The technologies of Elon Musk’s empire are creeping across the Earth.
They’re shooting up into lower orbit and speeding through American highway systems.
Through these cars, rockets, and by connecting his corporate work to environmentalism, Musk
has molded his image as a modern-day Iron Man, seeking to save the world from itself
by innovating boldly into a better future.
But as we’ll soon see, this is far from the case.
The story of Elon Musk is vastly different from the one drummed up by his fanatical fan-base.
His future is full of exploitation, dreams of eco-modernism, and ego-driven pursuits.
This is the story of Elon Musk, and why he will never be the answer to the climate crisis
that so many want him to be.
Elon Musk Has Always Been Rich Like many ultra-wealthy people, Musk attempts
to paint himself as an entrepreneur who has built his massive pile of wealth from nothing,
but in reality, he has always been rich.
From his dad’s acquisition of an emerald mine in Zambia, to his mom’s familial wealth,
Musk grew up with immense financial support from his parents.
Indeed, during his years at University of Pennsylvania, Musk had enough money to buy
a 10 room frat house which he then converted into a nightclub.
And his first company, Zip2 was partially financed by Musk’s dad, while his mom bought
Musk groceries and gave him $10,000 to keep his lights on so he could focus on building
the company.
And as recognition of Musk has grown, so too has his persona, especially on twitter.
From manipulating stock prices by tweeting out a 420 joke, to lashing out at one of the
divers trying to rescue a group of young kids trapped in a cave, to his transphobic comment
that pronouns suck, Elon Musk is a destructive internet personality.
For lack of a better term he’s a troll.
But unlike most internet trolls, Musk holds immense power.
His “jokes” can quite literally crash cryptocurrencies.
So, while some of what he says may seem trivial, it is important to keep in mind that Musk’s
business model involves mythologizing himself as a capitalist maverick, unafraid of speaking
his mind.
Someone who isn’t afraid of breaking a few bones to build a bold vision of the future.
But as we’ll soon see, while the imagery and promise of Musk’s future seems exciting,
the path to get there is riddled with capitalist exploitation and extraction.
Elon Musk Didn’t Create Tesla Elon Musk is an eco-modernist.
A philosophy based on principles of techno-optimism and decoupling which argues that more efficient
and innovative technologies will allow us to separate our carbon footprints from our
actions.
Essentially, eco-modernists envision a future where the status quo continues on by way of
clean, green technological innovation.
And this future is best exemplified in Tesla.
A company whose mission is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,”
through their electrified products.
There’s no disputing that the electric car manufacturing company has partly succeeded
in this mission by shaking the auto industry to its core.
In a little over a decade Tesla has become a behemoth in the EV space, with a cult following
akin to Apple.
But much like Musk’s revisionist myths of his childhood or even claiming that he’s
a socialist, the story of Tesla is decidedly different from the green car revolutionary
that Musk paints it out to be.
For starters, Musk did not create Tesla, these two guys did.
Only after the company had been around for a year did Musk jump in to invest his Paypal
money, and with that money he secured a board seat and then later in 2008 ousted the original
founders of Tesla from leadership, appointed himself CEO, and retroactively named himself
co-founder.
And once Musk assumed the reins of Tesla things quickly changed, and often not for the better.
The Tyranny of Elon Musk After 2008, Tesla did grow substantially as
a company, but it was always at the whims of Elon.
In part because of their relentless fixation on profits and production, Tesla has had a
dismal record of injuries and worker exploitation in their factories.
Multiple investigative reports from Reveal outline Tesla’s transgressions, explaining
that in both 2015 and 2016 the serious injury rate at Tesla’s factories was nearly double
that of the auto industry as a whole.
Journalists interviewed Tesla workers who suffered debilitating headaches from inhaling
toxic glue, and one employee “fainted and hit their head on the floor” because the
factory conditions were uncomfortably hot.
In the years since 2016, Tesla has reported fewer injuries, but Reveal refutes these claims.
After multiple interviews with ex-Tesla medical staff, reporters found that the company not
only keeps injuries off the books to improve its safety record, but turns away or severely
under-treats worker injuries in company clinics so laborers can quickly return to the assembly
line.
This kind of exploitation continued into the pandemic, with Musk demanding factory workers
report to work during the California stay-at-home order.
In many cases, this relentless drive to produce more electric cars is induced by a fear of
Elon Musk.
