Elon Musk is not understood

Elon Musk is a divisive character. My intent here, as always, is to add some nuance and signal to a noisy, complex and/or obscure subject. Whatever your views on Elon, I feel that it is a worthy goal to move the conversation towards more meaningful engagement, hopefully without painting too large a target on my back. The problem is that 99% of the critique out there is not well-intentioned and it’s not accurate, which means that most people simply lack the context they need to understand what Elon is doing and why. This is a problem, because Elon is a relatively powerful and visionary leader, and his companies are increasingly important vehicles for the delivery of transformative technology.

I make no secret of my admiration for the achievements of Elon’s companies. I first met Elon in about 2011, and found him thoughtful and interesting, though of course I know many people who’ve been on the receiving end of quite severe criticism (as well as praise) in the context of their work. Nevertheless I was sufficiently impressed by what I saw SpaceX doing in 2011 (it had only launched Falcon 9 twice at that point – it launched Falcon twice the evening I wrote this post!) that I diverted a meaningful fraction of my meager grad student savings into Tesla stock, which have appreciated approximately 120x since then, enabling me to fund the process of getting a Green Card and ultimately becoming a US citizen.

And yes, I’m self-aware enough to know of this meme. I’m a weird nerd. Surprise. Although in this case, I’m also a red head writing about the process of generating less invalid criticism, so perhaps I’m just shooting myself in the foot – which is apt given the subject matter.

Today, my family drives an old Model 3 and a newer Model Y, and find them to be incredible cars. Two and a half years ago we used the 3 to tow a caravan across the US and back, an extremely ambitious and challenging adventure with two tiny children, and the car performed flawlessly.

The achievements of Tesla are even more incredible when contrasted with the continued struggle of legacy automotive manufacturers to ship a compelling electric car, or even stay out of bankruptcy. At the very end of 2023, it is telling that no other company has yet managed to ship a profitable car with better performance than the very first 2012 Tesla Model S. There are now several non-Tesla electric cars of comparable performance that are sold at a steep loss and/or at achingly low volumes.

On the SpaceX side, I am incredibly impressed that the Starlink vision I wrote about four years ago is already a reality, and I’m writing this post using it. A few of my colleagues have remarked at how forward thinking the post was, but it’s easy to do a few calculations and write 5000 words. The SpaceX team actually designed, built, and shipped the damn product. More than 5000 functioning internet satellites! Does anyone really understand how hard this is to do? No-one else has even dared to try, let alone succeeded.

Despite these achievements, Elon is clearly far from perfect, especially by his own admission, and we would be richer as a culture and a civilization if we were better able to engage in meaningful discussion and legitimate criticism of his numerous missteps and learning experiences. And yet, in nearly every interview he does, the ostensibly professional interviewers appear not to have done their homework, appear not to understand what they are dealing with, and end up wasting an hour of Elon’s time, an hour of their time, and an hour of our time.

In the case of the infamous BBC interview, the interviewer asked (paraphrasing) “Why have you unbanned hatespeech?” and when Elon responded “what’s hate speech? Define it. Give me a single example of it occurring on the platform,” the interviewer had no idea. This is basic stuff. It has a definition. There is an interesting argument to be had about its effects and the extent to which it should be “balanced” with freedom of speech, particularly within a forum operated by a private company. I would be interested to learn more about Elon’s views on the matter. Subsequent clarifications seem to suggest that he views doxxing and inciting violence as crossing the line, which is reasonable, but not very insightful. It certainly doesn’t expose any of the deeper philosophical exploration behind the fundamental importance of freedom of thought, expression, and association to liberty that informed the First Amendment, and which apparently is barely taught in school! Fortunately Elon was able to drive much of the interview so we did get a decent exploration of other issues despite the awkward failure of the interviewer.

Contrast this to Tim Dodd’s exemplar space-related interviews, and you can see a professional who has taken extensive pains to be as well-informed as they possibly can be, has a list of curated questions, and keeps Elon on topic to deliver rare insights into what and how he thinks about problems. More of this, please!

If you are going to interview Elon Musk, it is essential you do your homework and practice! Presidential candidates do extensive practice for debates, because they are professionals who, like musicians and sportspeople, must enter the field confident that they are unable to make a mistake. No-one has ever been able to wing a good interview with Elon.

I’m going to use John Oliver’s recent segment on Elon Musk for two reasons. First, it’s a reasonably comprehensive list of somewhat tired anti-Elon canards. And second, it’s a perfect example of incredibly superficial reporting on important deeper issues that are in desperate need of exploration and constructive criticism, both about Elon and in general. It’s not exactly a secret that Elon and his companies get a lot of bad press, perhaps because they threaten to disrupt comfortable incumbent power structures. I even wrote about Tesla’s unfair treatment back in 2019. I want to emphasize that this show on Last Week Tonight is not being singled out because I think it is particularly bad – if anything, it’s more accessible and less objectionable than most of the stuff out there – but mostly because it covers a lot of ground.

Before I dive into the details, I’ll write a few paragraphs of what meager insight I can offer, based on my necessarily limited outsider perspective.

One of the reasons Elon is such a enigma is that he is not very relatable to ordinary people, at least beyond superficial meme humor. He thinks in physics and math and is pre-occupied with obscure, illegible technical and managerial problems. For most of these problems, he is the first person in history to ever encounter them. He doesn’t act like other rich and powerful people, who mostly live carefully anonymous and private lives, or at least buy fast cars, yachts, palaces, and other status symbols. He doesn’t run a personal PR agency to burnish his image or appear to care that much about projecting a folksy persona. If you or I cashed out our startup at the age of 31 with $180m (about $310m in 2024 $$) free and clear, what are the odds you would find us 22 years later still grinding 100 hours a week on a bunch of problems that have proven impossible for much larger, less dramatic, better resourced, and supposedly smarter organizations? Zero. His drive and success in moving from software into multiple hard hardware problems is unprecedented. The list of hardware entrepreneurs who have ever built something comparable to even one of Elon’s business is very short indeed – Henry Kaiser sometimes comes to mind.

Elon is cut from different cloth. He looks and speaks like a middle-aged nerd, but his pain- and risk-tolerance is, according to both biographers, off the charts. He grew up in apartheid South Africa, which is so culturally foreign to most of the rest of us it makes the Mormons and their traditional work ethic and focus on irrigation/terraforming look quaint. By multiple accounts he had a very difficult home life and was bullied so severely across several schools that he was hospitalized more than once.

Yet somehow the commentariat thinks that if they can just dunk on him hard enough he’ll give up and go home. They do not understand. Elon never gives up. His rocket company was dunked on, in front of Congress, by Neil Armstrong! No-one has ever or will ever be dunked on that hard, from now until the end of time. Neil Armstrong was misinformed and I regret he has not lived to see SpaceX’s later successes. A few days ago the Falcon Heavy launched the X-37. SpaceX won the HLS contract to land the next US astronauts back on the Moon, and this time with 100 T or so of additional cargo, in a fully reusable Starship designed to transport a million people to Mars.

Let’s go to John Oliver on Last Week Tonight and dig into the details.

This is our final show of the year, so we thought we’d focus on someone who’s had a pretty big 12 months — Elon Musk. A man who can pull off pretty much any bad-guy-in-a-movie look. There’s Lex Luthor posing for the cover of Metropolis maniacs monthly, there’s “why no Mr. Bond, I and my child bride expect you to die,” there’s “I just bought your media company and I’m about to strip you for parts,” there’s “space’s first racist sheriff,” and finally, the “less-fuckable reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic.” Truly, the man has range.

Transcript

Let’s start with a joke about the man’s appearance – remembering that his skull was fractured by attackers in his teen years.

Elon’s made news all year, from test-launching the most powerful rocket ever built, to just this week, having to recall 2 million cars due to safety concerns.

This “recall”, reported breathlessly on the front page of newspapers all around the world, required a routine over-the-air software update. Shocking! Teslas were and still are the safest cars ever built. Meanwhile Daihatsu, a subsidiary of Toyota, admitted it faked safety data for 30 years. VW still requires customers to bring their car to the dealership to update the software, and Ford’s OTA updates brick the car. VW has paid $33b and counting in fines for cheating emissions testing and just this week Cummins has joined them, installing defeat devices to fool emissions testing and shipping millions of cars that pollute the air we breathe and kill our children.

