I can not stand elon musk, I have found him to be a greedy, egotistical, narcissistic pig for years, well before he made his love for fascism and authoritarianism known. I also believe he is a racist. A South African by birth, he could have based his companies and established solar panel, battery and electric car manufacturing facilities in South Africa creating education and employment opportunities to his fellow citizens, boosting the economy of his home country as well as neighboring countries. Musk ran his mouth about rebuilding the shattered energy grid of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria years ago but nothing came of that either. He is only interested in making the rich richer and backing neo-nazi, fascist, authoritarian politicians who are working to destroy democracies and replace them with oligarchies. This from the Washington Post.....
Opinion Elon Musk is suffering from know-it-all syndrome
In the name of “free speech,” Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter and then squander three-quarters of its value turning it into X, a cesspool of far-right anger, grievance, misogyny, conspiracy theory, eighth-grade humor and Trump worship. In the name of “efficiency” — the task he wants to perform for Trump — Musk would be in a position to wreak similar havoc on our professional civil service, our best-in-the-world military, our majestic national parks and who knows what else.
Musk is an immigrant from South Africa who uses the megaphone of X to attack a daughter of immigrants — Vice President Kamala Harris — and to applaud Trump’s racism and xenophobia. Musk never hesitates to fuel the MAGA world’s raging transgender panic and has dismissed his own transgender daughter as “dead — killed by the woke mind virus.” He is the father of 12 children in all, and he proselytizes for procreation, saying on Saturday at a Trump rally that “I don’t think it’s cool to deliberately not have kids. It’s anti-human.”
Imagine how these views might be translated into policy if voters unwisely return Trump to the Oval Office.
Give Musk his due: He became the richest person in the world, worth more than $240 billion, by presiding over feats of engineering that can only be described as genius.
He revolutionized the auto industry, launching the electric-vehicle revolution and making Tesla the most valuable car company in the world, worth more than twice as much as second-place Toyota. SpaceX, the company he founded with the goal of sending humans to Mars, routinely does things that make you disbelieve your eyes, including, for example, a test flight earlier this month in which a booster rocket was guided back to its launchpad in a vertical position and then caught gently by giant mechanical arms.
And Starlink, a SpaceX subsidiary, has launched more than 7,000 small satellites into low Earth orbit, where they circle in a choreographed space ballet, forming a global communications network. No nation-state has anything like it.
Governments, especially ours, are already dependent on Musk’s technology, which has been aided by federal subsidies. SpaceX vehicles are NASA’s only reliable way to get crews and supplies to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX also has contracts to launch Defense Department satellites and other classified payloads. And Starlink has been lifesaving at moments of crisis, allowing Ukrainian armed forces to coordinate their defense against Russia’s invasion and temporarily replacing cellphone networks in the southern Appalachians that had been destroyed by Hurricane Helene.
At the same time, Musk’s companies are regulated by the federal government and have been the subject of numerous investigations. In self-driving mode, his Teslas do not yet drive safely. Regulators want to make sure that water discharged at his SpaceX launch site in Texas is not polluted. Musk promises that the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which he hopes to lead in a new Trump administration, will slash regulation. The conflicts of interest could not be more glaring.
Musk has long been criticized for his bombastic and erratic management style, but only in recent years did he become such a political loudmouth. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk’s rage at the Democratic Party began in 2021 when President Joe Biden launched his effort to shift the nation toward electric vehicles — and snubbed Tesla, by far the nation’s biggest maker of electric cars. Before one big White House event, the Journal said, Biden aides called Tesla executives to tell them Musk was not invited.
Why? Because Tesla’s factories are nonunion, and Musk has resisted workers’ efforts to organize. Faced with a choice between offending Musk and angering the powerful United Auto Workers union, Biden sided with labor. Musk reportedly was not pleased.
He might be suffering from know-it-all syndrome, a disease that seems to target billionaire tech bros. (Peter Thiel is another sufferer.) They prove themselves brilliant at electronic payments or rocket design or whatever, and conclude they are brilliant at everything, including politics and government.
They are wrong. Achieving goals in a democracy requires forging public consensus, and Musk doesn’t even know what that means. He is dangerous because of this ignorance. Vote for Harris — and wish Musk a safe journey to Mars.
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