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Elon Musk Knows How to Fight the Federal Government
Regulators despise him. Stakeholders love him. Fans of space exploration laud him. And innovators—well, it depends on whether you see electric cars as an inevitable part of the future, or an irresponsible and impractical development.
Very few people are indifferent to the workings of Elon Musk.
The main reason I want to celebrate Elon Musk is that he isn’t afraid of anyone, at least not in the federal government. He has repeatedly pushed back on, insulted, ignored, and refused to comply with federal regulators. Some people would say that he can afford to be incorrigible with his remarkable ventures, wealth, and success. On the other hand, there are many corporate CEOs who have caved into regulators who mainly seem to want to flex their muscles, exert stifling control, and make life difficult for risk-takers.
Musk has scuffled with the National Transportation Safety Board, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Security and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. We could debate whether these agencies have had legitimate concerns, but Musk is making a critical point: you’d better have good reasons for slowing him down or he will stonewall, criticize or ignore requests.
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Elon Musk sets an outstanding example for corporate America to stand up to totalitarian forces and not to cave into the federal government. He is an iconoclast; his politics are all over the place. But he is very clear on his overall mission: to break boundaries and push ahead with every bit of his being—and to hell with the powers-that-be.
As we watch corporations supposedly stand up for the American people, we choke at their duplicity, ignorance, and disingenuousness. They don’t even care for their shareholders anymore; their priorities are virtue signaling, and as long as the Left dictates their agenda, they will foolishly comply. As businessmen, these CEOs aren’t obligated to defend America, but they are naïve enough to believe that if they walk in lockstep with the Left, they will be safe from criticism and retribution.
They have no clue that when the Left has used and abused them, those CEOs will be chewed up and spit out.
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Elon Musk is also sending a message to everyday Americans, those of us who live ordinary lives and might think we have no power to make a difference.
We are lying to ourselves.
Each of us has an obligation—to our country, our communities, our families, and friends—to protest the lies and misrepresentations of the Left. We must support each other in taking a stand, for speaking out and refusing to bow to the arrogant and deceitful Left. More and more we are realizing that the consequences we might face if we speak out are inconsequential, compared to what we have to lose as a people.
May we have just an ounce of the boldness that Elon Musk demonstrates every day, and speak out against tyranny and oppression.
Published in Domestic Policy
And ironically, the only check on his activities is the United States of Behemoth.
From over at RushBabe49.com:
Electric cars are.
Next up in stores everywhere: Elon Musk cologne.
More like Hank Reardon, I think, but playing the government more than Hank did IIRC.
I don’t know everything that he’s done, but his struggles with the NTSB were over blown in the press.
I’m a big fan of Elon Musk, and I haven’t heard anyone saying anything bad about him except the guy about the caves. Something untold was happening in that case.
I would be too intimidated to be a friend of his. He is brilliant and a good man. I’ve not seen anything about him that isn’t a sign of integrity and genius. If I ever met him, I’d just stutter, I’m sure.
Here’s the thing about his electric cars: My personal theory is that everything he does is driven by his desire to populate Mars. You can’t use internal combustion engines on Mars, you need battery powered vehicles. The car industry made crappy battery powered vehicles, so he made better ones.
When he gets people to Mars, they will need to bore underground for minerals, water, and probably shelter, so he started his boring company.
He will need a way to communicate over vast distances on Mars, and communicate with Earth. He has the experience building a satellite fleet that he can deploy and track on Mars.
He will need fuel on Mars, so he’s developing his own fuel manufacturing here on Earth so he’ll be better prepared to make it on Mars.
He is very focused and he makes things happen.
That’s where the money is.
Even with all those things, not very many are being sold out here in Washington County, PA. In spite of the fact that the local Giant Eagle supermarket has dozens of electric charging stations in the parking lot, I’ve never seen a single car using any of them. (Who paid to put those in, I wonder?)
There seems to be only one Tesla on the road in this area. And considering there’s only one, it’s remarkable how often I come across it when I’m out on my rounds. I’ve concluded that either the guy is stalking me (highly unlikely), or he’s a Tesla employee whose job it is to drive around and gin up interest in the product, or perhaps he’s just showing off.
My guess is that it’s mostly “people of leisure” who can afford them, so whoever it is has plenty of free time to drive it around.
I’m reserving judgment on Elon Musk. Brilliant, innovative guy, but I’m not convinced he’s any better than, or perhaps even as good as, the rest of us in many important ways.
My only up-close (but still at considerable distance) encounter with Elon Musk came from the reporting of his efforts to rescue the Thai soccer team boys from the cave in July of 2018. I was in Thailand, in Chiang Rai (pretty much ground zero for the rescue operation) at the time, and it was a very big deal. Elon Musk and the SpaceX people showed up, having designed a child-size submarine to be used in the rescue which the people on the ground refused to consider, and which one of the advisors to the rescue team, Vernon Unsworth, made a rather impolitic comment about, something to the effect that Musk was a publicity hound who didn’t know the first thing about caving or the underwater twists and turns of this particular cave set, that the sub couldn’t possibly work and get around the corners, and that Elon Musk could stick his sub where the sun didn’t shine. Not kind, but perhaps Unsworth–a well respected Brit who’d lived in Thailand for decades and knew the caves like the back of his hand–was busy working on getting the kids out of the cave at the time–an exercise which was concluded successfully in terms of the children, but in which a Thai Navy SEAL lost his life.
