1). “Elon Musk: Everything You Didn't Know About His Sh*tty Past”, “Not a Genius a Bullsh*tter”, May 13, 2024, Episode 8 of “This F*cking Guy,” Hysteria Podcast hosts Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco, Hysteria, duration of video 35:08, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2). “The Problem With Elon Musk”: 'The Billionaire Who’s Not Like Other Billionaires' ” Jul 12, 2024, Johnny Harris narrates a program about Musk, Johnny Harris, duration of video 42:45, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The Corporate Controlled Media has consistently portrayed Elon Musk as a Genius, a brilliant technician, and a self-made man rising from obscurity in South Africa to being one of the most wealthy people living on Earth. The reality is definitely quite a bit different. Musk grew up in an upper class family, (a bizarre one we might note) who lived in one of the biggest houses in Pretoria, and his father was an investor in and a manager of an Emerald Mine in Zambia.
As in earlier times in the U.S., one of the main jobs of the Corporate Controlled Media is to create mythologies around various major business figures and to lionize them. Two of the most common disinformation memes are: “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” and “I studied in my family's little cabin by the light of some tiny lamp, in between chopping wood and fetching water from the local stream”. Classic Horatio Alger claptrap.
Item 1)., “Elon Musk: Everything ….”, points out the numerous infusions of billions of dollars into Musk's questionable and often failing business concerns. Their discussion also calls into question Musk's dubious scientific, engineering, and techological credentials and abilities; and points out that Musk typically bought his way into existing companies, later taking control of them or withdrawing from them with a pile of cash, through standard intra-corporate machinations. Tesla, in particular, was already producing electric cars when Musk invested in it. The two original engineers who founded the company continued to supervise production and to design and plan new vehicles until they were ousted by Musk later on.
Item 2)., “The Problem With Elon Musk: ….” is much more laudatory about Musk's complex series of companies. Harris says the Musk has a way of attracting and motivating very talented people to work in his companies, though he ends up pressing them mercilessly and drives many of them away. Harris bases much of his discussion of Musk's business operations on the Hagiographic Biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson. However, Harris presents a more skeptical assessment of Musk, in the sections in which he discusses the purchase and operation of Twitter under Musk.
One thing is sure. From his confrontations with public health officials in Alameda, County California, over closing the Freemont Assembly plant during the Covid Pandemic, to his recent decision to move his more mobile investments (such as “X” formerly Twitter) out of California to the more congenial extreme-right atmosphere in Texas; Musk sees the function of government as being a source of money, and a provider of coercive force against working people when they clash with him. The officials of California have had the nerve to not always follow this playbook and Musk has written and delivered oral statements denouncing governments that do not toe his line.
But it is more difficult to move actual heavy industrial operations. Tesla's original assembly plant in Freemont, California that, with other nearby facilities purchased later, represents a total of nearly 7 million Square Feet of production area, has 22,000 employees, and that produced 560,000 vehicles in 2023, is still in operation. Tesla has 2 other major assembly factories, a 10 million square foot facility in Austin, Texas, and a 2,240,000 square foot operation in the outskirts of Berlin, Germany. Tesla has a 54,000 square foot plant in Shanghai that is listed as production facility for “superchargers”.
Tesla was passed up by BYD of China as the world's largest producer of electric vehicles (EVs) in the past couple of years. BYD is also the “low-cost” producer of EVs. Of course the U.S. has now placed a 100% tariff on Evs, BYD could be expected to open assembly plants in Mexico in response to avoid that tariff. Biden passed legislation that has provided subsidies for high-tech production, that includes money that U.S. based companies used to open battery factories in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia.
The other major operation of Musk that has some notoriety and some major success is Space-X. And at this point Space-X is the main functioning operation that can send payloads into Earth Orbit, and to shuttle astronauts to and from the International Space Station (where two astronauts are currently stranded with the inoperable Boeing StarShip). Musk used the operational Space-X rockets to put thousands of communications satellites in orbit, though he did not cooperate with the agencies that are trying to coordinate satellite and “Space Junk” objects that orbit the Earth. A precise and detailed account of how Space-X was founded, funded, and to what degree it was given valuable technology and launch facilities is beyond my ability to present. But we can rest assured that there was plenty of subsidies, Item 1). provides some information, while Item 2). provided material more favorable to Space-X. It does appear, at this time, that the original Musk plan to “colonize Mars” has been, at the least, been put on indefinite hold. Perhaps, the somewhat more realistic plan to mine minerals on large asteroids and to run some very polluting operations on them has a chance of implementation. The extremely high price of moving material up into earth orbit and to any mining venue on an asteroid would severely limit the potential operations.
Musk, and a growing number of Tech CEOs have shown that they are by no means champions of freedom. They are just typical Capitalist Rulers who want to use government for their personal and business benefit, and wield the power of the state against working people whenever they "get out of line".
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