The Incredible Lightness Of Being Musk

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The idea for this story has been kicked around in the executive dining room at CleanTechnica headquarters for a while now, as Elon Musk appears to be going further off the rails with each passing day. Let’s be honest. Musk and Tesla pay a lot of bills around here. The term “clickbait” is used pejoratively whenever anyone doesn’t like one of our articles, because we are in the click business, as is every other digital media site. The gods of Google count every click, every key stroke, and every “like.” Clicks are the currency of the digital world. There is no financial incentive for CleanTechnica writers to get more clicks these days, though, so we are not individually pushed to chase stories for clicks. It is perhaps a natural tendency, but we have certainly driven away many, many readers by not praising everything Musk does, so the conclusion that we write stories like this to make more money is fundamentally flawed.

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” is an old expression but it’s good advice. Nevertheless, the most recent activities by Elon Musk have soured most of us on him, to the point where some are considering selling their Tesla automobiles because they no longer wish to be seen as supporting his cockamamie worldview. Ever since he bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, he has promoted the notion that all speech should be free, but it should only be amplified if he personally approves of it, and he’s more than happy to sue others for what they say in order to try to shut them up (a fundamental attack on free speech, as one judge concluded). He has set himself up as the one and only true giver of truth for the entire world. If you post stuff he likes, it gets passed on to his legions of followers. If you post stuff that he doesn’t like, it is sometimes deleted and your account is deactivated. It should be obvious this is not free speech at all. It is megalomania writ large.

About That Musk Post On X

The most recent example happened last week when the Secret Service arrested a man with a rifle near a golf course where Donald Trump was playing. Soon afterwards, Musk posted this disgusting piece of garbage on X:

That post sparked a backlash so fierce that the great and powerful Musk was forced to delete it — after it had been viewed tens of millions of times. According to Wired, after deleting the post, Musk said it was merely a joke that fell flat given the context. “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏. Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Well, duh. How is it possible that the man who considers himself to be the smartest person who ever lived does not know this? He is the master of the world’s most powerful social megaphone and yet does not understand the most rudimentary principles about how it operates? That has raised concerns that Musk, who is the beneficiary of billions of dollars worth of contracts with the US Department of Defense and NASA, may himself be a threat to national security if he uses his power at X to inspire political violence.

“In my experience, the Secret Service would take such a comment very seriously,” Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a liberty and national security fellow at NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, told Wired. “Typically, agents would go out and interview the subject to ensure that there wasn’t an existing threat, and to make the subject aware that the agency takes such statements seriously.”

Musk Is A Social Media Addict

The US government’s heavy reliance on companies controlled by Musk has repeatedly raised concerns by national security experts, especially a year ago when he denied a request by Ukraine to enable Starlink in Crimea so it could launch an attack on Russian troops. There are concerns about Musk’s business relationship with China and his reliance on financing from Saudi Arabia to partially finance the purchase of X. Critics are quick to point out that while he is quick to lash out at the Biden administration for what he considers violations of his version of free speech, he never, ever has anything negative to say about the rulers of China or Saudi Arabia, two countries in which free speech is considered a crime punishable by death or long periods of incarceration.

Just how involved Musk is with X was revealed in a recent article by The Guardian that reviewed his activity on the platform during one 24 hour period in August of this year. The sub-headline for that story said, “A controversial tweet may make it to the news, but reading every post from the world’s richest man shows how frenzied and extreme he really is.” It then went on to detail 145 tweets Musk made the day after his online interview with Donald Trump. The record shows him active on the platform during most of that time with the exception of a few 2-hour intervals when we was away from the site.

During the day, The Guardian says Musk shared anti-immigrant content (he himself is an immigrant, of course), election conspiracies, and attacks against the media. He exchanged tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers, and sycophantic admirers. Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, he has little to no interaction with left-wing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader right-wing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.

Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.

A Growing Paranoia

One of the indications of extreme wealth and power is a growing sense of paranoia. According to the New York Times, Musk has increasingly barricaded himself behind a phalanx of armed bodyguards as he has become more wealthy, more famous, and more outspoken. While many high profile people face threats, Musk has expanded his personal security beyond that of other billionaires.