He even challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, to which Zuckerberg replied “send me location,” and may I suggest to both of them: interior volcano. And then, of course, there’s Twitter. He now calls it “X,” but the rest of us still call it “Twitter.” He officially acquired it 12 months ago, and since then, it’s been one fiasco after another — with the most recent coming when he tweeted his agreement with this antisemitic post, calling the great replacement theory “the actual truth.” That caused many big advertisers to flee.

Here John repeats a popular talking point (“Elon hates Jews”), but the “great replacement theory” is a ludicrous far-right conspiracy actively promulgated by Trump and his surrogates, and while Elon’s reply managed to get him in the middle of a simmering controversy between certain factions of the American Jewish community and other progressives, it didn’t read to me as antisemitic. Feel free to read both links and reach your own conclusions. Sam Teller, Elon’s former PA, tweeted that he’d never seen a trace of antisemitism in five years of working closely with him. Then Elon traveled to Israel twice (once before and once after the Oct 7 attacks, which certainly re-calibrated my sense of the nature of state-sponsored antisemitism) meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both times.

And then, in the midst of denying any antisemitic intent, Elon decided to taunt the sponsors who had left.

This is a reference the Sorkin interview, in which Oliver predictably soundbites the fun part with Elon saying GFY to Disney CEO Bob Iger, another famously ornery old rich white guy, in the context of a discussion as to whether advertisers would be able to financially coerce Elon towards compromising his commitment to free speech on X. Whose side are we on here, John? You do know your show would probably be illegal in your native Britain, which lacks a constitutional protection for free speech and press, right?

The real issue here is that, with the exception of X which has open sourced its recommender algorithm, our social network feeds are curated by organizations who have a decade of experience manipulating public opinion, sometimes in favor of inducing anxiety so people buy advertised products, sometimes in favor of swinging an election, and sometimes in favor of pushing CCP propaganda.

And look, I could talk for hours about what Elon’s done to Twitter — many in the media do, because it’s where they spend most of their workdays.

This is uncomfortably true, and it’s not a good thing. The news does occur sooner on X, but we need journalists out in the world reporting on stuff, not just punting hot takes around their bubbles.

But what Musk’s time at Twitter has definitely changed is how many people perceive him. Because for a long time, he was seen as a one-of-a-kind genius who’d save humanity, and described as a “real-life Iron Man.” It’s a comparison that he even welcomed, cameoing as himself in Iron Man 2.

Elon let Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau use SpaceX as a set during the production of Iron Man, the first and by far the scrappiest of the Marvel Universe films. When schedule allowed, he invited Elon to cameo in Iron Man 2 as a courtesy – far from the most destructive involvement of tech billionaires in Hollywood! This seems petty but Oliver is insinuating here and in several other bits that Elon has a messiah complex – which is strongly at odds with his frequent public recognition of his fallibility.

Still, for a long time, Elon’s public image was that of a maverick celebrity inventor who cut through red tape, revolutionized space travel, and made electric cars cool. And he does do a lot. In addition to Twitter, he’s the head of five other companies: Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring company, Neuralink, and X.ai.

This is as good a time as any to point out that Twitter is by far the easiest and simplest of his companies. It’s also not unusual for wealthy people to buy media. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for just $250m in 2013. Why? Because freedom isn’t free. If you have the misfortune of running a company as prominent as Amazon or Tesla, the major extrinsic source of risk is “regulatory attention” in one of several guises. If you control a newspaper, you have potential recourse.

Despite joking about starting a non-partisan fact checking website called “pravda” for years, he is fairly late to the game of buying into media. For many years, he dismissed it as a “nice to have” that would be too distracting, but during COVID realized that large numbers of regulators and officials had been waiting for any excuse to deal him personal harm, and was forced to accept this Faustian bargain.

Tesla is electrifying transport and has now vertically integrated to the point that they are refining their own lithium for batteries. SpaceX has perfected booster re-use (something the Shuttle never even tried to do), launched people to the space station, saved the US space program from dependency on increasingly unreliable, geopolitically catastrophic legacy Russian Soyuz launches, and is building the transformational Starship. Boring company is making tunneling cheaper and faster. Neuralink is building a literal brain-computer interface to cure degenerative diseases, injuries, and enable humanity to keep up with AI. And X.ai, the newest company, is attempting to counterbalance Facebook and Microsoft, two well-known and well-loved paragons of responsible corporate stewardship in consumer software, in developing machines that think far, far better than humans can. No big deal.

Elon’s companies are a huge anomaly. Elon has raised more than 100 rounds of financing for these various companies. Most entrepreneurs are lucky to raise one or two. Elon has never yet lost money for his investors. This is extremely unusual. Elon’s companies are all doing crazy financially risky things – taking on impossible problems, and succeeding. There are no comparisons. As Jeff Bezos, himself a fabulously wealthy and unusually successful business person who also runs a rocket company, said during his recent interview with Lex Fridman, “in terms of judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. There’s no way you could have Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader. It’s impossible.”

And thanks to their rollercoaster fortunes, he can claim the twin distinctions of being both the richest person in the world and the first person ever to lose $200 billion dollars. Which is hard to wrap your head around. It’s like hearing someone won a marathon after accidentally running 200 miles in the wrong direction.

Okay that’s actually pretty funny. But it masks a common source of confusion.

“Net worth” for founders who lead their companies (a vanishing rarity) is commonly misunderstood. While it is true that Elon now has significant liquid wealth, that was not the case for most of his life, even when his net worth, on paper, was billions of dollars. Why? Those billions are an artifact of an accounting system that attempt to translate the value of his operational control, his stake, in the companies he built, into money. “If he sold his stake at the going rate it would be worth this much.” Of course, even with an IPO, that is not possible because of price elasticity. The market value of a company is the future discounted net present value of expected future returns. Tesla’s market cap, and by extension Elon’s net worth, is some function of the money the market expects the company to make in the future, not some giant pile of gold sitting in a vault under Starbase!

When people like Elizabeth Warren talk about billionaires as a policy failure and the desire to enact some kind of harsh wealth tax on a tiny handful of successful software (or in Elon’s case, hardware) entrepreneurs, what they’re really saying is that it should be against the law to build a company that’s too successful, without having to sell most of it to investors first. The most charitable possible reading is that these statements, which are profoundly hostile to the notion of property and entrepreneurship, are calling for severe antitrust enforcement to be brought to bear on often quite small companies that are delivering extraordinary value to customers all around the world. The EU has managed to regulate their tech sector effectively out of existence, and has been rewarded with a decade of zero growth for their troubles. Let’s not do that.

And to hear Elon tell it, he’s been doing this, at least in part, to benefit humanity. He recently said of Tesla, “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth” demonstrating a pretty strong messianic streak.

This quote occurs about 15 minutes into the Sorkin interview, and it’s in the context of Tesla’s delivery of more than 2 million electric cars. Just to linger on that for a second – in a world where Chinese manufacturing is crushing everyone else, the single largest global manufacturer of electric cars is based in the US and manufactures mostly in the US. I’ve taken my Tesla Model 3 apart and put it back together and I am in awe of its engineering mastery, and it’s an old model! The idea of building even the prototype boggles my mind, and Tesla has produced millions of them! I spent a decade writing software and I doubt I’ve written even a million lines of code.

Later on, Elon pointed out that the Biden administration didn’t even invite Tesla to the electric vehicle summit, instead honoring GM, who sold 26 electric cars that quarter, against Tesla’s more than 300,000. Elon has built incredible businesses by focusing on performance over appearance. There are millions of people who specialize in looking good, in pointing the finger and criticizing, but only one US car manufacturer delivers (currently) around half a million EVs per quarter, and that company is Tesla and it is led by Elon. I think this is fair grounds to claim strong environmental credentials, and hardly proves Elon fits some messianic (delusions of grandeur) archetype.

In fact, Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, who’s both worked with and clashed with Musk, has said, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.” Which is a pretty big asterisk. It’s like Jesus says in the book of Matthew: love thy neighbor, but more importantly me, and if you don’t, fuck you, find your own heaven, j-crizzle out.”

