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):

*Musk's disregard for marketing is very clear and could indicate why he made the mistake that's killing Tesla now, especially overseas. Musk believes that good products don't need marketing and has never spent money on it in his companies. This is somewhat contradicted by his incessant personal marketing on Twitter and generally making his companies appear to be about himself, not to mention being wrong in general about marketing, but it still is true regarding his professed belief and likely what he really thinks. His mistake is that even accepting the idea  that good products don't need marketing does not exclude terrible marketing from harming products. The gigantic damage Elon has done to Tesla isn't going to be overcome for years, especially outside of the US. I speculated elsewhere that an EV company niche-marketed to conservatives might not be a bad idea, but converting the market leader to that role is not a good idea.

 *For the folks arguing that Musk isn't brilliant, just lucky or a nepo-baby, read the book. You're hurting your credibility. Musk had too many successes beyond and before SpaceX and Tesla, as well as multiple successes within each company. Elon's father did occasionally provide financial help while mostly being broke, and more importantly his father did far more psychological damage to Musk than the help he gave with a few tens of thousands of dollars of investment. It's also hard sometimes to remember the incredible good that Musk once did for the US and the world prior to his descent in recent years, but what he accomplished is pretty amazing.

*The curse of a terrible parent is pretty clear with Musk (and Trump, fwiw). Something to keep in mind for assessing both men, both of whom are terrible parents themselves but are also better than their fathers were. And fwiw I can think of several folks I've known with terrible parents who turned out to be really good people, so it's also not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Early in the book I saw a clear parallel between Musk's father and Donald, which might help explain their relationship a bit.

 *Musk is brilliant but his level of success was also luck - both Tesla and SpaceX nearly went under multiple times. Many of his other ventures also made money but it was only those two that pushed him into the outer stratosphere of wealth. While there's a lot of stupid in the Great Man Theory of History, the part that is true is that randomness, including individual personalities and capabilities, can change history.

*His obsession over the "woke-mind virus" being the greatest threat to humanity is yet another example of really smart people having bad quality control over their own assessments. Musk fwiw does seem ready to admit being wrong on smaller matters, but I think that's part of how he justifies being impetuous (that he's capable of admitting error and reversing, so go full speed ahead). I do think there are some issues with wokeness, but it's far down in the list of problems humanity faces.

 *I share Musk's concern about AI, but he seems to have done very little about it. The Mars thing to protect from AI seems unlikely (AI will be there too), and otherwise while I agree that we should explore the solar system and the stars, I disagree about his urgency.

*His Optimus robot seems stupid to me, although I think all the humanoid robots are stupid outside of some minimal psychological benefit in medical care and assistance (and even there, putting a video monitor face on a more capable robot might be sufficient). Anyway, he's behind the other humanoid robot companies.

*Musk told a colleague he thinks he's bipolar. Um, yeah. He also refused treatment. My amateur assessment is bipolar people have contributed hugely to humanity in their manic phases, but it's not worth it.

*A relatively minor incident that puzzled me - how in hell did he not lose the defamation case brought against him for calling one of the Thai-cave-rescue organizers a "pedo guy"? Especially because the book added that Elon said more damning things about the guy, for whom there is no reason to believe it's true. I still don't know the answer, but I did get a clue: the plaintiff hired Lin Wood, a formerly credible lawyer who went off the deep end supporting Trump's 2020 lies in court and gave up his license to practice law in the face of likely disbarment. Hire good lawyers when you need them, and my prior would be to stay away from lawyers who try to be famous.

*Musk appears to have worked illegally in the US while here on a student visa, so yeah, another hypocrite in the Trump world. 

*I can see that he's operated DOGE in in the same way he made tremendous cuts at Twitter, disregarding the real-world consequences of his actions, and that it wasn't all that successful at Twitter either. 

No tremendous conclusion about all this on my side - maybe he can pull back to just being a really good engineer and try to actually parent all his kids, but that's up to him to decide.