His security team now operates like a mini Secret Service and he is guarded more like a head of state than a business executive, security experts said. He now travels with as many as 20 security professionals who research escape routes or clear a meeting room before he enters. The threats to his safety have caused Musk to become more fearful, three people close to him told the New York Times. He is rarely without bodyguards even when using the bathroom.

At the annual Tesla shareholder meeting in June, Musk said he thought the threats against him were getting crazier. “The probability that a homicidal maniac will try to kill you is proportionate to how many homicidal maniacs hear your name. So they hear my name a lot — I’m like, ‘OK, I’m on the list,’ you know.” He added this had forced him to be more standoffish with the public.

The Takeaway

So, what are we to make of Elon Musk? Is he the greatest engineer who ever lived or a charlatan who leverages the talents of others to burnish his own halo? Probably the reality is somewhere in the middle. There are a few possible takeaways here.

One is that Musk used Tesla to propel himself to enormous wealth and fame and then did what other wealthy and famous people do — turn inward to bask in the glow of other wealthy and famous people who feed each other’s inflated egos and plot how to keep the hoi polloi from absconding with their wealth and fame. Douglas Rushkof did an excellent job of explaining this dynamic in his book Survival of the Richest. If you haven’t read it, you really cannot be fully aware of what is happening in the rarefied stratosphere where Musk and his peers (if there are any) operate.

Two, Tesla exploded like a supernova more than a decade ago but has slipped into complacently lately as Musk’s mania for robotaxis has superseded the company’s focus on bringing affordable electric cars to market. The world does not need $100,000 trucks or $200,000 Roadsters. It does not need vehicles that can make the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs. It needs affordable vehicles that do what people need them to do reliably for years and years. They need to take the kids to soccer practice and the dentist, and get people to work on time in comfort and with a certain amount of style.

Musk’s focus on the offbeat to the exclusion of marketing research is intriguing but possibly contrary to the goal of long term profitability for Tesla. He pooh-poohed criticism of the Cybertruck, saying he personally didn’t care if it was a commercial success. That’s easy for someone with a few hundred billion in the bank, but hardly a basis for building a company with a history of sustained growth.

Third, some readers will have noted the reference to a 1984 novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera with a similar title. In that book, the protagonist, Tomáš, is a highly regarded surgeon and intellectual. He is also a womanizer. Musk, for all his achievements and wealth, has a simplistic relationship with women which seems to involve impregnating as many females as possible. One almost gets the impression that he intends to populate his proposed colony on Mars exclusively with his own progeny. The latest example was a post on X that he made shortly after Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Once again, Musk saw this as a funny joke, but others found it crude and creepy. Hillary Clinton told the San Francisco Chronicle the post was “another way of saying rape.” At a time when women’s reproductive health is such a significant part of the current political climate in the United States, Musk’s post was stupid, ignorant, tone deaf, and offensive. His apologists always make excuses for him because he is on the autism spectrum, but that is no excuse for being an arrogant ass and it certainly does not make him a good candidate for the gatekeeper of free speech for the entire digital world.

We would love to see Elon make Tesla the most successful car company in the world, but he is so distracted by his X escapades that it seems he doesn’t have time for Tesla anymore. He was once the head cheerleader for Tesla and the primary reason why its stock was valued far higher than other automakers’. Tesla was different and the difference was Musk and his indefatigable promotion of the Tesla brand. But he has abdicated that role so he can post a thousand times a week on X.

Part of the blame must fall on the company’s board of directors, who seem unwilling to rein Musk in, or incapable of it. Perhaps someday some smart securities lawyer will hold them to account for breaching their fiduciary duty to stockholders. The sense we have here at CleanTechnica is that Musk is a loose cannon, and because of that, the promise that Tesla once had is being squandered.

We would rather he stick to his original purpose of making Tesla the preeminent electric car company in the world. Instead, BYD is well on its way to doing precisely that and Musk has no answer for it. What Tesla desperately needs is a professional manager running the company who is not micro-dosing drugs and who is not tilting at windmills on social media 24/7. Elon, we hardly know you anymore.