Again, it is strange that John Oliver would choose to quote Sam out of context here, since there is so much legitimate grist for the mill when it comes to critiquing Elon and Tesla. Sam’s statement is in the context of Elon’s objection to Sam taking OpenAI, which Elon cofounded and initially funded as a non-profit, private and selling a huge for-profit stake to Microsoft. This statement is literally Sam defending a process by which he forced Elon out of his non-profit and then converted it to a for-profit company to build powerful AI.

Elon co-founded OpenAI in 2015 because he believed that Google DeepMind was insufficiently serious about AI safety. AI safety is now, 8 years later, a big deal, though fortunately it’s in Kamala Harris and King Charles‘ capable hands!

At no point has Oliver or any of the other critics really thought deeply about the fact that Elon continues to call these deeply technical questions correctly a decade in advance – what could it be? Probably nothing!

[Laughter] and I know there are people who love Elon, and people who utterly hate him, and there are going to be parts of this piece that irritate both groups.

This show could have been much better, and that’s what irritates me.

There are also people who would, understandably, rather just ignore him. But as you’ll see, we might have passed the point where that’s an option for any of us. So tonight, let’s look at Elon Musk, and let’s start with how he earned his “business genius” reputation. And I’m going to skip over the early years — the growing up in apartheid South Africa, then emigrating to the U.S. via Canada during his college years. You can read any number of books on that, or just ask your next Bumble date who turned up in a fedora and a “Release the Snyder Cut” t-shirt, ready to spend the entire night talking about him. Elon first earned his fortune from creating a company called “Zip2” with his brother, before going on to help run PayPal alongside Peter Thiel. And if I only could’ve been a fly on that wall! I’d have flown into a hot light bulb.

This is a funny thing to say because Peter Thiel was a cofounder of Confinity, Elon’s X.com rival. They merged the companies to create PayPal and then Peter threw him out during his honeymoon before selling the company to eBay. I don’t believe they were on speaking terms for many years.

Anyway, having insinuated that Elon has some Jesus complex, Oliver will now insinuate that Elon’s companies are only doing easy things they ripped off from other people.

He then invested that personal fortune into SpaceX, a company that would create and launch its own rockets and spacecraft. And that is a pretty gutsy move, to go from an online payment system to literal rocket science. Although — as some point out — SpaceX wasn’t exactly starting from square one.

What SpaceX has been very successful at is taking basically off-the-shelf technology, stuff that was developed by NASA 50 years ago, and streamlining it.

This is a popular canard, and while it’s true that NASA helped SpaceX out in the early days and was and remains an important customer, it’s also important to remember that NASA is full of experts that argue, to this day, that booster recovery is impossible and also economically stupid. SpaceX is the beneficiary of the US’ investment of more than a trillion dollars (with a T!) in rocket technology for delivering nuclear weapons, but to the extent this research was done by NASA, it’s available to any entrepreneur on the NTRS database. Numerous other rocket companies have been founded, often by SpaceX veterans, with decidedly mixed success. If it was so easy to rip off NASA’s rockets, why have Astra, Vector, Firefly, ABL, Rocketlab, Relativity, Virgin Orbit, etc etc failed (so far) to make much money? The reason is that SpaceX is actually incredibly innovative, in a way and to an extent that’s very difficult for outsiders to understand. If SpaceX had simply copied NASA, they would definitely have failed, because NASA’s rockets have never been remotely close to economically viable.

So in that way, he’s kind of the Henry Ford of — of space, because Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile. He just figured out how to make the automobile, you know, commercially viable.

As we all know, building a consumer-facing automotive manufacturing business starting from nothing is trivial, so easy in fact, it’s only ever been done once! The fact that people like you and I can afford to buy any kind of mechanical or electrical device is due, 100%, to mass production. It is still an incredibly hard thing to do while making money. It’s almost fashionable to profess deep ignorance of the origin of every aspect of the wealth that makes one’s life bearable, but would it really hurt Last Week Tonight to do a single segment on how factories are designed, built, and operated?

Yeah, like Henry Ford, Elon Musk managed to build on the technology that others had invented. That’s not the only way he’s like Henry Ford, which you’d know if you’d ever googled either of their names and the word “antisemitism,” but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Elon has quite a lot in common with Henry Ford. For example, they both had to watch their eldest son die. They’re both pacifists who favor US military isolationism, which was received wisdom on the Left until the moment Obama was elected. They’ve had disagreements with auto workers unions. They’ve revolutionized and revitalized manufacturing, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Their technology has been ignored and attacked by the received political wisdom until it suddenly became the MVP of some key strategic victory for the US and its allies. For Ford, it was his technology’s mass production of the Arsenal of Democracy, including the B-24 heavy bomber at his Willow Run plant. For Musk, it was Starlink and orbital space launch, of which more later.

Both Musk and Ford are fascinating singular complex characters and it does a profound disservice to Oliver’s viewership, who probably have no reason to know much about Henry Ford, to summarize the product of his life’s enormously beneficial work with sneering condemnation, all for the sake of a cheap laugh.

The point is, Musk took a big risk on starting a rocket company. Which nearly didn’t work. His first three attempts to launch one failed, and then he made a truly audacious gamble.

Interviewer: When you had that third failure in a row, did you think, “I need to pack this in?”

Elon: Never.

Why not?

I don’t ever give up.

Eight weeks later, Musk bet the company on another flight.

We have lift-off.

And this time around, everything worked.

Perfect.

If that fourth launch hadn’t worked, that would have been it. We would have not had the resources to mount a fifth.

You couldn’t have gone on at that point?

We — yes. Death would have been, I think, inevitable.

John: That is genuinely impressive. Although, there are less weird ways to say “we would have gone out of business” than “death is inevitable.” Phrasing matters. It’s why people say “we just had a baby” instead of “Lisa shit life out of her hoo-ha.” Same meaning, different feeling.

John, tell me you’ve never built a business from scratch without telling me you’ve never built a business from scratch. That’s fine, most of us couldn’t and shouldn’t start rocket companies. But when you pour your heart and soul into a technology you believe is critical to the survival of the human race, it is natural to think of it living and breathing. And, if you run out of money, you die, your tech gets trashed and all your employees lose their livelihood.

And that trend continued through SpaceX’s subsequent efforts — something that, as this former head of NASA points out, is not something they’d ever be able to get away with.

Charlie Bolden: If we lost rockets at the rate that — that Elon Musk loses his big starship, NASA would have been out of business. Congress would have shut us down. If we lost one starship, let alone six or however many it’s been. We can’t do that.

John: Right, the U.S. Government can’t waste billions of dollars just blowing things up in the vague hope that it’ll somehow turn into a success, unless of course, those things are Iraq or Afghanistan. So, SpaceX began with a big gamble, had a flirtation with disaster, and then became a massive success.

Bolden’s somewhat glib remark here misses a greater truth. First, NASA benefits from avoiding branding risk by paying SpaceX to blow stuff up. NASA’s success in the Apollo program stemmed from aggressive, hardware rich development (led by actual Nazis, incidentally) with lots and lots of destructive testing, which NASA has shifted away from in recent decades. Second, Bolden was NASA Administrator under Obama and while Obama publicly supported the Falcon 9 and its early cargo flights to the space station, Bolden was not unequivocally supportive until well after he’d left NASA. Third, NASA’s main project under Bolden’s tenure, the SLS and Orion, are not exactly paragons of lean, mean, effective program development, now running a decade late and $80b over budget.

And that pattern persisted with Tesla. That company was funded, in part, by pre-selling cars to future owners — only to run into repeated production delays and spiraling costs. Just watch Musk at one meeting of those early buyers, where he told them that the price had gone up, on the cars they’d already bought.

Customer: We took faith in you, and now you’re just turning around and changing the price on us, not telling us, and then we find out about it backwards, and now, well, kind of — everyone’s hurt because we weren’t told.

Elon: We can’t sell cars for, you know, less than they cost us to produce. If anything, what we had, more than that occurred, then it was an accident —

Customer: Well, that’s why there was a bunch of comments after it that all got —

Okay. There seemed to be a little bit of anger from some people in the room who felt that we’d kind of done a bait and switch. And I mean, that’s sort of a little bit true that there was a bit of a bait and switch. I mean, it’s — that’s, I mean, kind of what happened. That was very tough.

