Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this not a common trait among most of the high-level tech CEOs? We hear of lack of humanity across much of the tech industry when you get up to that level. All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others.
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But even if you don't care about Musk's personal attitude, and just like his results... his results absolutely, positively suck. I'll go point by point, as all of them are overstated and fall apart when you look at the details:
- Making EVs mainstream: He bought the founder seat of an EV company (and sued the actual founders over who's allowed to use the word "founder"). The one car that was a clean-sheet Musk design, the Cybertruck, was a huge flop you can't even take into a car wash without remembering to put into "Car Wash mode". Also, Tesla as a company engages in comically owner-hostile parts pairing, their cars have some of the worst fit-and-finish issues I've ever seen, they feel a constant need to reinvent how cars work to make them seem "futuristic", and the only thing stopping BYD from handing them their ass on a silver platter is the fact that the US government engages in shittons of domestic car company protectionism.
- Helping paralyzed people interact with the world: In clinical trials on a handful of human subjects, many of which already have had complications due to the BCI device failing. I admit I don't know enough about medical devices to know where Musk hid the bullshit here, but I do know other companies are doing similar things already.
- Reducing traffic in LV: I genuinely do not understand how you could come to this conclusion about the Vegas Loop unless you have never stepped foot in Vegas. The Loop is a god damned joke of a service. The tunnels only exist between one convention center and about two integrated resort hotels; everywhere else the Loop is just a glorified taxi service with an app that barely works.
What he should have built was an actual underground train line, but all these techbros that want to solve traffic don't want to touch trains with a 100 foot pole, because that costs real money and Musk just wanted to aurafarm.
- Cutting government fraud: He eviscerated USAID for being in SpaceX's way, punched a bunch of security holes in critical government IT infrastructure, and made a bunch of really tiny penny-pinching cuts that were almost immediately undone by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act dramatically increasing government spending. Oh, and because of the DOGE cuts, America has new world screwworm again.
The entire premise of DOGE - that there's an exorbitant amount of unidentified waste and fraud that is primarily contained in small-scale discretionary spending programs - is nearly bullshit. I say nearly, because there IS waste and fraud - it's just that the waste and fraud is in the form of well-paid McKinsey consultants and military contractors. Both of which have lobbyists that can get Congress to pass all sorts of bills to enshrine their waste and fraud as politically untouchable, including and especially by DOGE[0]. Ergo, DOGE was doomed from the start to only be able to deal with insignificant amounts of fraud.
- Making reusable rockets: SpaceX's rockets are only partially reusable (the second stage is still disposed of) and they have to spend a lot extra for the equipment to make the first stage and cone able to land. Also, every launch and landing must be paired with an expensive refurbishment process as landing is extremely stressful. In other words, reusable rockets are really dumb.
The reason why SpaceX is doing this really dumb thing is because they run a satellite ISP, Starlink. The problem with satellite Internet is that going up into space increases your latency (thanks, Einstein) and having a lot of people hitting the same satellite lowers the bandwidth it can push. Musk's solution is to put the satellites into a lower orbit - but the problem is, at Low Earth Orbit you can't stay locked to one position on Earth. And satellites are a shared medium: the more people using the service, the worse it gets. So you need a lot more satellites to provide service equivalent to wired ISPs. All these extra satellites in low-Earth orbit create light pollution that makes terrestrial astronomy impossible, and also pollute the orbits they're in with junk if they get damaged.
I'm noticing a bit of a pattern here: Musk suggests something really stupid and thinks we can just engineer our way around the stupidity, because the stupid thing is there specifically to get around an essential expense of the problem. Why is the Vegas Loop a bunch of Teslas and a tunnel that only covers like a quarter of the system? Because the obvious solution - a train - is too expensive to build, and people like Musk want car-like social isolation[1] on every mode of transportation. Why is SpaceX so obsessed with reusable rockets? Because it'll let them spam LEO with satellites, which they need in order for Starlink to work, because just building a wired ISP or a traditional cellular ISP is expensive and fundamentally unsexy work.
At least when Steve Jobs reinvented the wheel, his wheel was usually rounder and smoother.
[0] If there is a theme of the second Trump administration, it is the concept of impoundment. The thing is, this is explicitly unconstitutional; the President cannot refuse to spend money Congress tells them to spend. And corporate interests generally tend to win bigly in court against Trump. So if DOGE had done the smart thing and went after McKinsey, they probably still would have lost.
[1] As an autistic person, I'd accuse this of being an anti-social autistic tendency, but we also really like trains.