporting reliable news sites, like the Pulitzer Prize winning PolitiFact or Fair.org who strive for fairness and accuracy in reporting. But no, instead our sensitive billionaire, whilst pitching his ‘journalistic integrity’ website, shared and supported articles from Electreck (a website run by a Tesla fan boy, with writers who own Tesla stock, and share promo codes for Tesla), and The Knife (which is linked to NXIVM, a sex cult…I wish I was joking but you can read that whole story here). According to Musk, “Sadly, it had better critical analysis than most non-cult media.” As I said, the media is worthy of criticism…but your bad idea is also bad.
Everything is memes and jokes until unions are mentioned. For example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled Tesla illegally fired employee Richard Ortiz and others who discussed unionisation, as well as threatening to pull stock options of employees who followed along. The NLRB went on to identify 12 violations of labour laws, including a series of anti-union tweets Musk made in 2018. Musk attempted to urge his employees against unionising, by promising free frozen yoghurt…no I am not joking: “There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory.” In 2017, Tesla was reporting an extremely high number of injured employees, with workers complaining of long hours and hard physical labour. According to one employee, workers would collapse on the line, and labourers were told to work around them, because despite all the futuristic and utopian promises Musk espouses, it’s still just a factory. It’s hard to be utopian leaning when you, like, own all the money. As I described in my article on Bill Gates, what we are seeing with billionaires like Gates, Bezos, and Musk is this sort of top-down thinking, or what I coined a “benevolent oligarchy, a world where a rich few decides what’s good for the rest of us.” Musk’s supposedly futuristic and utopic thinking that pushes ‘his’ inventions, mean nothing without a change in infrastructure and human rights that allow a society to actually enjoy and benefit from them. When the news broke of the poor conditions, Musk promised to meet with all injured employees, and then go down to the factory and do their job, to better empathise. Of course…he didn’t do that. Even if he did, performing someone’s job for an hour doesn’t actually give you an idea what it’s like to do it all day, everyday.
The way Musk has treated his employees hasn’t improved since then: in 2021, Tesla workers are still complaining about long hours and harsh conditions. Not to mention how hard Musk went to war on keeping his factories open during the pandemic, leading to hundreds of cases of Covid-19 (unavoidable for his employees, lest they be fired for not coming in). Incidentally, hundreds of new Covid cases at one company sure seems like the opposite of his prediction that there would be zero by April of 2020. So maybe we shouldn’t have the tech equivalent of a Dickensian coal magnate appear in Iron Man 2, or hosting SNL, or turning up in episodes of Rick and Morty.
Where Tony Stark invented all his Iron Man armours and all the tech he uses, Musk has invented nothing, zilch, nada. He has smartly invested in a lot of existing technology that already exists, but the extent of a lot of his ideas was to take a thing we have and then say ‘What if online? What if internet ? Yes me thinks so.’ And that kids was how PayPal was created.
Let’s talk about the Boring Tunnel. One of Musk’s many companies is called The Boring Company , an offshoot of SpaceX and the one that made the flamethrowers. But in fact they are a tunnel construction service. What began as a really expensive way for Elon to personally avoid traffic, the idea sold to the public was a futuristic new way for drivers to go long distances without interruptions of traffic — a sort of superfast carpool lane promising to take people from Westwood to LAX in 5 minutes. The final concept was not so much a super tunnel for cars, but a subway system, with Musk tweeting: “Adjusting The Boring Company plan: all tunnels & Hyperloop will prioritize pedestrians & cyclists over cars.” By 2017, Musk was talking about installing these ‘future tunnels’ in other cities like DC, New York, and San Francisco. Really, all he did was make a small tunnel with some glowing lights, that are inescapable in an emergency. But somehow, Musk sold the idea to Las Vegas after failing in Chicago. Congratulations Elon for just creating a highway underground and in a small space, therefore being less safe than normal highways, especially for Teslas which set on fire more than other cars (meaning the tunnel could only carry a fraction of the traffic Musk claimed it could — 800 passengers an hour and not the 4400 the convention in Las Vegas had aimed for). Oh yeah, and you can’t drive your own car in the tunnel — you have to call a Tesla (which has to be driven by someone for safety reasons, it is not in autopilot) like an Uber. So basically Musk sold Las Vegas the idea of a dangerous, enclosed, light-up underground highway where you call an Uber.
Remember how I mentioned The Boring Company was a subsidiary of SpaceX? That’s because Elon’s intended use for the Boring Tunnel is to mine on Mars. In other words, this Vegas project is just a way to test a prototype, and get paid for it — selling the dirt to the poor. No…literally. Musk tweeted back in 2018, “New Boring Company merch coming soon. Lifesize LEGO-like interlocking bricks made from tunnelling rock that you can use to create sculptures & buildings […] First kit set will be ancient Egypt — pyramids, Sphinx, temple of Horus, etc.” Essentially, Musk intended to use the dirt from the tunnels he was creating to make fun stuff for rich people, but when pressured about affordable housing he realised that a secondary and alternative use for them could be that, “Yeah, the boring bricks are interlocking with a precise surface finish, so two people could build the outer walls of a small house in a day or so.” Cool afterthought Elon. The Boring Tunnel in Vegas had no plans for turnstiles to regulate the flow of passengers and it didn’t even have fire precautions, because they didn’t care or know what they were doing. Any infrastructure planning Elon does on Earth is just a big test for Mars.
