Well, first of all, although he wrangled a way to get himself legally listed as a “founder” of Tesla, he did not actually start the company, and he drove out actual founders (Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning) after providing Series A (post-‘seed’) financing. Like much of his claimed accomplishments this has been subject to repeated revision until the story that he tells now scarcely reflects any actual history. He claims to have been intimately involved in every single aspect of the design of the Model S which is so risible to anyone familiar with vehicle engineering that it can be dismissed on the face of the claim but of course his adoring fans lap it up. (Musk has also had a continuing petty feud with Eberhard, denying him the first production Tesla Roadster that he was supposed to receive as part of his contract and widely disparaging his well-documented contributions to the early development.) The less said about the Cybertruck the better but Musk has been making pronouncements about how Full Self Driving would be available on Tesla cars any day now, going back to 2015, even though they’re still having basic problems with adaptive cruise control to the point of posing a significant hazard to occupants and others, a capability most other car manufacturers have managed to mature to a highly reliable state.
There are a number of electric car companies that have been “started from scratch”; many have failed as is typical with startups but a few are still making a go, as are established manufactures with the industry base and supply chains to produce electric cars in more than boutique numbers. The idea that Tesla is ‘saving the planet’ is something Musk has made a large meal of as enabled by the tech media loving him up but the reality is even if he built a Tesla for every US and European citizen the effect it would have on carbon emissions would be in a fraction of a percent, notwithstanding the embodied carbon cost in the manufacturing of new cars and that even his ‘budget’ Model 3 is still out of the price range of even most middle class Americans without subsidy.
Starlink certainly promises to provide high bandwidth access worldwide, but we’ll see how that goes once the system is taxed to anywhere near its planned capacity. Regardless of how well it works I fail to see how it can meet the necessary income to be fiscally viable even assuming users worldwide can afford the fees. What it really does is allow the US and other developed companies avoid having to treat internet access as a necessary utility like power and telephony, and make access to fiber optic lines a priority for rural areas even if it isn’t profitable. Of course, what happens when you have a large number of people dependent upon satellite internet suddenly experience a mass outage due to a Carrington Event-like geomagnetic storm or hacking/sabotage can be left to the imagination. This is notwithstanding the potential of thousands of satellites leading to a cascade impact failure (e.g. Kessler Syndrome) resulting in a denial of entire orbital azimuths and the problems that such a vast fleet of satellites will pose to ground based astronomy.
SpaceX has done a remarkable job of reducing costs in spaceflight and essentially revitalizing the commercial spaceflight industry, and I have to admit a degree of * schadenfreude* in ULA CEO Tory Bruno of admitting that they could cut their costs by ~50% in response to SpaceX winning EELV contracts (validating a study I worked on a couple of decades ago demonstrating essentially the same reduction) but despite trying to portray those developments as some kind of massive technological leap the Falcon 9 is actually a very conventional launch vehicle, and the reasons that other companies didn’t invest in developing reusability is because it didn’t make fiscal sense. Given that SpaceX has not driven launch costs—including its own—down by the originally claimed order of magnitude, and has never actually published a real listing of launch and refurbishment costs, I suspect this is still the case, although the advantage to reuse in terms of launch tempo may still make it worthwhile assuming continuing market demand.
The “Occupy Mars” nonsense and Elon’s febrile ramblings about using “Starship” to explore the Solar System is far less impressive, and I’m still waiting to see anything more than ‘renderings’ of the Lunar landing system that NASA has awarded them a $2.9B contract to provide. What they have done in Brownsville to the residents of Boca Chica and the impacts upon the adjacent wildlife preserves is another matter entirely, especially with the contradictions between their stated plans and what was submitted on their environmental impact statement suggests that Elon and SpaceX are less concerned about the environment and society at large that they advertise.
Of course, there is Elon’s habit of SLAPP suing anyone who disagrees with him, insulting and slandering people who point out his self-serving claims are bogus, the ongoing issues of harassment, discrimination, health & safety violations, labor-busting, and reported wastes at the Tesla Fremont facility, and his overall public displays of entitled billionaire douchebaggery even before you get to his constant squabbles with the SEC, and the Solar City debacle. Being the “world’s wealthiest person” winging about paying taxes, which having gotten a lot of recent attention, barely registers on the scale of things and is really just a symptom of a larger systemic problem with how very wealthy people can shield themselves from any responsibility to the nation that provides them with the educated labor force, infrastructure, and technological developments that enable them to build such wealth to begin with.
But hey, there isn’t any bad behavior that a few cheaply-bought publicity stunts can’t erase from public memory, amirite?
Stranger