Elon Musk is a South African-Canadian-American
businessman and billionaire, well known for his eccentric mannerism,
grand visions of the future, and unique way of thinking atypical for ultra wealthy businessmen.
Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company, SpaceX, the space freighter company,
Boring Co., the underground logistics company, and Neuralink, the cyborg research company.
All of these avenues have generated Elon Musk a considerable amount of wealth. While total
wealth is hard to calculate, most estimates give him a net worth of roughly 93 billion dollars,
making Musk somewhere between the fifth and second richest man in the world...
and the world’s wealthiest African-American.
Some of Elon Musk’s most well known achievements include inventing reusable self-landing rockets,
sending a car into space, owning one of the most successful electric car startups,
co-founding the most used cash transfer app, obtaining a goth girlfriend,
naming his child a pizza hut discount code, and pioneering high speed vactrains.
It’s no surprise that this activity has garnered Musk a wide amount of
praise and support from the media and the public. Mostly redditors though.
However, his achievements may not be all that they
seem and while magic rockets or putting people on Mars is certainly quite cool,
Elon Musk is possibly the most overrated person in the world right now. Here’s why.
The bulk of Elon Musk’s current wealth comes from Tesla, the electric car company. He didn’t
actually found the company, he was just one of the early investors who then bought out the
founders and gave himself the title of founder. But that’s fine, it’s helping us transition to
electric cars and fight climate change right? Wrong. Not only have they consistently been
wrong about when they’re going to make a car that anyone other than the super rich can
afford, Tesla has also been caught engaging in 19 violations of California Environmental Laws.
Most models sell for nearly 80,000 dollars, but the cars themselves are just...shoddy.
90% of Tesla cars shipped in 2017 had some sort of issue needing to be fixed,
whether it was a leaky battery that Tesla knew would cause dangerous problems as far
back as 2012, or parts of the cooling system cobbled together with wood from Home Depot,
or being unable to log into your car because of a coding error, thus preventing you from driving it.
You can bypass the autopilot safety feature by wedging an orange or other round fruit
into the steering wheel, leading to hilarious videos like this one where
drivers are asleep at 70 miles per hour on the fucking highway.
The autopilot also disengages the moment before the car hits anything
so Tesla can always claim the driver was in control whenever the car crashes. Huh.
Is Elon Musk and his team working towards fixing these issues?
The man works up to 80 hours a week sometimes. The answer is no,
his top priority is getting the onboard computer to play Minecraft and Monty Python videos.
In 2016 Elon Musk founded the Boring Company, after being stuck in traffic one day and wishing
there was a better, faster alternative to get from A to B. The system Musk’s team devised was
an underground tunnel system where users pay to get into a small car that moves along a fixed
rail. Elon Musk called it “safe, earthquake proof tunnels under cities to solve traffic”.
If you’re getting Deja Vu it’s because Elon Musk has just claimed to have invented
the subway. An extremely inefficient subway, solely for Tesla users.
In February 2019, the mayor of San Jose gave the Boring Company 800 million dollars to dig
a tunnel connecting San Jose airport with San Jose train station. This distance is 8 minutes by car
and roughly half an hour by public transport. Now I’m no economy expert but I would like to
think you could improve that half an hour bus ride with less than 800 million dollars.
And that’s the perfect summary of Musk’s business strategy.
Although he’s taking climate change more seriously than other corporate leaders,
he just wants to ensure he is the only one who can profit from the solution. And that
solution just so happens to be everyone buying his car brand and paying to ride in his tunnels.
But at least there’s SpaceX right? Admittedly, some of SpaceX’s stuff is rather cool and I
commend the thousands of engineers who make it work. But other stuff is complete nonsense.
Starting in 2018, SpaceX began launching the Starlink programme, a fleet of thousands of
satellites that orbit the earth providing internet connectivity to people on the earth below.
This doesn’t sound so bad, what’s the problem? Uh, it’s going to ruin terrestrial astronomy.
That’s right; these satellites are made of shiny metal coating which means if you try to
take a picture of space with them in the way, your picture will be covered in horrible white streaks.
In response to this criticism from the astronomer community,
Musk promised that future satellites would be covered in a coat of paint, reducing reflectivity
by 55%, and in the meantime astronomers are going to have to work around the problem.
Except these satellites are controlled by artificial intelligence and change
course when they feel like it, so you can’t really predict where they’ll be
at the time you want to take your pictures. Elon Musk also confirmed that when SpaceX
finally puts humans on Mars, he will be ignoring earth laws and implementing his own laws across
the entire planet. I can’t see anything that could possibly go wrong with that.
Don’t even get me started on the Neuralink stuff. Letting Elon Musk
connect your brain to the internet can only go wrong. He’ll probably replace
all your childhood memories with the boot ROM of a microwave as a joke.
So far the only thing Elon Musk has ever invented that has ever been a tangible improvement to the
lives of everyday people is Paypal. But an Elon Musk defender,
and Elon Musk himself, might say he has provided high-paying jobs to thousands of workers to help
feed their families, and you’re probably right, but this also makes for a good Segway into...
Alright this stuff is pretty boring so he’s just a big long list of labor rights violations
committed in any of Elon Musk’s companies. He made workers take mandatory overtime.
