Elon believes in half of "Fake It Til You Make It"

Greetings, long-ignored friends! I've been scratching the writing itch elsewhere but felt this is a good place for thoughts occasioned by Musk's ethical decline. It was triggered by finishing Isaacson's biography. (Summary review if you want to skip the rest and return to BlueSky: very interesting and worth reading despite suffering from successful-author's-pagecount-bloat, and also ending in 2023 before Elon did the worst misdeeds of his life.)

Maybe a bit of a 3-part morass, but I'll start here:

1. My normal prior is that enviros don't have to worry or pull punches when advocating for our interests in competition with every other interest out there. One reason is that we provide a public good while economic interests internally benefit from their advocacy, so they're much better funded than we are, and they don't need us to hold back. Of course other social interests are somewhat different: spending on the arts is also a public good. Still, we advocates aren't the decisionmakers, so usually, we should advocate zealously for the environment, arts advocates do the same for their field, and politicians or voters get to decide who gets the attention and budgetary dollar.

Priors can be overcome though. My longstanding concern has been DEI issues in particular are something traditional enviros have to keep in mind. Innovative Elon has created a new concern though: using environmentally-created dollars to do really, really evil things. This puts the environmental advocacy community in a quandary when it comes to Tesla. I don't have answers.

2. I'll contribute my small part in making sure the world doesn't forget what Elon has tried to do to democracy. An illuminating aspect of Musk 2024 was that PACs funded by Musk told pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan that Harris was pro-Israel while telling Pensylvania Jewish voters that she was anti-Israel. This is where the "Fake It" side of Musk's bio kicks in. He has said rabidly false things about Tesla and Space X for so long that I think he concluded it didn't even have to be eventually-true, just as the cynically-contradictory messaging to voters could never be consistent. His companies are now tainted with the same credibility for anything he claims about them. (I suppose he could claim he didn't do the voter-messaging thing, but I'm dubious. It feels like him for what that's worth, and AFAICT he didn't try to stop or denounce it.)

Worse still is his pioneering steps to use money in US politics, already a scourge, and knock us down to Third-World democracy-corrupting levels. The worst of it so far was on the day of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election when Musk PACs offered $50 to voters standing in a polling line who showed the photo of the Republican candidate for the Court:

 

 I've spent time in developing countries, and this is just another version of what the local oligarchs do to corrupt elections. I remember reading in Thailand many years ago that people felt it was ethical to accept the voting bribes from the wealthy but it would be unethical to then vote against the stooge being propped up for office. That's want Musk wants to do to the US. At $50 a person, Musk could spend $5 billion bribing 10m people across seven swing states in 2028 (or 2026), and producing 1 million new MAGA votes in those states could swing national results. Musk could easily afford this, although it's very fortunate that it didn't work in Wisconsin. I hope Musk and Republicans give up on bribery but they could also double down in the next elections, with their minions posted somewhere near polling stations and offering $100 bills on the spot to people who repeat some pro-MAGA mantra.

3. Thoughts about the book. I finally got to that. In no particular order (too long, so I'm putting it below the jump):