“A lot of the time, his promises are outright fraudulent”
Gurus generally are a bad thing. We should be wary of the power of rich industrialists to set the agenda for society’s future and to attract large numbers of followers based on their personal visions. Musk is particularly dangerous because he gives people romantic science-fiction dreams: going to Mars, revolutionizing transport. A lot of the time, his promises are outright fraudulent.
He told us he would be going to Mars in 2010, again in 2015, he promised the Hyperloop and a submarine to rescue Thai children trapped in a cave. A lot of the time, it’s just hype — and not always harmless. People have been killed because they believed their Teslas would drive themselves, just as Elon Musk said they could.
There’s a great Youtube video that explains how engineers distinguish between what they call AM, the world of “actual machines” (real engineering), and FM, which is the world of “fucking magic”. Elon Musk is often in the world of FM. That’s certainly true of his tunnel plans, which do not revolutionize public transport by reducing traffic as claimed because you get clogs at their entrance and exit. He told the City of Miami he could build tunnels for a fraction of the costs their engineers calculated. It hasn’t happened. All the experts say that he’s promising the impossible.
The climate crisis is urgent, America has to make huge public investments to build green cities and Musk is talking about Mars. Billionaires like the idea of fleeing to space — it means they don’t have the responsibility of trying to care for the earth. These guys are very good at selling a vision. Trump is the same. They’re storytellers with a feudalistic vision. That’s the problem with Musk, along with cryptocurrencies and his stupid tweets about Covid-19.
We need better dreams than Elon Musk’s: we need to believe in a wonderful, possible human future.