John: Yeah, you can see how baiting customers with one price and switching it for another might be considered a bait-and-switch. There’s actually a great econ book on the subject, entitled “words mean what words mean.”

Again, John Oliver reaches for the easy, lazy laugh lines here, but misses the point. Elon had only just taken over running Tesla from its original co-founders, who (it is alleged) had systematically deceived Elon (previously the major investor and chairman of the board) and had underestimated the cost of the delivered product by a factor of two. This is not a minor mistake! Elon didn’t just ask his first customers to pony up more cash, he poured every last cent of his remaining fortune into the company to keep it alive, and eventually delivered 2500 Roadsters, which remain desirable collector cars to this day.

This is in sharp contrast to Nikola CEO Trevor Milton who was just sentenced to four years in prison for fraudulently lying about his electric truck to investors.

It’s not the only time Tesla has been accused of selling vaporware after the fact. For example, Tesla has for years sold “full self driving” to Tesla customers at a steep discount, with the understanding that it its delivery is subject to regulatory approval. Many of the early cars, we now understand, lack the hardware needed to perform FSD with current technology. That’s why it was sold at a discount, to cover time, regulatory, and tech risk. I use the current beta version of FSD and it is astonishingly good. It feels like magic. It is significantly better than any Uber driver I’ve ever had, and statistically it’s significantly safer than I am.

And yet, Tesla’s now a big success, with factories on three continents delivering over a million vehicles a year. Meanwhile, SpaceX is currently valued around $150 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

SpaceX is projected to make $15b in revenue next year. A 20 year bet paying off, almost unheard of in a world where even venture capitalists want an exit within 3-5 years. SpaceX, like Amazon, prioritized building value over much longer time horizons and with much greater sustainability. Isn’t this something we can celebrate?

Although it’s worth noting — his boldness sometimes comes with a tendency to overpromise, and show off products long before they’re ready. Like in 2019, when Musk decided to demonstrate how indestructible his new cybertruck was, by having its chief designer chuck a steel ball at its window.

Franz, could you try to break this glass, please? [Cheers]

Oh my fucking god. Well, maybe that was a little too hard. [Laughs]

John: Yeah, not great. But also, kind of charming! I’ll be honest, there’s something I kind of like about the cybertruck. I mean, I don’t want to own one, or drive near one, it’s basically a 7,000 pound smushed-up refrigerator moving at 60 miles per hour, being driven by, odds are, a real piece of shit. But there’s something appealing about a man so passionate about his idea that he’s willing to ignore questions about aesthetics, performance, durability, practicality, safety, and who on earth actually wants to spend up to $100,000 to drive every child’s first attempt at drawing a car, and build it anyway.

Instead of talking about how Cybertruck is pioneering insanely advanced new technology, such as a 48 V wiring harness and massive single piece castings, technologies that will form the basis of an affordable mass market electric car, John Oliver again goes for the easy laugh, though now with someone else’s four year old joke. Contrast this to Sandy Munro’s walking tour of the Cybertruck factory in Austin, Texas. Don’t watch that YouTube video if you don’t want to learn anything. Elon is building enormous competitive factories here, in the United States. How? Can we learn something?

And that’s not his only embarrassing product launch. Two years ago, he introduced a Tesla robot by showcasing a prototype that was just a dancer in a robot bodysuit, and it was exactly as dumb as that sounds.

John: I absolutely love it. Apparently, all you have to do to launch a robotics company is invest in a spandex bodysuit and a dancer.

I was at that product launch, thanks to a kind invitation from a reader of this blog, and once again John has completely missed the point, once again misinforming his audience in service of reassuring their existing biases. Tesla opened their doors to showcase their self driving cars, the Cybertruck, their Dojo supercomputer, and their Optimus android project. Why? To help them recruit top talent. Did it work? Tesla and SpaceX are, by far, the most desirable places for new engineering graduates to work. Why? Is it because Elon is generous with pay and vacations? Hardly. It’s because it’s the place where all the best people must go to test their mettle with the smartest people, the most capable teams, and the toughest problems. Life is short. If you want to get good, you have to try hard. Just last week, Tesla released a video of the incredible progress they’ve made in just two years on Optimus, but you wouldn’t know that if you watched John Oliver’s show.

Does anyone here have the slightest idea just how hard it is to build a humanoid robot? Two years ago, all the wise old sages were shaking their heads and confidently pronouncing that Elon and his top engineers were in way over their heads, didn’t know what they were talking about, had forgotten basic aspects of engineering. And yet today, these same people are no less confident and no less wrong. This is an interesting story. Where are the TV talking heads sharing insights into how most of the barriers we erect and accept are soluble in sufficiently advanced technology and engineering? Can we celebrate technical excellence? Do we have another plan to fix the world?

Embarrassing moments aside, there’s a lot to like about Elon’s companies. SpaceX has made real achievements, like reusable rocket technology and making space easier and more affordable to access. And Tesla has pushed automakers to take electric cars seriously in a way that would have seemed impossible 20 years ago. But as one of Elon’s critics points out, there are costs to that progress that often get overlooked.

Is Elon Musk a net positive for society? I would argue he is. I think the EV race is a great thing. Space exploration is really hopeful and just kind of inspiring. The problem is with the word net, and that is once we decide an individual or a company is a net good for society, we don’t want to hold him or the company accountable for anything.

John: Right. Even if you think Elon is a “net positive,” it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the harm he’s doing along the way. And let’s start with his employees, many of whom have called Elon a nightmare to work for.

Elon is not an easy boss. Elon understands that his job is not to give his employees warm and fuzzies and be their best buddy. His job is to make sure his companies succeed, and to keep the hiring bar extremely high. Top people only want to work with top people. Almost without exception, anyone working at an Elon Musk company can make more money with less effort somewhere else. And yet they still choose to work there, even prefer it, often for years or until they leave against their will. It’s a free country! If you don’t want to work at an Elon company, there are millions of others to choose from.

And not just at Twitter, where he fired most of the staff and ordered the rest to work in quote, “extremely hardcore” mode.

And yet Twitter still works. The reality is that as interest rates rose and raising money got more difficult, every tech company laid off staff.

He’s been like this at every company, as this early employee at SpaceX will attest.

Jim Cantrell: It was not unusual to have a phone call from him at 3 in the morning on your cell phone, you better, by god to have that next to your bed to answer. He’s just gone into yelling fits against me and telling me I’m stupid and I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I’ve seen him do it to other very intelligent people. So he’ll definitely find your weakness in your personality, in your — in your character, in your — in your spirit, and I wouldn’t say exploit it, but you’ll — you’ll definitely crack.

John: Well, that sounds unpleasant! Not just your boss calling to abuse you, but because there are only two reasons someone should be calling you at 3 in the morning and they’re: because a loved one is having an emergency and needs your help or your house is on fire, and even then, that could’ve been a text. And the damage isn’t just emotional.

I think John Oliver should have a quiet chat with his research team. I don’t think Jim Cantrell even worked at SpaceX – he accompanied Elon on a trip to Russia and did some consulting, but he doesn’t appear in the founding photo and appears to have moved on by the time they incorporated.

For someone who spent so little time at SpaceX and working with Elon he sure talks a lot about it, so I wouldn’t regard him as a perfectly reliable narrator. For example, see Cantrell’s later accusation of embezzlement at his own rocket company.

Workers at his factories complain of immense pressure and unrealistic deadlines. A report a few years ago on his Tesla factory in Fremont, California found employees complaining that style and speed trumped safety, and that workers there had been sliced by machinery, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions, and sprayed with molten metal. One worker claimed that she had been told Elon didn’t want signs, or anything yellow like caution tape, in the factory. Which isn’t good, because caution tape is important. It lets people know something might be dangerous and unstable, like a skull and crossbones on a bottle or this jacket on a middle-aged man. Now, Tesla does deny that — but its claims about its factories can be hard to verify. Even when regulators try to get involved at Musk’s companies, they can be strongly resisted. For example, his Nevada Gigafactory at one point denied entry to state OSHA inspectors for nearly three months. Which is ridiculous. The word “Gigafactory” alone should be enough to warrant an immediate inspection.

