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As someone who’s been telling liberals for years that their green energy hero Elon Musk is a pathological liar and a charlatan, it’s been extremely annoying to hear conservatives now accuse critics of Musk of disliking him because he’s a free speech crusader or – lately – some kind of conservative.
My distrust of the Tesla Motors CEO has nothing to do with his views on censorship or his politics – if he even has any. Rather, it is his long track record of being pathologically full of shit.
Take the latest performance in the interminable Musk circus.
An editor at Insider said the publication contacted Musk on Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET for a comment on a story about him that it would be running.
The story tells of a $250,000 severance package paid to a female former flight attendant at SpaceX, where Musk is CEO. Her friend told Insider the woman was sexually harassed by Musk, who allegedly exposed himself to her. At one point Musk reportedly offered to buy the woman a horse because he was apparently having a totally normal one.
Musk replied to Insider by saying there’s “a lot more to this story” and asked the outlet for more time to respond. Insider agreed and extended its deadline. But instead of following up with Insider, Musk took to Twitter to announce he’d be voting Republican and predicted Democrats would engage in “dirty tricks” against him.
In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.
But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022
Skeptics of the man immediately sensed bad news was coming down the pike for Musk, who is a masterful manipulator of the media.
And so, the Insider story dropped the next day. Musk has denied the allegations. Many Tesla fans and conservatives have dismissed or downplayed the story and have taken Musk’s bait – hook, line, and sinker. Musk is being unfairly maligned, they say, just as the Oracle of Fremont/Austin/Mars prophesied.
Musk’s tweet was driven less by politics, and more by a desire to spin the narrative. When he tweeted he’ll be voting Republican, he wasn’t really making a political statement, but rather shaping the discourse. His ability to do this successfully is unparalleled thanks to an embarrassingly credulous media, not to mention his fanboys.
The billionaire famously eschews marketing and PR teams. However, the amount of glowing press Musk is able to generate thanks to media boosterism is enormous. He is widely seen as a visionary who constantly rolls out cutting-edge products.
For example, a Google search of “Musk unveils” and “Tesla unveils” returns a slew of headlines over the years announcing various achievements:
“Elon Musk Unveils ‘Tesla Bot,’” Insider (2021)
“Tesla Unveils ‘Robotaxi’ Plan for Self-Driving Ride Sharing Network for Next Year” – Electrek, 2019
“Tesla unveils its first electric pickup, the Cybertruck – CNBC, 2019.
“Tesla Unveils the New Roadster” – TechCrunch, 2017
“Elon Musk Unveils New Tesla Roadster and Semi Truck” – Inc., 2017
The problem with these and other such “unveilings” is that none of the aforementioned products actually exist. They remain vaporware. And while the articles themselves acknowledge this, collectively they continue the narrative about Musk being a genius visionary. In the case of the Cybertruck, the Semi, and the Roadster, customers have put down deposits on these “products” for years now, but have yet to receive them because, again, they do not exist. In some cases where customers have sought refunds, they’ve gotten a nightmare instead of their money back.
Then there’s Musk’s perennial claim that Tesla is this close to achieving full-self-driving vehicles, which experts say is years or maybe decades away, if ever. Indeed, the company even offers a product called Full Self-Driving, which in fact is not full self-driving, but apparently, it’s ok for Tesla to call it this because they capitalized the letters. (I highly recommended the new New York Times documentary called Crash Course, which explains how Musk’s FSD claims may have had deadly consequences.)
Alas, any news reports about how Musk missed yet another deadline or just made something up are dwarfed by the mountains of laudatory coverage he received when he first made his claims. Running a story about Musk “unveiling” a semi-truck is far splashier than say, reporting that after five years since its “unveiling,” there’s still no semi-truck.
One of Musk’s most unforgivable claims occurred at the start of the pandemic. After wildly underestimating the damage Covid-19 would inflict, he claimed Tesla would produce much-needed ventilators and distribute them to hospitals. As usual, he receive gobs of free press and was praised as the billionaire we need.
Ultimately, though, Tesla didn’t make any ventilators to help Covid patients. Instead, it sent sleep apnea devices called bilevel positive airway pressure machines – or BiPap machines – and slapped a Tesla logo on the boxes in which they were delivered.
Musk doesn’t just lie to burnish Tesla’s reputation, but his other companies as well. In 2017, he tweeted his Boring Company “received verbal govt approval… to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 minutes.” He later specified the federal government had given this approval.
Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017
Those words were retweeted more than 60,000 times despite the fact that “verbal govt approval” is not a thing, especially when it’s for a multibillion-dollar project that would require drilling two hundred miles of tunnel through multiple states and the nation’s capital. As a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration explained, the agency did not take action on Musk’s plan “because we haven’t gotten any indication from the company that they are interested in moving forward with the project.”
Also, note Musk’s ridiculously low estimate of the amount of time a trip between New York and Washington, D.C. would take: 29 minutes. It reeks of the age-old pricing trick of setting the cost of something at $9.99 for the explicit purpose of being able to claim it’s less than ten bucks.
I’m about 1,000 words in, and I’m not going to belabor the point further in this space. I haven’t even mentioned his infamous “funding secured” tweet about a go-private bid for Tesla for which he was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Tesla and Musk settled, and he stepped down as chairman). There’s also the time he baselessly called a critic a pedophile. Then there’s Neuralink, his brain chip company about which he has made wild claims that seem to have given false hope to many who suffer from brain-related injuries and illnesses. And don’t forget the weaselly manner in which he’s currently attempting to wriggle out of his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. On and on and on it goes. It’s all very exhausting.
Anyway, Elon Musk is full of shit and pathologically so.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
