Last week, we ran a sidebar survey asking if Electrek readers still believed in Elon Musk’s vision of a self-driving, robot-built future on Mars. After receiving more than 3,000 responses, here’s what you told us you think about the world’s first trillionaire.
The inspiration for this week’s survey was simple enough: as I was talking with someone this week who told me, “We’re going to Mars, I believe in Elon!” That surprised me – but what surprised me the most was that they were totally unaware of the many Elon-based political controversies, legal challenges, and missed deadlines that we often cover in these pages. That made me wonder, do you still believe in Elon?
As Musk closes out what is objectively the most financially successful week in human history, it seems only fitting that we check in on the results.
By the numbers
Keep in mind that these numbers represent a specific set of people only, and that the views of the highly educated and well-informed readers of Electrek who don’t have anything better to do than respond to my survey questions may not be representative of the views of the poorly informed public at large who probably don’t know even about my surveys.
That said, more than 67% of you responded that you either don’t trust Elon, or don’t trust Elon with extreme prejudice – and that prejudice showed in the comments.
(Musk) is single handedly responsible for the destruction of USAID through the Department of Government Efficiency. This single organization, through PEPFAR, helped to end the AIDS epidemic so prevalent in the 1990s and was instrumental in addressing world hunger. Not only did he shut it down, he didn’t even distribute the food and medicine that was already sitting in warehouses ready to be shipped. Estimates are that 600,000 people will have died from this one decision alone. Who cares about going to Mars when he can’t even take care of people here on Earth?
Jason wasn’t alone in painting that negative picture of the guy, with another commenter who goes by “JGOOD” going a step further, labeling Elon as “a con artist.”
Elon’s a con artist and everything he does is a long con. You need only look at his complete reversal on “saving” earth with EV’s to see that he sells self-preservation fantasies to people who are concerned about the future. He’s saving society by going to Mars—saving society by mining asteroids—saving society by building EV’s and solar roofs (although both now ignored). He makes the most money by selling ideas that are not currently possible. That’s why Tesla, which successfully built EV’s had to be recast not as a car manufacturer…because as a real tangible product it couldn’t be a fantasy anymore. Better to change it into an AI company that can still offer the fantasy of a better future. See the pattern? SpaceX will likely be the next company to be recast into something else that can only happen in the future.
The most interesting comments didn’t come from the people leaning in to the criticism of Musk or his politics, however, but from the several (!) commenters who challenged my assertion that, “we wouldn’t be talking about electric cars without (Musk).”
At this point, I truly believe that we’d have more electric vehicles on the streets and more chargers if there wasn’t an Elon and Tesla at all. There were many different companies, including most experienced car makers working on BEVs before Tesla. Battery tech was improved by laptop and phone manufacturers far more than by Tesla. The concentration of funds and attention helped Tesla sell more cars, but (IMHO) did not do much to help Non-Tesla BEV sales and that is what really counts – BEV sales, not Tesla sales. BEV chargers, not Tesla chargers. And in that direction Elon has always been the one slowing things down as much as he could.
Other commenters piled on. “Any other multi millionaire could have funded Tesla instead and we’d have the same outcome today,” wrote a commenter going by n. “Possibly better if the $$$ wasn’t attached to a psychopath with a god complex.”
That gives you a good look at the thinking of the 67+ % of responders who don’t trust Elon and maybe a few of the 17+ % who “didn’t know” about the guy, but for a look into the minds of the 13-ish % of responders still supporting the guy, perhaps it was a commenter going by D B who had the most entertaining (if not predictable) response.
There’s nothing special about Elon Musk. Anyone else could’ve commercialized EV’s, commercialized private space travel, built a global communications satellite network, and brought high speed internet to billions of people. I thought about doing those things, but I was too busy reading Electrek and drinking beer.
Elon’s claimed goal of “making the human species interplanetary to save it from extinction” is laughable. His true goal is to become obscenely rich for the sole objective of widening income disparity on Earth and rubbing it in our faces.
Elizabeth Warren has the right idea when she proposes confiscating Elon’s entire fortune to pay for 6 months of the Federal government’s deficit spending. And then confiscate the wealth of all billionaires to pay for another 6 months. At the end of the year, we’ll assess our progress and go from there.
Other, more credible commenters were able to keep their responses focused on my questions about Elon without invoking any of the other typical MAGA snowflake triggers and boogeymen that live rent-free in those people’s heads. The most thoughtful of which, I thought, came from Phil Brooks, who cited fellow PayPal Mafia member Peter Thiel’s comments about Musk:
Peter Thiel said if he ever wrote a book, his chapter about Elon would be titled “The Man Who Didn’t Understand Risk”. Once you realize that all of Elon’s genius, is really just a completely lack of concern over risk, he makes a lot of sense. Where he succeeded wasn’t because it was impossible, it was just that no one else would take the risk on to do it. This leads to a cycle where he believes his own hype and it all burns down… if he hadn’t gotten himself to be too big to fail first (he has, X being propped up by big banks shows that).
Others, meanwhile, stuck to the script I tried to prescribe in my wording of the survey questions, with Mark Horning writing that, “‘Elon Time’ is real. The vast majority of what he says he is going to do, he does. His timelines, on the other hand, are a complete and utter fantasy.
While still positive, Horning’s isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement – especially if you’re an investor or, increasingly, a customer. And, if there’s any conclusion to be drawn here at all, it’s that there seems to be a lot more doubt about Elon’s ability to deliver on his promises than there used to be.
Now that he’s worth a literal trillion dollars, however, he certainly can’t say he doesn’t have the means to deliver. From here on out, I’d argue that it’s a questions of whether or not he actually wants to deliver.
Let us know what you think, in the comments.
Original content from Electrek.
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