Factories are dangerous places. Tesla has significantly fewer injuries than other automakers. The OSHA inspector delay may have been due to a, no doubt, extremely interesting authority dispute between different arms of the state regulatory apparatus. There’s a reason there’s a Fourth Amendment, and a process that regulators must also abide by to ensure they are able to protect their own safety and do their jobs. If the Gigafactory safety manager broke the law in denying the OSHA inspector access then why haven’t they been prosecuted?

But it’s not just workers who Musk is willing to put at risk. Sometimes it’s his own customers. He’s long been developing self-driving car technology, and has sometimes knowingly exaggerated its capabilities. The two pieces of software available are called “autopilot and full self-driving,” but despite their names, neither system can drive a car on its own.

John Oliver chooses here to propagate a persistent and deliberate misunderstanding of the functions of a Tesla – one which is clear enough to my five year old with a moment’s inspection. “Autopilot” is named after the same function in aircraft. A machine that, since the 1930s, has been capable of holding the airplane straight and level so the pilot can focus on other tasks such as navigation, radio work, team coordination, engine management, etc. It can and does fly straight and level directly into a mountain – it does not absolve the pilot of responsibility. It is a tool to improve safety through cockpit resource management. It does not substitute for a driver, it just allows them to focus on other aspects of driving safely, like watching for hazards, scanning around the car, and remaining alert. I’ve used autopilot since 2017 on my Model 3 and I believe it makes me a much safer driver, and the statistics agree, though Oliver doesn’t discuss them in his segment. Teslas are not only the safest cars ever built, they also crash significantly less often than other cars. “Full self driving” is a feature which has been in limited beta release, to only the safest drivers in the customer fleet, for quite some time. In both cases, the driver remains fully legally responsible for the actions of the car, just as the pilot of an aircraft remains the pilot in command even when using the autopilot.

Yet, in this 2016 ad, it appears to be doing just that — amplified by the introductory text Elon personally asked for, which reads “the car is driving itself.” But that was extremely misleading. It was driving along a pre-planned route. It was only “self-driving” the way your nana self-drives herself up and down the stairs. And Tesla will note, they tell drivers they should keep their hands on the wheel and take over if anything goes wrong. And I sure hope drivers do that, because he’s been inviting them to try out “full self-driving” in beta mode. Basically, having drivers find the bugs in new software, even on complicated city streets, and with predictable results.

Before continuing with this quote, I’ll point out that miles driven with FSD are currently more than 10x safer than the average US driver in terms of accidents per mile driven, and that Tesla’s approach has garnered it vastly more data and much higher safety than its deployed competitors Cruise (since shut down) and Waymo. “With predictable results” is just the sort of condescending sneer we’d expect from a non-technical commentator passing judgment on a technology he has made zero effort to understand.

Because even if Tesla drivers volunteered to take part in this high stakes experiment, the people around them sure didn’t. No one got a push alert, saying “Hey, Tesla here! Please consent to take part in the beta test that is currently hurtling towards you. Do hurry, time is a factor.” And Musk has taken a pretty blithe attitude toward self-driving deaths. In 2016, when concerns were first emerging, he told reporters that “if they wrote stories that dissuaded people from using autonomous driving systems, or regulators from approving them, “then they would be killing people.” Essentially, arguing that any deaths in the present day will be more than offset by lives saved later.

We’ve seen these arguments before. When Volvo introduced first standard seat belts, then standard airbags, conventional automakers, particularly in the US, waged a PR war against them arguing they didn’t make anyone safer and customers should be allowed to choose. Of course, like the tobacco lobby, they were knowingly deceitful and they do have the blood of tens of thousands of their own customers, including children, on their hands. Even in 2016, Tesla’s relatively primitive lane-keeping autopilot software decreased the likelihood of collisions and injury. Today, Elon’s statement is 100% vindicated. Yet another example of Elon calling a technically complex issue correctly seven years ago. I wonder if anyone will update their negative assumptions about Elon’s basic technical competence, given that he got this one right too? Probably not.

And just this week, when The Washington Post noted they’d tallied about 40 fatal or serious crashes involving Tesla’s driver assistance software, Tesla responded by saying, “We believe it is morally indefensible not to make these systems available to a wider set of consumers, given the incontrovertible data that shows it’s saving lives and preventing injury.” But rather than producing that data, it promised “more detailed information will be publicly available in the near future.” Which, I’m sorry, is just not data bitch behavior. And that’s coming from TV’s number one data bitch. Anyone who collects “incontrovertible data” would give you a more specific date than “the near future.” Because data bitches, as we all know, are also calendar bitches.

The Washington Post (incidentally owned by Elon Musk rival Jeff Bezos)’s article on FSD was so ludicrously free of facts or analysis that every “data bitch” on X (including your humble servant) noticed instantly it did not normalize accidents by miles driven, which is kind of important. Yes, of course, Teslas have had more accidents running various forms of driver assistance, because Tesla sells a million cars per year and other self-driving car experiments are running a couple of hacked Priuses around an empty parking lot. The specific examples given in the article tragically describe how a young driver took his eyes off the road to pick up a dropped phone. The NTSB would describe a similar aircraft accident as “pilot error”. The problem is not that a Tesla crashed while its driver was inattentive. The problem is that every day hundreds of pedestrians in the US are injured by drivers texting and swiping on cell phones – an issue so alarming that pedestrian injuries have risen to 1980 levels, and if those cars do not have AI-driven safety features which come standard on every Tesla and precious few other cars, those people have zero chance. But we will never have a WaPo article about the thousands of lives Tesla’s technology saves every year.

And look, history is littered with titans of business who were shitty or broken people, from Thomas Edison through Henry Ford through Steve Jobs. The difference is, by and large, they didn’t open up their brain to let the whole world have a constant look inside. But Elon does, and the glimpses we get can be terrifying. And that brings us back to Twitter. Musk has been a heavy user for years, putting out classic tweets like “I put the art in fart,” “69 days after 4/20 again haha” and “technically, alcohol is a solution,” which technically, isn’t a joke. And his biographer will tell you he’s addicted to the app to a genuinely problematic extent.

I am far from Steve Jobs’ greatest fan (I’m not a fan of his family values) but it’s not exactly unusual that famous, rich, successful founder/CEOs of huge consumer facing businesses have detractors, particularly from the peanut gallery that have total ignorance of what large companies do, how they operate, and what it takes to run one. It is literally impossible to bring the iPhone or the Tesla Model Y to market without treading on a single toe or firing a single employee, and yet both Tesla and Apple employees are famously loyal and get famously rich from stock options – sharing in the upside from creating such enormous value for the world.

Yes, Apple earns incredible profits but given how desperate Apple users are to upgrade to the latest $1500 phone every year, one thinks they could probably raise the prices even further without hurting revenue. Why are Apple users so loyal? Why do they feel burdened by thousands of dollars of cash in their wallet they could use to buy an extremely similar phone or computer from another brand for less than half the price? Could it be that the company makes a compelling product?

Elon could tweet less and get us to Mars a bit faster, to be sure – no dispute from me. But he is correct when he states that his disintermediated conversations with customers, fans, investors, job candidates, and members of the public bring incredible net value to his endeavors. One of the most difficult things to obtain in senior management is truth, since there are no disinterested intermediaries who can provide it. Everyone has an interest in telling a particular story, usually one that shows them in a good light. Running a direct feedback loop via X (and other channels) helps short circuit the usual corporate echo chambers that plague the competitors of Elon’s companies.

One day he was traveling with a friend, Antonio Gracias, and Musk had kept tweeting late at night, doing these ridiculous tweets, sometimes very harmful ones. And so, the friend said, “Let me take your phone and I’m going to put it in the safe here in the hotel room.” Friend punches in the code and he said, “That way you can’t use it late at night.” At 3 in the morning, Musk calls hotel security to get him to open the safe and he starts doing tweets. He was addicted to tweeting.

John: Look, I’m sure when the average security guard is called up to a billionaire’s hotel room at 3:00 a.m., They have a list of things to expect, and it begins and ends with “dead body.” So it must have been a pleasant surprise when he wheeled an empty garbage bin into the room only to find Elon Musk punching random numbers into his hotel safe because he just thought of “I put the art in fart” and the whole world simply had to know.

Ha ha, good joke about violence towards women trapped in abusive relationships with massive power imbalances!

