Elon Musk is not a genius, He just made you think he is.
By Sagar Vellalath
In a question and answer session with Elon Musk, a man identified as Roy Philipose said “I’ve been asking to speak to you for two years now, to tell you that I’m also a super-genius like yourself”.
Elon Musk is perceived to be the typical genius success story: a meteoric rise from rags to riches catapulted by the power of his intellect. However, this is far from the reality. In fact, this perception is the result of carefully calculated image creation efforts on the part of Musk and his team. The reality conveys a much bleeker, darker reality of who Musk really is.
Musk is not really “Self-Made”
One of the reasons that Musk has garnered such widespread acclaim is the false narrative that he is a self-made entrepreneur. Contrary to public perception, Musk was not born into destitute conditions, in fact his family was wealthy. Perhaps the reason Musk did not want many to know that he was born into wealth was because of the manner in which his family garnered that wealth which his father claims was by owning a Zambian mine. Mines in Africa were and still are notorious for the exploitation of the laborers, predominantly Black African miners to enrich white colonizers. Further demonstrating that Musk is not the self-made entrepreneur that he is widely viewed as is the falsehood commonly believed that Musk is the founder of the Tesla corporation and the PayPal corporation, when in reality he did not found either corporation. In 2009, Musk was sued by Tesla’s first CEO because Musk declared himself as the founder of the corporation and eventually Musk was forced to settle in court for the title of founder. Similarly, Musk also made significant efforts to establish himself as the founder of PayPal, the product of a company that one of his start-ups merged with. Musk was not the founder of either company nor was he the sole creator of the proprietary technology. However, because of his efforts to claim the founder titles of both corporations many people believe he is the genius behind both products. Musk is setting it up to appear as if he himself is the creator of these innovative products, when he is really just reaping the benefits of others’ efforts. Furthermore, Tesla’s success can also be heavily attributed to a nearly half billion dollar bailout that the company received in 2009. In fact, Musk’s corporations have received over $5 Billion dollars combined in government subsidies.
Musk’s Grotesque Selfishness
Musk is often revered for his intellect, considered by many as a genius, however there is no evidence of this supposed brilliance. In fact, there are many incidents that have been reported which include Musk acting ignorantly many times primarily in an effort to commit public relations stunts. For example, in 2019 when a group of boys in a soccer team were stuck in a Thailand cave, Musk presented a mini-submarine as a way of saving the suffering children. However, the submarine was not at all apt to take on the mission of saving those children, and the diver who eventually saved the children claimed correctly that Musk had offered the minisubmarine as a PR stunt. After which Musk conducted a slander campaign against the diver claiming that he was a pedophile, and the diver responded by suing Musk for slander. Musk utilized a tragic situation as an opportunity for a publicity stunt, obscene behavior that was extremely disrespectful to the kids who were in danger. Musk also proposes outlandish projects without specifics or providing technology blueprint. For example, Musk’s highly impractical and costly project with his corporation The Boring Corporation has been heavily criticized. Musk has announced and signed agreements with cities to deliver a transportation system of tunnels through his corporation, The Boring Company. However, a recent editor’s note in Tunneling Journal, an industry publication, dismissed Musk’s Vegas tunnels as a mere “vanity project.” Moreover, Jian Zhao, a professor of civil engineering and a tunnel boring expert at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said that he didn’t see how the Boring Co., given their current approach, would be “able to do things as they promised. I don’t see any new technology being mentioned.” There have been numerous reports citing little to no progress on the agreed upon transportation systems and lambasting the project as impractical. Moreover, Musk is generally lauded as a revolutionary for combating climate change, however his solutions to the existential crisis of climate change are deeply flawed. Individual electric cars are not a very scalable solution for climate change because of the cost of the cars for each individual as well as the fact that most of the population of the world live in cities in which individual cars are much less relied upon. The time it would take for a full transition to electric cars is also likely too long to prevent the major damage from climate change. Moreover, because there needs to be so many electric cars that are produced, the resulting pollution from Tesla’s factories in creating the electric cars is actually exacerbating