Tesla’s former environmental compliance manager, Susan Rigmaiden, laments that “If
someone said, ‘Elon doesn’t like something,’ you were concerned because you could lose
your job.”
Which means that Tesla factories are held hostage to the whims of Musk.
His distaste for the color yellow, for example, led to less safety lines and signs than usual
on the factory floors.
And Tesla workplaces are actively discouraged from unionizing, hamstringing labor power
and allowing Tesla to get away with even more exploitation.
Musk rules over Tesla with an oppressive hand so much so that one former Tesla executive
said that “everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon.”
But, this is just one element of Tesla and Elon’s pursuits.
If we zoom out to a global scale, the cost of Elon Musk’s eco-modernism has carved
even bigger scars into people and planet.
Elon Musk’s Green Imperialism As the world inevitably transitions away from
fossil fuels our thirst for oil will merely be supplanted with a thirst for materials
like lithium if we continue with business-as-usual production.
A trend we’re seeing first hand with Tesla.
The electric car doesn’t spawn out of nowhere, it’s forged out of hundreds of precious
metals extracted usually from the Global South in areas like Bolivia or the Democratic Republic
of Congo.
And Tesla, with it’s need for large amounts of lithium and precious metals, is at the
forefront of this resource extraction.
In 2019, Tesla was sued by 14 Congolese families for the deaths of their children in mines
that supplied cobalt to the electric car maker.
In the same year, a U.S. backed coup in Bolivia ousted Evo Morales who had plans to nationalize
their lithium industry and make batteries for themselves.
A coup which mirrored many of the other U.S. imperialist ploys for resource control in
South America.
In the wake of the coup, Musk tweeted, “We’ll coup whoever we want, deal with it!”
While most likely a twisted joke, it's hard not to take the statement seriously when Tesla’s
success requires an abundance of easily exploitable lithium.
In short, when Elon Musk and other eco-modernists envision green companies like Tesla stopping
climate change with clean technologies, the reality is much messier.
Technologies have material consequences.
Tesla cars, for example, require cheap and exploitative resource extraction industries
forced upon the Global South by the North.
An eco-modernist world, while greener, still leans heavily on the unjust workings of our
current capitalist, imperialist global economy.
Which begs the question, if workers are getting injured and the whole country’s economies
exploited, who is this better future for?
A Muskian Future For The Few, Climate Chaos For The Many
When Elon Musk and Tesla seek to build a more sustainable future, who is that future for?
Certainly not for the factory workers, nor those laboring in the lithium and cobalt mines
of the majority world.
Tesla, and ultimately Elon reveal the inherently unethical, and untenable eco-modernist approach
to solving the climate crisis.
They create fancy electric cars and gadgets for the few who can afford it, while the rest
toil to make that gilded reality possible.
The cybertruck, Las Vegas loop and SpaceX all fall neatly in this vision of this eco-modernist
world built on so-called capitalist innovation.
But as fellow YouTuber Tom Nicholas points out, the bulletproof windows of the cybertruck,
the anti-public transit loop systems, and the Mars colonies that Elon Musk dreams up
all work to sharpen class divides.
As it stands, Tesla’s prices are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of the world.
Its brand is almost synonymous now with the eco-conscious upper class.
So, in a twisted sense Musk is a savior.
His ideas will save his cult following of primarily white american upper class men from
the worst of climate change, but it will be at the expense of the rest of the world.
Ultimately, Elon Musk reveals the perils of building a green future on the promise of
imperialist capitalist technology.
Musk’s ecomodernist future requires exploitation of workers, resources, and countries just
to begin addressing the climate crisis.
Musk is just one, albeit prominent, figurehead of this new skin of capitalism.
A capitalism that, under the guise of climate action, maintains systems of oppression and
exploitation.
To build a future that’s actually ethical and environmentally viable, we need more than
just good technology, we need to build people power.
This can start with unionizing Tesla factories or building movements around better mining
conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but it must build into a greater movement
that rejects and dismantles the false idea that capitalism will save us from climate
change.
To be successful, our future must foreground indigenous land sovereignty, caretaking economies
and a demilitarized, decentralized, and carbon free world.
Right about now you might be thinking, what about SpaceX?
What about Starlink or even more about the Boring Company?
Well Musk’s pursuits outside of Tesla deserve a video unto themselves, which is why I wrote
a little bonus section about Musk’s obsession with climate apocalypse technologies.
I’ve uploaded that section as an extended edition of this video on the streaming platform
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