And look, Elon’s tweets were never that great. Not like mine, of course, which are banger after banger after banger after certified banger. I don’t miss. But in recent years, they’ve taken a turn toward the nasty and conspiratorial, getting increasingly into the realm of right-wing trolls. And many point to one particular moment as the turning point — the pandemic lockdowns.

In California, 40 million residents are in lockdown —

At the time, the government had ordered Musk to close his Tesla factories in California.

I mean, he was pissed that his factories were forced to close.

Yes, ultimately, yes. That’s the thing. He wanted them there and he wanted them working. He thought it was an existential crisis if Tesla didn’t succeed. He really — for the world, for all of us. And then it got weird.

Free America now. Give people their freedom back! Hospitals in California have been half-empty this whole time. Now give people back their freedom.

Musk told his employees that he intended to defy orders and go to work.

CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Yet again, John Oliver misses the point. Elon has given multiple interviews speaking about this. Because Tesla runs a factory in China, his teams had better insights into the progress and impact of COVID than anyone who worked in public health in the US at the time. Remember when the CDC successfully shipped 65 COVID tests in February 2020? Or when they refused to run mRNA vaccine challenge tests, delaying vaccine deployment by 11 months? Or when they lied about mask efficacy?

Now it’s the end of 2023, nearly everyone has gotten COVID and recovered, and what we can say with the benefit of hindsight is that the lockdowns almost certainly killed far more younger people than they saved. I personally know more people who died or were seriously injured due to being unable to access medical care because of lockdown (not hospitals being overwhelmed) than people who were killed or seriously injured by COVID. The vaccines did most of the work, and antigen testing and masking can help in some cases – but seriously people, just open a window. Ventilation is an old technology.

Second, Elon has repeatedly stated, and his story is corroborated by public statements by various officials involved, that several factions of CA state- and Bay Area-based officials had been wrangling with Elon and Tesla over numerous issues. Given the Bay Area’s famously dysfunctional governance, I’m inclined to credit Elon’s story. And these same officials, in many cases unelected and not formally invested with the necessary powers, seemed to take the lockdowns as an excuse to try to harm Tesla as badly as they could, perhaps out of envy and spite. This was the precipitating factor in Tesla moving most of its future development to Texas, a state with its own set of flaws but at least a basic understanding that they shouldn’t shoot the golden goose!

So, instead of using this segment as an opportunity to talk about California’s ongoing challenges with governance, affordability, homelessness, drug abuse, and manufacturing flight, he once again attempts to relitigate some years-old controversy that no-one cares about anymore. Seriously, why is it so difficult to build a non-software business in California?

John: Okay, what that really drives home is just how different Musk is from the rest of us, because there’s “rich and detached,” and then there’s “I’ve asked the cops not to arrest anyone else so we should be good” rich and detached.

I think Elon’s intention, read that way by 99.9% of people, was that he wasn’t sitting in a remote management suite ordering his peons back to work in the pandemic. He was, and often is, literally working and sleeping on the front lines with them solving problems and fighting to make the factory work. Later, Governor Newsom even held a press conference to re-assure Tesla that California would be less hostile to the company in the future.

And, look, a lot of our brains got a bit broken during the pandemic. I think we can all agree that it’d be really cool if the entirety of the “pandemic chapter” in future history textbooks simply read “weird time, had to be there, we did our best.” But Elon didn’t channel his anxiety in one of the normal ways like spraying groceries with disinfectant, getting really into sourdough bread-baking, or tracking down and purchasing one-of-a-kind rat erotica. You know, normal stuff we all did. Instead, his brain broke in the direction of right-wingers who were loudly opposing the shutdowns. And once he started siding with them over those complaints, he found himself sympathizing with their broader concerns about a “woke mind virus,” and that they were being mocked, shadow-banned, and generally disrespected by Twitter.

John again misses an opportunity to engage with a really important question. During the Obama years, the world was simpler. The conservatives had the Kochs and nearly all the “old money” billionaires, and progressives had Elon, the Google founders, Zuck, Gates on a good day, and the other Californian technocrats. Then what happened? How the hell did progressives manage to disown Elon Musk, the software millionaire American Dream immigrant who poured it all back into building two enormous internationally successful technology companies in California to tackle climate change and make life multiplanetary? Who now stands for “success” in the progressive world? Who is championing the economic supremacy of a progressive system, one built around diversity, inclusion, and innovation? Can we build a Left coalition around something more constructive than “ban billionaires to solve the world’s problems” (itself a thinly disguised and ancient antisemitic trope) as though it would make a lick of difference?

And since he was also the richest man in the world, he could fix all this by simply buying the whole thing, which is what he then did. And I don’t have time to run through every bad decision he’s made at Twitter — although, real quick: he cut about 80% of the staff, dissolved the “trust and safety” council, blew up the verification system, exercised the same censorship he claimed to be against, reactivated the accounts of various white supremacists, released “the Twitter files” — in which he basically mistook the emails of various feckless left-leaning tech weenies struggling with the impossible job of content moderation for a vast elite conspiracy to silence right-wing dipshits — changed the name to X, put a gigantic “x” on the building which he then took down, and, just this week, reversed his earlier decision and let Alex Jones back onto the site. A decision that’s been met with resounding praise from “big loud fucks” quarterly.

Unfortunately this section is a real “Gish Gallop” of bad takes, fundamentally misunderstanding what Elon is doing at X/Twitter and why, and as consumers of the ambient mediasphere, we should be concerned. The rapidity of this attack betrays the real reason John’s show decided to attack Elon now – X is a threat to their model – a place where narratives can evolve outside the control of a handful of extremely centralized media conglomerates.

Remember, it’s super easy to stand outside the company and condemn hard but necessary decisions as “bad decisions” but John Oliver doesn’t run Twitter or any company and thus lacks the experience to understand how things actually get done in the real world. To someone who knows just a bit of context – and the Isaacson biography is a good starting point here – Oliver’s monday-morning quarterbacking carries as much weight as a teenager pontificating on the finer points of brain surgery.

Let’s go through them in order.

Elon cut 80% of the staff – and the company still works. Why did he do this? The company was losing money, and had less than two quarters of runway, in part due to the apparent disinterest of previous management to ever think about the company’s financial sustainability, particularly as they were on the way out. Simply put, Twitter had never made money, not even close. The management’s responsibility is to keep the company alive, and it was incredibly obvious, even to outside observers, that Twitter’s culture needed a big shake up. Following these layoffs, nearly every other tech company also realized they needed to get to profitability as interest rates went up, and also laid off large numbers of people.

Verification – was dysfunctional and had been for years. Used and abused by a bunch of legacy opinion writers who were understandably miffed that their super-user status was dissolved. The model was broken, and X needed to actually verify identities the same way Google and Couchsurfing does – bootstrapping on the financial system and its KYC requirements.

Exercised censorship – Elon has been quite clear that his company will maximize freedom of speech up to the legal limit. But most countries do not actually protect freedom of speech, and so if he is legally required to censor information in, say, India, what are his options? Defy the law? Fight it in an Indian court? We could have had a discussion here about the limits of freedom of speech in a networked environment subject to multiple overlapping jurisdictions and the chilling impact that has on US discourse, perhaps with a sideline of propaganda from TicTok, but no.

Twitter files stuff – unlike John, I read a good amount of the source material. It certainly looked to me a lot like taxpayer-funded US federal employees emailing contacts at Twitter about censoring all kinds of information, which is also quite clearly unconstitutional. We’ll see this work its way through the courts over the next few years but as much as it pains me to say this – it looks like the right wingers whinging about selective deboosting or deplatforming on Twitter were at least partially correct.

Putting the X on the building is, again, a jumping off point for a potentially fascinating discussion about most California cities usurping development power from building owners and lessees, with the predictable result that construction has ground to a halt, rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is at catastrophic levels, people and businesses are fleeing the state, and the building stock is aging at a staggeringly unsustainable rate. Twitter went through the necessary legal process to change its name and then San Francisco city deployed the “isn’t there someone you forgot to ask” meme and forbade them from removing their old signage from a building – at their own expense – until they’d gone through SF’s notoriously dysfunctional, slow, and corrupt permissions process. X’s X was an act of brave defiance and it was widely cheered by a city of citizens sick of the dysfunction and rot.

