The Canon of the Genius Inventor
Elon Musk isn't a savior, and he's not a brilliant scientist either
A recent article by Paul Krugman would have readers believe that Elon Musk is a narcissistic billionaire layabout, whose thin skinned approach to internet moderation does little to hide his true nature as a petulant, aggressive boss among the many petulant and aggressive bosses of the world. But it's far worse than that: he's also a snake oil salesman.
Thomas Edison gets brought up a lot when people talk about Elon Musk, but Thomas Edison has not been looked upon kindly by history -- rather he's been considered less an inventor and more of a salesman, as noted in an extensive New Yorker piece -- just like Elon Musk. Not only did the man not invent the lightbulb, but his real claim to fame was the fact that he had filed over a thousand different patents for inventions in his lifetime, effectively securing his legacy by plastering his name on every household object that he successfully marketed.
What Krugman's article misses, most importantly, is the fall of apartheid. Not only has Musk admitted that another shakeup to the status quo is one of his greatest fears, much like all billionaires, but his earliest investments -- the ones that led to him becoming the richest man on the planet -- were thanks to his parents' ownership of an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa. He owes everything he has to stolen wealth, gentrification, and the echoes of slavery that reverberate throughout the African continent. So why is it that people hold him in such high regard? A Star Trek episode named him as a genius inventor alongside Edison. A Rick & Morty episode, for whatever it's worth, had a cameo character named Elon Tusk who the characters lovingly refer to as Mister Tusk over and over. An HBO Max movie by the name of Moonfall asks "What would Elon do?" and dumps compliment after compliment on his work and his corporations. A rich child galavanting about with daddy's emerald money hardly seems like the kind of person who deserves lavish praise just because he made a few electric cars or a couple of rockets -- poorly. So what exactly is the deal? Why are people worshiping this man as if he had Einstein's brain in his skull?
An article by Linette Lopez -- who presently remains banned from twitter -- lays out the true state of affairs for Tesla and SpaceX fans, whose fervent belief in his ability to govern outweighs any of the negative effects his corporations have had on the planet. Tesla rarely delivers on its promises, still forcing people to wait for their cybertrucks while its self driving programming causes multiple car pileups in San Francisco. SpaceX itself has had six failed launches in just under twenty years, a number that rivals the total number of failures worldwide in the same period of time. The Boring company has, to date, successfully completed a single tunnel that would be used to help alleviate traffic, while cities and governments all across the United States are throwing money at them with the hopes that they'll do the same in places like Chicago and New York, despite none of their initial claims about traffic coming true as of yet. Meanwhile, as Lopez notes, there are substantial defects with Model 3 cars, a failed promise to deliver robo taxis across the world, and even a fake rooftop solar product that Musk used as a fundraising stunt. After seeing all of these things in conjunction, one might come to the conclusion that a billionaire is somehow the last person who should be in charge of a major communications network: but wait, there's more!
There's the fact that Elon Musk has also had a history of intimidation practices that are flagrantly illegal and downright immoral, from intentionally faking police reports about a potential mass shooting at a Tesla factory in San Francisco to the multi-million dollar lawsuit they lost after a worker had to endure racist epithets at work for over a year. Not to mention the 4 million dollars in payouts they had to make for refusing to provide breaks and wages while they intimidate union organizers, and force their workers to experience a quote "grueling workplace culture". All the while, Musk companies take massive amounts of government subsidies, allowing organizations like SpaceX and Tesla to force taxpayers to foot their egregiously large R&D bills.
I had a friend tell me that Twitter was funnier and more engaging than it had ever been in the wake of Musk buying it, and that's just flat out wrong. The mass layoffs have had disastrous effects for the function of the website, both in wealthy and poor countries alike: not only did they drop support for older versions of twitter nearly instantly, but newer functions, like the multi-colored verification system are a testament to what happens when a team of accessibility developers disappear from a major site, making it impossible for colorblind people to People have been experiencing worse and worse service outages that have been directly linked to the teams who once worked at Twitter being laid off to help assuage the company's budget woes. In the meantime, the company's revenue continues to suffer, as it's always been a deeply unprofitable platform that has leveraged debt in order to stay afloat. A snake oil salesman doesn't know the first thing about truly leveraging a business, and his scorched earth approach to running a business has proven as disastrous for Twitter as many said it would end up being.
The end result of what each company is trying to accomplish is also worth noting, because Elon Musk has never truly been an innovator. What exactly does putting hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles on the road do for the carbon crisis when trains have already been proven to solve it? What good is having payload rockets sent up to space, which have no safety precautions and no room for personnel, when our goal is supposed to be interplanetary travel? And what good does a tunnel in some of the most earthquake prone cities in the United States do to alleviate traffic that public transportation couldn't? None of what gets used here looks or sounds like an innovation, but rather what many refer to as a "disruption" -- intentionally using government subsidies and tax evasion to avoid the standard way of doing business -- much like what Uber and Lyft did to the taxi industry in the U.S. Disruption has never solved any problems that simple legislation couldn't solve, and that alone should be grounds for people ignoring whatever Elon Musk and his cronies have to say on the matter.
What we have today is a far more serious problem than billionaire worship or billionaire control. It's billionaires all the way down, baby; they aren't just in our news feeds crying about how everyone is too mean to them at every minute of the day, they're regularly and routinely winning government contracts, dodging taxes, ruining platforms of mass communication, taking control of every piece of legislation to keep themselves safe, and somehow no one manages to even whisper the word guillotine in their presence. Something has to give eventually: either billionaires have to be taxed out of existence, or the working class has to be given control over an amount of wealth that rivals theirs. And since we know the latter is never going to happen without a fight, it stands to reason that we've got no choice but to implement the former.
That's why our first step should be eliminating billionaires: period. No one should be able to amass so much wealth that they have the power to outright purchase multi-billion dollar companies, and it stands to reason that any attempt at allowing someone to purchase a communication platform like Twitter should never be allowed in the first place. That means taxation and wage violation enforcement are key -- the main components in any attempt at removing a billionaire from power -- which requires a much stronger federal government and a much more powerful justice department capable of taking them head-on. Second, nationalizing the industries that billionaires would attempt to "disrupt", including communication platforms like Twitter, is an important step in the process. While some people might disagree with the idea of Twitter being a government run organization, it would be better by far than having it be an advertisement run organization, in which the profit motive is what dictates whether it lives or dies. I say taking the leap is probably a better step in the right direction than what we have now, and I imagine a lot of people can agree with me on that point.