The Worst Thing About Elon Musk

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Julie Roginsky

Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is often described as a triumph of private genius, which is convenient for Musk and absurd for everyone else. The SpaceX initial public offering that pushed him into trillionaire territory did not descend from Mars fully formed. It was built on a launchpad paid for, protected, and expanded by the American taxpayer. SpaceX received a major early award under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative, designed to support private companies developing cargo transportation to low-Earth orbit. NASA later awarded SpaceX billions more through commercial crew and cargo arrangements. In May, just weeks before the IPO, SpaceX won a $4.16 billion Space Force contract for threat-detection satellites.

Tesla, too, was never merely the story of a lone visionary conquering the market. In 2009, Tesla announced that it had received approval for about $465 million in low-interest Department of Energy loans from the Obama administration to accelerate electric vehicle production, including Tesla’s plug-in vehicles and the development of its Fremont manufacturing facility. By 2015, Tesla, SpaceX, and Musk’s SolarCity had benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, including loans, tax breaks, grants, factory construction, discounted financing, and environmental credits. A decade later, the scale of public support for Musk’s companies was far higher: at least $38 billion over two decades through contracts, loans, grants, and tax credits.

That is what makes the myth so obscene. Musk did not become the world’s first trillionaire by escaping government. He became the world’s first trillionaire by feeding off government and then turning around to tell everyone else that government was the problem. He built companies that depended on public risk, public contracts, public tax credits, public research, public infrastructure, and public procurement. Then, once taxpayers helped make him untouchable, he positioned himself as the man entitled to take a chainsaw to the same government that had helped make him the richest man on earth.

But the most dangerous thing about Musk’s fortune is not simply its size, grotesque though it is. It is not only that one man now possesses wealth larger than the economic output of many countries. It is that his wealth buys him something more corrosive than influence and more dangerous than the unbridled ability to double and triple his fortune.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/the-worst-thing-about-elon-musk

[303squadron]

1. I disagree

The most dangerous thing about Eloon is that he is a trillionaire Holocaust denier.

[RussBLib]

2. David Corn - The World's Worst Trillionaire

Pile on Musk! He deserves all the opprobrium we can heap on him. Here's a recent one from David Corn, one of my favorite curmudgeons.

Elon Musk: The World’s Worst Trillionaire
His wealth isn’t the only thing that’s extreme.
by David Corn
Mother Jones Washington DC Bureau Chief

Hooray, Elon Musk is a trillionaire. You catch that last week? It was all over the news, with splashy headlines proclaiming that X-boy is the first human to enter the four-comma club. Of course, much of his wealth is on paper and tied to the inflated value of SpaceX, which went public on Friday. Most notably, the main media stories about Musk reaching this milestone sidestepped an important fact: The guy is a racist conspiracy monger.

The accounts of Musk’s newfound trillionaireness in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal neglected to mention that the world’s richest man is a dangerous purveyor of paranoia and hate. As many are hailing Musk’s entry into this league of one, it’s a good time to review his record as an alt-right extremist who’s amplified and promoted noxious, dangerous, and false ideas. So let’s go for a non-comprehensive jog down memory lane—sticking only to recent years.

In October 2022, after Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was brutally assaulted at their San Francisco home, Musk spread an article from an obscure website that claimed the assailant was a male prostitute and the attack stemmed from a drunken dispute between Pelosi and this man. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk posted on Twitter, which he had recently purchased. The site Musk referenced had reported during the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced by a body double, and his post illustrated his penchant for recklessly echoing bullshit conspiracy theories.

A few months later, Musk put up a post comparing Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros to the Marvel supervillain Magneto, and he contended that Soros hates humanity and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.” His anti-Soros messages, broadcast to his 125 million or so followers, were widely excoriated as advancing antisemitic tropes.

the rest can be found here and/or on my blog.

https://russblib.blogspot.com