Finally, Alex Jones. Elon has stated multiple times he doesn’t want him on the site, that he regards his exploitation of the Sandy Hook dead as unforgivable, etc etc. And yet he let him back on the site, as he did with President Trump. Why? Pragmatism? Desperation? Listen to his own words – he wants X to be an inclusive and comprehensive forum driving back against the partisan splintering of the national discourse. Elon didn’t buy Twitter because he had money burning a hole in his pocket. Elon bought Twitter because it accidentally became the literate layer of the English speaking world and he recognized, again years earlier than most other people, that the fragmentation of the public forum was an existential threat to civilization.

Again it pains me to say this, but this means letting people in who say mean stuff and who you disagree with. Because if you isolate yourself from hearing from them, then you also isolate them from hearing from you, and we should not be surprised that Truth Social and Mastodon become boring echo chambers that diverge into ever deepening levels of insanity.

And notably, his time in charge of Twitter has seen a rise in unpleasant rhetoric from Musk himself — including boosting a transphobic documentary saying, “every parent should watch this,” responding “interesting” to a tweet reading, “blacks kill each other. Whites kill themselves,” and boosting this Office meme falsely implying there had been a coverup about Pizzagate.

I am vaguely interested in the fact that Elon is apparently one of the very few top business and political leaders who never flew on Epstein’s jet, but it’s probably nothing.

I didn’t think it was possible, but it genuinely makes me miss the man who once posted “send me your dankest memes” and this picture of a turtle on wheels with the message, “science has gone too far.” And while Elon will dispute that there’s been a rise in hate speech on the platform, or that he’s pandered to white nationalists, you know who disagrees with him on that? White nationalists. Just listen to Nick Fuentes, telling Richard Spencer everything Elon has done for their movement.

Fuentes: It’s only been a year since Musk acquired Twitter, which is not really a long time. And the changes didn’t even begin to roll out until less than a year ago. And yet the change has been dramatic, how much the window has shifted noticeably on issues like white identity, which apparently is suddenly mainstream. It wasn’t for a long time. It seemed like Charlie Kirk said one or two things about it last year, and then this year, now everyone’s a white nationalist. Now everyone’s a white identitarian. You open up one of the social platforms. It’s so hot, it’s so fast. It changes public opinion virtually overnight, and — and really in our favor.

John: Wow. All of that’s horrifying, but the use of the term “white identitarian,” is just not fooling anyone. That’s what the word “racist” writes on a job application to make it sound like it went to college.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. The internet is full of weirdos and losers who will insist that Elon secretly agrees with them. Elon RTing actually crazy stuff is problematic but there’s no time left in this segment to dig into the hows and whys of, eg, transphobia, because we’ve spent so much of it talking about his fashion choices.

And the fact Elon seems to be getting increasingly radicalized is a big problem, because we’ve put a lot of power into his hands — and more than you may realize. Remember when I said no one is taking the big swings he is? That includes the government. And over the years, that means a lot of things this country relies on have been outsourced to Musk. Every day Musk’s companies control more of the internet, power grid, transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure and its energy supply.

This would be an interesting moment to talk about privatization in general, the collapse of the government’s ordinary procurement channels, the failure of the major aerospace contractors, and the general decay of infrastructure in the US. Instead, we’re going to scaremonger about the one person who, against all odds, is actually making headway on these problems we’ve allowed to fester for generations!

And since it’s timely, yet another example of Elon correctly calling a technical question, this time six years ahead of time.

To take just one example: SpaceX has now put more than 4,500 Starlink satellites into orbit, meaning that Musk’s company now accounts for over half of all active satellites. And that puts the U.S. government in a bit of a bind — just watch a National Security Council spokesman try to explain why it wouldn’t be acting in response to Elon’s boosting of that “great replacement theory” tweet.

Spokesman: There’s innovation out there in the private sector that we’d be foolish to — to walk away from. I’m not aware of any specific efforts to address — to address our concerns over his rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean that we accept or agree with or condone in any way that antisemitic rhetoric that he pushed.

John: Yeah, we’re now at the point where the government is explicitly saying, “We’ve chosen to look the other way on the anti-semitism thing,” or as it’s more commonly known, a daddy’s home 2.

Why should the NSC spokesman have an opinion on the communications of a business person in their capacity as a private citizen? He’s probably attended a week of mind-numbing training on how to avoid saying anything too interesting for TV, and another week of mind-numbing training on how not to get busted for breaking the constitution, which explicitly blocks the government from infringing on free speech. The DoD and federal government more generally is a major customer for millions of businesses in the US, and it’s never been their business, or in their interest, to tone-police their suppliers!

More generally, this tactic seems to be going out of fashion, but it’s a bit weird that people will identify something an opponent says as problematic, and then signal boost it in the biggest forum they can find and beg someone else to care about it, as though maybe the DoD will “cancel” Elon if he says something controversial enough. The DoD is literally in the business of quickly and effectively killing large numbers of people to safeguard the peace and prosperity of the United States of America. They do not care about cancel culture.

And the problem isn’t just the optics of having someone as erratic as Elon in charge of half the world’s satellites — his opinions can change the shape of world events. When Russia invaded Ukraine, one of their first actions was to sever its internet access. Musk, to his credit, agreed to provide Ukraine access to his Starlink network, and donated hardware, enabling them to reach the internet via satellite. And they were grateful.

Lieutenant Taras Berezovets is a spokesman for Ukraine’s military. He told us Starlink is crucial for commanding troops on the battlefield.

Berezovets: We’ve been so grateful to SpaceX and to Elon Musk. Without Starlink, none of our offensives would be so successful.

John: It’s true. The Ukrainian military was grateful to SpaceX and Elon Musk, which is one of those headlines that even a few years ago would have sounded impossible like Panera bread’s lemonade linked to second death and Henry Kissinger: finally dead. [Laughter and applause] And by the way, I think it’s the lemonade that got him.

Despite the various organs of the US intelligence apparatus warning anyone who would listen that an invasion of Ukraine was imminent, the US and its allies were apparently surprised that Russia deployed cyber weapons we never stop hearing about to destroy Ukraine’s communications infrastructure. I’m unsure what their plan was – let Russia roll right up to the NATO border?

Quite by chance, literally that month, SpaceX was able to activate Starlink and then rapidly ship thousands of user terminals to Ukraine, at SpaceX’s expense, enabling the Ukraine government to maintain communications, command, and control. But for this incredibly unlikely, and to Putin, extremely unfair, turn of events, it is highly likely that the Kyiv column would have successfully overwhelmed the capital, completing a lightning war in days. Regardless of Zelensky’s personal heroism. According to all the usual scolds, Starlink was meant to be technically and economically impossible, a rich tycoon’s Waterloo, and suddenly broadband internet was and remains available to anyone anywhere on Earth, and usually cheaper than the local de facto monopoly cable provider.

But as time went on, Elon toyed with the idea of withdrawing Starlink’s service, complaining that the cost was too high — even as he seemed increasingly Russia-friendly. At one point, he said Russia should be allowed to annex Ukrainian land, and tweeted a proposed peace plan that would essentially just give Russia everything they wanted. Perhaps most notably, he refused a Ukrainian request to activate Starlink in Crimea, enabling them to launch an attack on Russian ships — reportedly because a Russian official warned him that could lead to a nuclear response. And I guess that must be true. What are Russian officials gonna do? Lie to an easily flattered CEO to get exactly what they want? No, I don’t see it. And look, Elon still insists that he’s pro-Ukraine, and… Okay.

Elon found himself in a very peculiar situation. He has a controlling interest in SpaceX, which is a private though heavily regulated business. SpaceX built a civilian telecom network, Starlink. SpaceX provided access to the civilian Starlink network to government officials in Ukraine fighting a desperate war for survival against a major US geopolitical adversary – a war that US policy seems dedicated to driving to a costly stalemate. Starlink became weight bearing infrastructure for the entire Ukrainian war effort, attracting levels of Russian cyber offense that would have crippled any other company – and Pentagon officials are on record saying how impressed they were at SpaceX’s ability to roll out defensive software patches.

