Why I Hate Elon Musk
Some kind of help’s the kind of help we all can do without
Upcoming Events
Come on out to Manny’s in SF this Thursday, March 16 at 6PM for our discussion of Methane, the 100X Threat. Methane mitigation is where I cut my teeth in climate change, and it is a fascinating topic, and one of grave importance to unborking the climate.
If you’re attending, and can help out a little bit at the event with photography and videography, please shoot me a note!
And, if you missed our event last month on sustainable batteries, no worries, we’ve got you covered:
And Now…
This week, Elmo Mush decided to get into a fight on the internet with Iceland’s 2022 Person of the Year, Haraldur Þorleifsson, who who was trying to figure out if Twitter had actually fired him or not.
Elmo Mush, the world’s richest man and, decided that the right way to handle this was to publicly punch down and drag him for sport in front of his 100MM followers.
Haraldur, who uses a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy, responded by absolutely destroying Elmo:
Elmo regularly does this, whether it’s accusing an emergency aid worker of pedophilia, or his casual transphobia and fascist pandering, or stiffing thousands of workers out of the severance he promised them.
For the most part, I would like to think that I am a lover, and not a fighter. There are very few people who I actively hate, insofar as I prefer to focus my energy on useful things (working), or pleasant things (making weird stuff), or necessary things (like taking care of the two six year old vilde chayas in the house). So it leaves very little time for concerning myself with useless assholes. But sometimes, in the service of a higher good, it becomes important to hate someone, in spite of the corrosiveness of the emotion, because there are some kinds of people that humanity must hate in order to survive.
Donald Trump is one of those people. He is a dullard, a charlatan, and above all a narcissist who will do anything for attention, including plunge the country into civil unrest because someone hurt his feefees. Donald Trump is a dangerous person, and people who care about humanity should reject his fascist ideologies. Elon Musk is another such narcissist. He is a bully who isn’t genuinely interested in fixing the problems of the 8 billion people on this planet, and would rather fantasize about using his vast wealth to go to Mars and leave the other 7.999 billion suckers behind to pay down the climate debt and/or die. He positions himself as a savior because it’s profitable for him to do so, not because he cares about human beings. It’s easy to see this, because he treats actual people like shit.
The work of unborking the climate is not glamorous. It will require a lot of work on unsexy problems, like updating our creaky electrical grid, aggressively tackling fugitive methane emissions, and a shitload of infrastructure. Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown (one of the best climate advocacy resources available anywhere) likes to say that “we have all the technologies we need” to fix climate change, but I think this is a category error. The energy economy is necessarily technological, and there is a lot of work to do on the nitty gritty of transitioning ourselves away from burning things for power: the devil, as always, is in the details, and those details matter a lot.
What we do not need, however, are silver bullets to fix the climate. Most of the fundamental technologies required to operate a carbon negative economy already exist. And what we really don’t need is a “white male middle-aged tech-prophet CEO”. Unfucking the climate is a humanitarian mission, and it requires empathy for human beings, because the decisions we make will impact the entire world. Shit rolls downhill, and the worst effects of the climate crisis will be felt by the poor, the marginalized, and the powerless. Climate solutions that privilege the lives of white westerners at the expense of BIPOC are not climate solutions, they are just new-fangled ways to shift the misery burden.
I want to make it clear that I have immense respect for the engineers at Tesla. I work with two former Tesla engineers, and have nothing but respect for their grit, determination, and tenacity, in the face of leadership that has decided to prioritize sales over quality.
And, I give Tesla credit for taking a lead in the nascent and necessary work of electrification of the transportation sector. However, as much as Wall Street would like to believe it, Elon Musk is not Tesla. He did not found Tesla, and his most important contribution to Tesla has arguably been buoying the stock value by appealing to memestonk investors, engaging in exploitative labor practices, and playing footsie with the SEC.
To date, the quantifiable climate contributions of Tesla have been pretty minuscule. Part of the reason is that Tesla has a very small share of the overall car market. But, also, the US grid is only about 20% decarbonized, which means that about 80% of the electricity used to drive Teslas comes from fossil fuels. And even given all that, he now seems intent on pissing those small gains away by buying Twitter because Grimes dumped him1.
Contrast this with some of the startups that come speak at our panels, like Kairos Aerospace, the company where I cut my teeth in climate tech, and one of our featured companies at next week’s methane panel. During the time I was there, there were about 35 people total. By 2020, we were surveying the entire New Mexico Permian Basin (and much of the Texas side) to find and report methane emissions from oil and gas companies, and had begun expanding into international markets. Given that methane has 30 - 100 times the climate forcing per ton of CO22, our company of 35 people was making a climate impact larger than Tesla’s.
There is no shortage of problems to solve. But there is a limited amount of capital available to the companies driving the transition of our energy and transportation economies. Rich asshole playboys suck up oxygen and attention from the real solutions.
Climate tech is not charity. It is venture driven, and it will make a lot of people rich. But that’s a feature of capitalism, and, like it or not, we are not abolishing global capitalism in the next 50 years, so we will have to work with what capitalism gives us. But even so, with literally hundreds of millions of lives at stake, self-absorbed profiteering comes at too high a human cost to ignore.
Fuck Elon Musk.
In fairness, who among us has not made a regrettable mid-life crisis purchase. Most of us just don’t have an Amex Unobtanium card.
Damn. There’s never been an article more accurate. Kudos Matt!