IT’S A MUSK DO
Latest act typical of tech titan
AND THIS guy wants to colonize Mars. COVID-19 has unmoored selfproclaimed genius Elon Musk like nothing since the dramatic 2018 cave rescue of 12 Thai children and their coach — a rescue Musk badly tried and failed to hijack, leaving him to slander one hero diver as a “pedo.”
Tesla’s market value immediately plunged by $2 billion.
In the aftermath, a chastened Musk did a fairly good job of keeping his head down, his mouth shut and meeting Tesla production numbers — his longtime bete noire.
And then came a global pandemic, treating us all to yet another look inside this once-in-a-generation mind. It’s always a trip.
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” he tweeted on March 6.
“Maybe worth considering chloroquine for C19,” he tweeted March 16.
Days later, Dr. Anthony Fauci made it clear that chloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, had not been proven effective against coronavirus.
Undeterred, Musk tweeted not to worry, proclaiming that children are “essentially immune” to the virus.
Also not true. In fact, we’ve watched children fall ill to a potentially fatal “pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome” that our top medical minds can’t specifically diagnose.
Yet Musk loves nothing more than promoting himself as some kind of global superhero, one with a brain so expansive he can solve any crisis or manifest any vision in a flash — be it interplanetary travel or the ultra-fast fabrication of a submarine built to impossible specs or the magicking up of desperately needed, hard-to-build medical equipment.
“We have extra FDA-approved ventilators,” he tweeted on March 31. “Will ship to hospitals worldwide within Tesla delivery regions. Device & shipping costs are free. Only requirement is that the vents are needed immediately for patients, not stored in a warehouse.”
Yet as widely reported, most of what he shipped were non-invasive machines used to help patients with sleep apnea. In typical fashion — huge promises to the marketplace, little to no fulfillment
— Musk kept upping the ante, posting a photo of what he called a Tesla-engineered ventilator that we have yet to actually see.
No worries. Like the greatest con artists, Musk is adept at moving eyeballs where he wants them. So next he began agitating for the lockdown to end, tweeting that it’s a violation of civil liberties.
“FREE AMERICA NOW!” was an April 29 tweet.
If we know one thing about COVID-19, it’s this: Until there’s a vaccine, this virus is the constant. Human behavior is the variable.
Anyway, Musk must be going stircrazy, because he also tweeted that he was giving up all his material possessions, including his residence — that’s one way to be free from quarantine — with one stipulation.
“I own Gene Wilder’s house,” he tweeted. “It cannot be torn down or lose any [of] its soul.” This was after tweeting parts of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in bits and pieces.
Tesla shareholders, are you alarmed yet? Does this seem like the behavior of a stable, sober-as-a-judge CEO?
Musk and girlfriend Grimes just named their new baby boy X AE A-12. The state of California, which has allowed for Pilot Inspektor, Zuma Nesta Rock and Audio Science, may not sign off on this — which may play into Musk’s ultimate goal: claiming government overreach.
His real fight is reopening and operating his Tesla plant in California, which he did in defiance of lockdown orders. What’s that — debt, you say? A history of over-promising and underproducing? Tesla on the verge, again as ever?
No — look over here, fellow Americans. Elon Musk wants us to believe he’s a warrior for our liberty and our rights, not an over-leveraged Silicon Valley billionaire who, like the smallest of us, may be totally undone by a virus that cares not about who you are.
Or, in this case, want so badly to be.