He failed to provide adequate bathroom and lunch breaks.
He encourages workers to work at unsafe machinery, leading to high rates of injury.
He threatened to take away employee stock options if employees unionized, which is...illegal.
He fired an employee one day before he could obtain stock options.
He denied injured workers medical care and forced them to take trips to the hospital
in a taxi instead of calling an ambulance, because he would have to pay for the ambulance.
He didn’t provide the required 60-day notice for laying off workers.
Tesla factories don’t have caution markers because Elon allegedly doesn’t like the colour yellow
He overworks engineers up to 12 hours per day. And Tesla Factories have three times more OSHA
violations as the next ten largest car factories in the US combined.
You get the picture Elon Musk treats his workers like crap.
Elon Musk’s personality is a mix between a 19th century evil railroad baron and that period of the
internet when we said things like “Take my upvote, You just won the internet today my good sir”.
If you follow Elon Musk on Twitter you’ll find very soon that his method of tweeting is
uncommon for many billionaires. In between cool pictures of rockets and updates on Tesla cars,
you’ll occasionally find stolen memes, anime reviews,
and unfunny phrases he thought were hilarious while probably smoking weed.
This has earned Musk praise for being, ironically, very “down to earth” because despite being a
billionaire he still enjoys pastimes of the plebs, like memes, anime, and marijuana.
To further cement his status among the 14-24 white guy demographic, at one point he appeared
on the Pewdiepie series “Meme Review” and got high on the Joe Rogan Experience.
But here’s the thing. All Musk does is take jokes from the dankmemes subreddit,
the most unfunny page on the internet, and funnel it directly onto his twitter account,
and is considered a comedic genius. He tried to de-list Tesla from the
Stock Market at exactly 420 dollars because it’s the weed number. He released a rap song
called “R.I.P. Harambe”...in 2019. He bought “Stankmemes.com” just to put a picture of a
meme on it. Changing his profile picture to anime cat girls. Selling branded shorts for
69 dollars 42 cents. Changing the price of Tesla’s flagship product to 69 thousand 420 dollars. The
man who is sending us to Mars is a nearly 50 year old man who still thinks the numbers 69
and 420 are funny. Things I stopped finding funny when I turned 16 years old.
Elon Musk’s “philanthropy” usually falls into a
similar pattern. Step 1: Pledge to help.
Step 2: Enjoy the free publicity and media praise. Step 3: Don’t actually do anything to help.
Case in point: In 2018, twelve junior football team members and their coach became trapped in
a cave in Northern Thailand while trying to escape torrential rain and flooding. Our philanthropist
pal Elon Musk was willing to help out, and instructed his top scientists to work on a
child-sized submarine to transport the children through the flooded tunnels and to safety.
And, while he probably was doing this for good publicity,
the idea isn’t that bad. Unfortunately, the head diver, Mr Vernon Unsworth, saw right through this
and said the submarine wouldn’t help, and that Mr Musk should shove it up his ass.
Elon Musk responded by calling the man...a
pedophile. Mr Unsworth would later sue Musk for defamation.
In fairness if I was in an online argument with a middle aged British man living in Thailand
I have called him a pedophile in under 10 seconds and I imagine most of you would too,
but at least I haven’t been pictured with child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Many people wondered what made Elon Musk, the man who once said very profound things about
free will and destiny and the nature of existence, suddenly start calling people
childish names. Maybe it’s got something to do with Musk admitting on twitter that he mixes
sleeping drugs and alcohol, which can lead to brain damage, but who knows it could be anything.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Elon Musk peddled lies about the nature of the virus,
predicting that it would be over by April 2020.
[HAHAHAHAHA] When that didn’t happen,
Elon Musk became a “lockdown skeptic”, pretending that shelter in place mandates wouldn’t slow the
spread of the virus and the blow it would do to the economy would outweigh the benefits.
What does Elon Musk have to gain from this? Because Texas, where Tesla is constructing a new
factory, had Shelter In Place orders in effect. That means all non-essential work had to be
halted...including construction. Just to be clear, Elon Musk encouraged people to ignore health
experts and potentially contract a deadly disease just so his factory could be built quicker.
As the virus raged on, Elon Musk tried again to repair his broken public perception
by modifying Tesla’s New York factory to stop making cars and start making respirators,
to allow Coronavirus patients to breathe more easily. Elon Musk had actually just bought
shipments of the wrong type of ventilator and then stamped the Tesla logo onto them.
Then he got coronavirus.
Elon Musk is often dubbed as a Real Life Tony Stark
because Elon Musk is an eccentric rich tech “genius” just like Iron Man but I disagree.
At one point Tony Stark actually stopped being a smarmy asshole and died a hero.
No, Elon Musk is more like Winston Churchill. A deeply flawed,
egotistic maniac who isn’t even that good at leadership, who despite this goes on to be
remembered by history as a hero because of his defining achievement. So while you know
Elon Musk as the billionaire man child who plays with space toys and tweets rubbish,
future generations of Martians will look up to Elon Musk statues in the city of Elongrad
and thank him for founding the first Martian colony and being the first Emperor of Mars.