Oh yeah and what about Starlink — that crazy new satellite internet system launched by SpaceX that, according to Forbes, will totally “save the world”. In reality, it’s being pitched as a solution to internet loss in more rural areas. Right now, the Beta test is limited to the Pacific North-West of America. It sounds like an altruistic endeavour to advancing technology, if it didn’t cost $500 to setup and $100 a month. In rural areas of America, cost is a barrier for many as communities have high unemployment rates during non-tourist seasons, depending on seasonal work. Oh and if you can even foot the bill, you get rewarded with internet speeds…below the national average. So…expensive for the consumer, slower than average, and not the only of its kind (as OneWeb, Virgin Qualcomm, Soft Bank and Hughes Network Systems are all doing the same thing), that requires rocket launches to make. But then why is Elon doing it? Well let’s hear it from the man himself. In an interview with CNBC, Elon said: “We see this as a way for SpaceX to generate revenue that can be used to develop more and more advanced rockets and spaceships and that…we think this is a key stepping stone on the way to establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the Moon.” Starlink is just another source of revenue so Elon can go to Mars. Yet again, I’m no ‘genius’ (and as we’re kind of finding out, nor is Elon), but if I were a billionaire, I might just expand internet infrastructure to rural areas, and make it freely available to everyone.
I mean is no one else a little worried that both Bezos and Musk, the richest men on Earth, are accumulating resources and wealth to escape Earth. Musk doesn’t really think the Earth is going to survive, and though he pretends to be extending the gift of “life beyond Earth” to humanity, he’d probably just settle for saving one person, at the expense of…how many was it Elon? “Honestly a bunch of people will probably die in the beginning.” Ah good to know. Out of all his investments, Musk has dumped way more money into SpaceX than anything else. Musk’s solution to climate change is not electric cars or renewable energy, it’s leaving the planet. To be honest, that’s his approach to most things — running away, escaping…people. The reason he doesn’t focus on public transportation, but instead tunnels filled with personalised death pods, is because he doesn’t like being around people. Whilst onstage at a Tesla event, Musk stated: “I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people […] and there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer. Ok, great.” Though pop culture sees Elon as some optimistic and utopic-thinker, intent on saving and improving humanity, in reality he finds us gross and doomed. How is assuming the Earth is doomed and we need to ascend into the stars any different than believing, in say, the biblical Rapture — an apocalyptic finale where only the deserving are saved. But instead of God choosing, it’s that guy who dressed up as Wario on SNL. Maybe we shouldn’t really take seriously the data analysis and predictions of a man who said there’d be zero new Covid cases by April 2020…just maybe.
Tesla, the inventor, mattered because what he invented filled a hole we desperately needed filled to advance — allowing us to communicate easier, and work differently. For lack of a better analogy, going to Mars doesn’t fill any of the holes we need filled. How does it solve climate change? Wealth inequality? Civil rights? It’s just a cynical act by a rich guy who isn’t betting on the human race. He isn’t solving any of those issues, or even trying to: he is running away from the problem, like a coward. In fact, he might actually be making it worse…through Dogecoin. I know I might sound insane, but hear me out. Dogecoin for those of you who don’t know is a cryptocurrency based on a meme, and is therefore funny that it has had an influence on the market. It works off a ‘proof-of work’ algorithm, which requires as much electricity to maintain as a small country. Good job guy who claims to care about climate change, you sure are helping with all that crypto mining you are causing. Oh and a single rocket launch emits more CO2 than a car would in two centuries, and fills space with debris. Did I mention that Musk created a launch site in the town of Boca Chica, Texas. The residents didn’t get much say despite Musk planning to launch thousands of rockets per year. They began to get notes on their doors that their windows might explode every now and then. Residents that had lived there long before SpaceX even existed began to leave as debris crashed over beaches.
His ego and wealth will always overtake anything he might care about. He certainly doesn’t care about people much. Elon Musk is not actually interested in preserving humanity, so much as preserving a certain better group of humanity. Musk regularly ignores federal regulations put in place to protect people, because his noble cause is just too damn noble. When Elon is talking about bringing humanity to the stars, he isn’t talking about you — you and I are the people he would sacrifice to make that happen. He’s just a guy telling us he’ll save the world as long as we give him money and, to quote Kanye, leave him “the f*ck alone.” All the articles and books (including all the ones I have linked to in this article), don’t say he has saved the world or that he will, but that he ‘could’. However…will he? He throws out these ideas because it costs him nothing to do that — but at the end of the day he’s just a CEO of an electric car company. He’s not the first electric car guy, nor the first private business man investing in space, or the first weirdo billionaire trying to visit space. Even if Elon does end up changing our world through electric self-driving cars or weird underground highways or that neuralink thing he was talking about: he wasn’t the one who invented them. Less Tesla, more Edison. Though Elon has many times quoted Sagan, he intentionally leaves out one important part of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: “There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. […] To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