So now Elon – a civilian business leader based in the US, personally owns a system that has been converted into a weapon of terrifying power being used outside of his control by a non-NATO country against a nuclear-armed totalitarian expansionist pariah nation, and the US (obviously) has not formally declared war against Russia. Does that make Elon a space pirate? A privateer but without a Letter of Marque? If Lockheed Martin ships a bunch of old stock to Kyiv under direct presidential authorization then that’s a bit different – they’re in the weapons business after all.

Elon was understandably concerned about his personal culpability in owning a network being used in ways that, let’s say, violate the terms of service with his knowledge. For the record, you are not allowed to strap your Starlink antenna to a drone and then kamikaze that drone into the warships of another country. AFAIK, US law has no carve out like Section 230 that would protect SpaceX from liability in cases of misuse like this.

We literally just had a huge damn Nolan film about Oppenheimer and fully half the film was about the conflict between civilian scientists and the apparatus of state power deciding who would get to control the “physics package” doomsday weapon. We’re speed running that entire thing all over again!

As of now, SpaceX has set up a parallel product “Starshield” for military use which, importantly, creates a mechanism whereby Starlink customers (including me) are not having to foot the bill for SpaceX’s costs incurred by being attacked by Russian hackers, and the DoD retains control, legal authority, and moral responsibility for the use of the technology in theaters of war.

Elon already was barely able to exist in public places without overwhelming security detail rivaling the Presidential Secret Service, but now that Russia views his meddling in an undeclared war as the critical factor slowing down their advance I would imagine his paranoia might have increased a notch or two. I hope he’s staying away from upper floor windows.

But U.S. officials are now in the awkward position of having to defer to him on policy. One Pentagon spokesman even said he’d let a reporter interview an official only if Musk gave permission, saying, “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to.”

I for one am shocked, shocked that a spokesman for the DoD gave an evasive answer about control of an enormously important space asset, whose uses are classified and whose contracts are definitely covered by a bulletproof NDA. When was the last time the DoD gave access to reporters about classified projects run by Lockheed? What projects?

Which isn’t great! “Before I respond on behalf of the mightiest military on earth, let me just run this up the chain and make sure it’s cool with admiral dank memes 420.” Elon Musk couldn’t have humiliated the Pentagon any more if he had opened up his own building next door called “The Hexagon: the Pentagon that fucks.” Now, the Pentagon has since signed a contract with Starlink to take over certain services and rely less on Musk’s whim. But even Elon’s own biographer [Walter Isaacson] has expressed unease about how important he’s become.

Interviewer: So how does Elon feel about having this much global power?

Isaacson: You know, he says to me, “How am I in the middle of this?” But frankly, he loves it. He loves drama. He loves being the epic hero. I think it is a little bit dangerous, because he loves it too much.

I think it’s unfortunate that so much of this Starlink-Ukraine drama unfolded towards the end of Isaacson’s time with Elon, because the aspects of Elon’s character that it revealed didn’t have a chance to get fully integrated into the text of the biography (much of which was quite derivative of Ashlee Vance’s earlier work). Indeed, Isaacson’s bio lays bare the fundamental challenge of the medium, particularly when writing about, and with access to, living people. Isaacson and Vance have tried damn hard to communicate something about Elon’s inner life to a general audience in ways they can understand, and it is clear at least to me that they have not been entirely successful – indeed full success is probably impossible. The furthest Isaacson seemed willing to go was to compare Elon’s worst character traits to those of his long estranged and increasingly crazy father Errol.

So what we learn from this soundbite is that Isaacson sees in Elon someone who has grown comfortable in the limelight and seeks inspiration from other singular figures in history – many of whom Isaacson has written about! The implication in John Oliver’s show is that Elon is mercurial about the mission and I don’t think this is correct. Elon is definitely mercurial but the success of his companies over multiple decades working on a succession of impossibly tough problems is an unfakeable testament to a deep commitment to make sure that the stuff that matters actually gets done.

It’s also important to mention that while Elon is powerful, he’s powerful mostly by the standards of successful entrepreneurs, which is to say he has “owns a newspaper” power, not “owns a fleet of nuclear submarines” power. His companies are enormous and successful and their collective revenue is a rounding error on the scale of a US federal government agency or any other major country. He has board control at Tesla and SpaceX, but Xi controls the CCP and Putin is effectively president for life. It’s a different level.

John: Wait, he “loves drama?” I’m really not comfortable with one of the most powerful people on earth being summed up the same way you’d describe Andy Cohen on New Year’s Eve. [Laughter] Look, the fact is, whether we like it or not, and the answer is absolutely not, a huge number of very important things going forward are going to depend on how Elon is feeling. Which is a terrifying thing to say about anyone, but especially this guy. So what can be done? Well, it’s actually simple: we just create a robust infrastructure economy that can resist easy monopolization by private firms headed by overconfident billionaires, and we do it about 15 years ago. Two problems with that: one, time machines don’t exist. And two, the only person with the resources and ambition to build one is the last guy you’d want to do that, because he’d probably use it to go back in time and high-five baby Hitler.

Yikes. I think Oliver is implying here that Elon would build a time machine to go back in time to high-five baby Hitler, presumably as a callback to the earlier bit about antisemitism, rather than in reference to Elon’s concern about the stalemate in Ukraine echoing World War 1 and the longer term impacts of that frozen conflict, which also bore on the rise of the Nazis in Europe and the root causes of the Holocaust. In any case, it’s a strange thing to joke about. Anyone who has read a single book about the history of WW2 would see through this hand-wavey and pretty gross insinuation that Elon and Hitler are in some way similar. Elon has a strange personality but has shown no signs of seeking power through violence to pursue a personal vendetta against a religious ethnicity – it doesn’t seem to be his style.

And look, I’ll be honest. My feelings about Elon changed a bit in the writing of this piece. I’m probably now more impressed by what he’s doing, but more worried by the fact he’s the one who’s been doing it. Because he cultivates an image that he’s simply too visionary, too original to play by other people’s rules, and he waves away the damage he does as the cost of innovation and saving humanity. But the truth is, that way of thinking isn’t remotely original. We’ve seen it so many times before. The least surprising thing on earth is a middle-aged billionaire CEO with self-serving libertarian views, increasingly racist politics, and a messiah complex.

I think this is a reference to Donald Trump? Who is not exactly middle-aged and does not exactly have a track record of success in business. But if John Oliver is the sort of person who is threatened by competent people building effective organizations to mass produce futuristic technology that has already saved hundreds of thousands of lives then I don’t know what to say.

And it’s long past time he faced the kind of accountability that should come with that — not just from the echo chamber he bought himself online — but from everyone whose lives are very much affected by him.

I’m not sure what Oliver means here by accountability. The sort of accountability handed out to other car companies that cheat emissions tests but rarely result in jail time for senior leaders? Or politically-motivated investigations harassing law-abiding public citizens whose efforts build businesses that safeguard our national security and make us all richer?

And I know Elon might be unhappy with this piece. He might even permanently delete my Twitter account, which is fine by me; after all, when this absolute treasure is gone, Elon’s the one who will have to explain why to the earth. And he might well say, he’s saving humanity — what have I ever done? What industries have I revolutionized? Well, I admit, nothing yet…

And this gets dangerously close to the truth. John Oliver is a professional entertainer. His show is ostensibly successful, running for nine years so far. But like Rachel Maddow, it seems to have suffered the indignity of audience capture and now seeks mostly to reinforce existing biases than to inform and discuss complex topics. John, it’s not too late to start working on hardware. It’s a lot easier to criticize than to build.

My purpose here was not to single out Last Week Tonight for special treatment, but instead to use its tightly formatted laundry list of the usual anti-Elon canards as a jumping off point for a discussion of these broader issues. If your goal is to attain insight into the functioning of the universe, it is necessary to approach questions with curiosity, humility, and empathy. It is always more complicated than it seems and any simple explanation is bound to be wrong.

What Elon and his companies do is barely comprehensible even to interested, well-informed outsiders like me. It may be too much to expect that professional entertainers care about getting the story right. But it does matter, because the problems that Elon and other deep tech entrepreneurs are working on matter. Their products change the world and pull us forward into the future, a future I think is unimaginably bright. How many more person-years of grinding poverty must the human race endure? It would be easier for us to get to a bright future faster if shows like John’s were able to celebrate innovation and help align more people towards working productively on technology that benefits everyone.