Musk’s response was several highly-publicized Tweets calling Unsworth a “pedo guy,” which Musk later insisted, in court, doesn’t mean “pedophile,” but simply means “creepy old guy” with an underage partner. He eventually deleted the Tweet and apologized, but followed up with a letter to Buzzfeed, calling Unsworth a “child rapist” who had moved to Thailand and taken a child bride who was “about 12 years old at the time.”
Apparently, while he was on a roll, Musk hired a PI to find dirt on Unsworth, reportedly paying the man $50K. It was later reported that the PI is a convicted felon, and while doing a nifty advance to the rear, Musk claimed that the investigator “tricked him” with the stories about Unsworth.)
While Unsworth does appear to have left his wife in the UK in 2011, and while his current partner does appear to be a couple of decades younger than her Elderly Western Gentleman (this is Thailand, after all, LOL), he and she have been together for ten years, and it’s pretty well-established that she’s now in her early 40s. (Unsworth is 66 or so.) Musk’s actual wife spoke up in her husband’s defense at the time of Musk’s accusations, as did his Thai friend.
Unsworth sued Musk for defamation, but lost in a US court. Hopefully the MBE Unsworth was awarded for his part in the cave rescue, by the Queen in the New Years Honors List for 2019, took some of the sting out of his loss.
Not sure either of these guys is what I would call an upstanding citizen. It does appear to me that Musk is thin-skinned, has a hair-trigger temper, acts rashly, and has quite a nasty streak. I hope he’s able to restrain that on the business side of his interests.
On a brighter note, and showing a surprising amount of self-awareness (if he means it) in the aftermath, he subsequently called his letter to Buzzfeed “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done,” and said, of being set up and led around by the nose by his shady private investigator, “I’m a [expletive] idiot.” He also said he regretted his attacks on Unsworth.
Vernon Unsworth, however, will probably carry the “pedo guy” stain around with him for the rest of his life. Because what’s said in the Internet never really goes away, even if it’s completely discredited or disproven.
And that’s my Elon Musk story, one I know in such excruciating detail only because the whole “soccer boys” story was of such interest to me because I was right there on top of it. Oh, and because I was in a bar the evening the boys were rescued, talking to some guys who know Vernon Unsworth quite well, and who had quite a lot to say about the matter themselves.
And that’s why I’m reserving judgment on Elon Musk. Time will tell.
Perhaps much can be forgiven, if he actually gets us to Mars.
If it is your only car you suffer the range and charge-time problems but as a second car you can use it only for short in-town trips while your other car is available for hauling and the long haul.
In short, it doesn’t actually replace many cars at all – and the government helps you buy it.
Musk. By Musk.
Every tenth car, seemingly, in Austin is a Tesla. I think that has a lot to do with Austin’s tech culture, but the reason you don’t see them in Pennsylvania is likely because batteries perform really poorly in cold weather.
Your comments have been great, and reflect the complexity of the person known as Elon Musk. Your input confirms my thinking: I like his irreverence and his willingness to push the envelope. But there’s also no question that the man can be a jerk. Who knows? In person he may be charming, but I’m quite sure we wouldn’t be friends.
Again, my goal is to emphasize his fearlessness and his determination to follow his own path, regardless of all the pressures coming at him to comply and go along. Corporate heads, as well as all of us, have much to consider when pressures to “go along to get along” are exerted. And to remember if we push back, we may or may not pay a price; that is the big question–will there be a price to pay, and how serious will it be?
What does SEC stand for, again?
Everyone knows it’s the Southeastern Conference.
Very likely, although the really cold months are typically only January-March, and Pittsburgh has a thriving tech culture of its own. Diesel has never really caught on here for personal car use, possibly for the same reason. If the car was as hard to start in the middle of winter as the tractor sometimes is, I’d never get to the grocery store. I also live in a rural area, so there’s a lot of road between one place and the next, and so range, availability of charging stations, and speed to recharge and get back t0 driving are important.
But I suspect a fair amount of it also has to do with the fact that I don’t live in an area that embraces rapid change, unless we can actually see, taste, feel, or spend, the benefits of it, and right now, people around here just aren’t seeing them.
How safe were cars from the 70s by comparison to today’s cars? Not very.
Electric cars have a batter problem, which is getting better and better, and a power production problem, which as Percival says, depends on nuclear development to be sustainable. My opinion is that both will get there eventually.
Autonomous cars will get there, too.