the climate crisis. A much more feasible plan would be to emphasize electric public transportation and to massively expand public transportation, such as through a national rail system and perhaps even a national electric bus system. Another series of events displaying Musk’s selfishness and ignorance were his tweets denying the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. Elon Musk has one of the largest platforms on Twitter with 34 million Twitter followers. At the end of January, Musk compared Coronavirus to the Flu, which is obviously dramatically understating the devastating impact of the coronavirus. With such a large following, spreadinging false narratives that the coronavirus is just the flu could have and likely did result in exacerbating the spread of the coronavirus resulting in more COVID deaths. Moreover, “in early March, […] Musk declared that ‘the coronavirus panic is dumb” and compared the lockdown precautions to the forcible imprisonment of people. Musk in March also tweeted that “ the United States would have ‘probably close to zero’ new COVID-19 cases by the end of April.” Not only is Musk sharing these false, awful talking points understating and minimizing the devastation of the COVID pandemic, it is apparent that Musk’s reasons for propagating these myths are not out of conviction but out of pure self interest. Musk was primarily concerned with the closing of his Tesla factory in California due to the COVID lockdown, hence he began saying all of these ridiculous COVID denying talking points and ultimately he moved his factory to Texas so that it could reopen during the peak of the pandemic. This shows not only Musk’s ignorance but his outright disregard for human life that he does not view as on the same level as his, which are the lives of his workers at his facilities.
Tesla Factories Have Very Poor Working Conditions.
Musk has repeatedly demonstrated a complete disregard for the conditions that his workers have to endure. In an SF Weekly Article, a Tesla employee Carlos Gabriel detailed Tesla’s factories as a “modern day sweatshop’’. “They’re using all the tactics they can to keep you from leaving,” Gabriel said. He claims that the company paid the employees their accrued PTO over one week so that the employees could not choose to stay at home and utilize their accrued PTO to avoid coming in when there were unsafe working conditions. Moreover, the SF Weekly article elaborated further that “Gabriel says he often works 72-hour weeks, and Art, [a 61 year old assembly line employee] says he doesn’t know whether his 8-hour shift will be extended to 10 hours, or when his brakes will be, until he arrives to work that day. Oftentimes, he says, he’s unable to eat his lunch, because his lunch break will be called hours earlier or later than expected. He adds that shift breaks are the bare legal minimum — 35 minutes for lunch, and 10 minutes to rest every two to three hours — which is difficult to maximize when he has to walk to break rooms located far from the assembly line.” Gabriel also described the workplace as cultish, citing that due to CEO Elon Musk’s tweets in denial of the Coronavirus Pandemic that workers felt pressured not to take the necessary precautions to appear aligned with their CEO. According to the Intercept’s Deconstructed Podcast, employees have even said that the company’s working conditions were straight from the Jim Crow Era. Podcast host Mehdi Hasan recounted that Black employees at Tesla complained that higher ups were ignoring their complaints about racism in the workplace, and Musk responded by instructing those workers to be “more thick-skinned”. Moreover, Hasan cites that “between 2014–2018 Tesla was the subject of 24 health and safety investigations, resulting in a quarter of a million fines for 54 violations.” In one specific incident “in 2018, an investigation by Reveal News into injuries at the Tesla car plant in Northern California revealed how a safety professional at the company went to her boss to complain about the lack of yellow hazard lines and pedestrian markings on the factory floor, and she was told: ‘Elon does not like the color yellow.”
Musk’s Image v.s Reality
Musk played little to no role in the creation of the proprietary technology of Tesla or Paypal and despite now having bought the title of founder, Musk did not found either company. Moreover, his claim of coming from rags to riches is a complete falsehood that he fabricated to cover up the fact that his parents owned a colonist mine in Zambia. There are numerous incidents displaying his ignorance and his selfishness and there are countless reports that detail the horrific working conditions that workers are forced to endure as they work at Tesla.
Musk is clearly not the good fortuned, innovative genius that he has made an effort to be viewed as. In reality, he is a man who was born into wealth and utilized that wealth to exploit others and amass even more wealth and then simultaneously cultivated a public perception that he is an extraordinary genius. So remember next time you hear someone say “Elon Musk is a genius”, you should say “No! he just duped you into believing so”.