As long as they’re not too “autonomous.” I’m less worried about my current vision of how a “driverless” car should work than I am about the next step once we “get there,” which is cars that really do, as the dictionary definition of the word states, “have the freedom to govern themselves or control their own affairs,” or “which act in accordance with their moral duty rather than their own desires.”
True. And that I, and millions like me, grew up with our parents driving us, un-carseated, and un-seatbelted, around in the front seats of 1950s vehicles and yet still survived into adulthood, frequently amazes me. I attribute the fact that we did so, to the humans behind the steering wheels.
I understand that one of the greatest challenges facing the vehicle developers was described a 2018 WSJ article which caught my eye (and about which I wrote a–lighthearted–post), thus:
Hm. Not quite there yet.
Attribute it to the fact that you got lucky. My daughter rolled her car a few months ago. If she had been driving some 1970s hunka, not wearing her seatbelt, she’d be dead. There are dozens of technological features that made that mid-2000s Honda a safer car that my uncle’s Cordoba. Yet he swore up and down that his BSM (Big Steel Monstronsity) was safer than them “rice rockets”.
Now, here is the flaw in my argument: the ways in which modern vehicles have been made safer for the last 2-3 decades all depend on the rules of physics. If I build a car body that crumples and redirects energy around the passenger instead of just throwing the passenger through the window, I can depend on those to work every time.
But software…that’s problematic. It’s true we can get purpose built software to do the same things over and over, but as you mentioned, it’s fairly complex to get a computer to distinguish between a cat and a pile of guacamole. That said…maybe I don’t need it to. Maybe what I really need it to do is follow the car in front of me at an appropriate distance and speed. When I was learning to drive, a cat darted out in front of me, my dad was in the passenger seat. I did the instinctive thing: I swerved and jammed on the brakes. Dad yelled at me: “Are you going to put everyone in the car at risk for a cat?!” He was right.
Autonomous in this context doesn’t fit the definition you used before. It simply means “doing some things automatically.” We already have cars that do some things automatically. They turn on the lights, they turn on the wipers, they shift gears. My truck switches to “eco” mode, which just means it shuts off half the cylinders given certain criteria, to save me some gas. I have a brake controller that senses deceleration and will apply brakes to whatever trailer I may be towing. New cars can park themselves, can stop when they detect a car in front. I rented a car that can sense the edge of the road and can do a pretty reasonable job of following the road. I let it drive itself for a few miles. It wouldn’t let me take my hands off the wheel without barking at me. But if I kept a finger on the wheel, it just drove itself down the road. It would match speed to the car in front, and when that car moved over, speed back up to the speed I’d set.
Yeah, there are things still to work out. Including applicability. But we are getting there.
I live in the center of this country. I see Teslas everywhere. AAMOF, it amazes me how many I see. I haven’t priced one, but it’s my assumption that they run in the high five to low six figures (and I’,m only counting the left side of the decimal point). Also, it’s my impression that the resale or trade-in value is unremarkable at best. However, they are in nearly all cases, really good-looking vehicles, both inside and outside. Has anyone driven one?
It all sounds nice until you realize that this gives the government (or the car company) the power to control where you go and how you get there. There was a time when I would have thought such a concern was unreasonable, but what we have learned from technology abuse the past 30 years is that if there is any way to abuse people’s rights or privacy, the government will do it.
I admire the technology, and it might be great for a trucking company, but I will never own a car that can be controlled by someone else.
The Model S and the Model 3 are decent looking. X and Y, which are the the coupe model of the S and 3, both look like a bug.
The S starts out at $75k
The 3 starts at $35k
The X starts at $80k
The Y starts at $47k
KBB says the resale value of the X is just under 50% of the purchase price after 5 years. That’s not bad.
I haven’t driven one. Every so often I think I want one, then I realize that I’d rather have a boat.
I concede that the bold part of your comment is possible. I don’t concede that it is necessarily true. And I submit that the market will drive privacy.
I also think that the liability for the software company and the manufacturer who build the autonomous capability will be astronomical. Car companies aren’t usually liable for drivers that have accidents, but if they program the driving software, they become liable for every accident. I suspect that burden will be too much using current tort practice and they’ll need to have a landmark lawsuit decided by someone like Judge Posner who will make a ruling filled with all sorts of faux economic jargon as though he knows what he’s talking about, that will absolve the company for any but the most negligent software failures.
I don’t think we have much to disagree about WRT the relative safety features built into today’s cars (in fact, I think I implied in an earlier comment that I thought children being driven, seatbeltless and carseatless, as we all were in the front of 1950s vehicles, was inherently quite dangerous).
I was speaking of the overwhelming majority of cars, drivers and passengers over decades which have not been involved in accidents, and saying that I believe, generally speaking, that the human drivers, and the decisions that they made, had something to do with that. I don’t believe the fact I survived is down to “luck,” and I wasn’t talking about those cars which have been involved in accidents and the relative chances of surviving same based on the year in which the car was built. I’m very glad your daughter was in a newer model car with adequate safety features.