Why do People Dislike Elon Musk?

Many people have commented about how Elon Musk denounced requirements for businesses to shut down because of the coronavirus, and how he blatantly violated those requirements, keeping his Tesla plant in Fremont, California open and churning out cars. Disappointingly few people have been pointing out why Musk did this: his pay from Tesla, Inc comes in the form of bonuses which are tied to several factors, and one of those factors is the number of vehicles Tesla makes. Once again this year, Musk will get a bonus worth several billion dollars, and one reason is because Tesla kept churning out those cars.

Did the Tesla employees on the assembly lines also get bonuses for hitting production goals? No. But I gather that they do get attaboy emails from Musk, telling them what a good job they're doing, and how they're saving the world.

What do they get when they talk about improving safety conditions, or about unions? They get fired.

Now, when people like me complain about how Musk mistreats his employees, or when we repeats those awfully persistent rumours that the Tesla assembly lines don't look nearly as shiny as clean as in the photos which Tesla allows to go public,

or how Musk milks the company for money, or lies to the public about how much his cars cost or about the terms he offered to other companies to join in with Tesla's Supercharger network, or discourages people from fixing their own Teslas although Tesla service is notoriously slow and expensive, or about how Musk has nothing but verbal abuse and downright slander for any company which hints that it might begin to compete with Tesla for a share of the EV market, or about how he won a lawsuit to allow him to call himself a founder of Tesla even though he's not, or about how he calls someone who rescued a group of boys from dying in a cave a pedophile, or about how the real Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man who was shabbily treated by the billionaire businessman Thomas Edison, who constantly took credit for his employees' ideas and hard work while ruthlessly eliminating competing corporations, or other complaints about how Musk is a thieving, fraudulent, cruel monster ripping off those who adore him, or what have you, we often hear the response that Tesla is revolutionizing the auto industry, and that it wouldn't be a success without Musk. But are either of those answers true?

We hear from Musk's ardent disciples -- this is a cult we're talking about -- that Tesla wouldn't exist today if Musk hadn't rescued it with money from his own pocket. They seem to believe that Musk quite selflessly offered all of the money he had in order to keep Tesla going.

No. Musk invested $30 million dollars in Tesla in 2004. This was not all of the money Musk had at the time: he had recently sold his share in PayPal for over a billion dollars.

That's right: although Musk didn't found Tesla, he did co-found PayPal. Have you heard lots of comments about how PayPal is a wonderful company which is making the world a better, safer, fairer, cleaner, more righteous place? Yeah, neither have I. In fact I've never heard a single comment remotely like that. But the next company Musk is involved with, suddenly, boom, you hear all of that all of the time, and you hear that it's all because of Musk.

So, Musk invested $30 million in Tesla in 2004, and now he's being paid several billion dollars every year. That's a pretty good return on investment -- it's pretty good for Musk, I mean. I'm not sure it's good for anyone else.

Would Tesla have gone under if not for that $30 million from Musk? It's hard for me to imagine that they would have. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars from other sources around the time they Musk put in his $30 million.

And now Tesla is making cars in China, home of those sweatshops which manufacture iPhones and Nikes and other products from companies which claim to be progressive. What's progressive about sweatshops? Why aren't more people asking what working conditions are like for Tesla employees in China?

What you hear more often than any other answer, when people like me disrespect Elon Musk, is that we're all jealous cause he's so cool and so successful and so brilliant.

Yeah. That must be it.

Dream Log: Art and Ohio State

I can remember a lot of my dreams since the coronavirus crisis started. Last night's dream was the first one where there was a pandemic in the dream.

I was in Columbus, Ohio, on the campus of the Ohio State University,

in order to attend a meeting intended to aid low-income people. However, the other people at the meeting would not respect social distancing from me, so I left before the meeting started, and wandered around the campus. On the way out of the meeting I found a key on the floor, but I didn't know what to do with it.

Social distancing was not being respected very much at all: for example, an Ohio State football game was about to get underway. I steered clear of the football crowd. On my way past them, I noticed a group of about twenty people in wheelchairs. A member of the Ohio State football team got behind each wheelchair, and together they ran, pushing the wheelchairs ahead of them, into the stadium. The crowd roared as soon as they got a sight of the speeding wheelchairs.

I walked through some campus buildings, looking at some library books which were not shelved in the main library. One book was a literary-and-visual-arts journal for Chilean expatriates. It was written in English, but everything was full of Chilean references which I did not get. I liked the illustrations, though, many of which were in a colorful sort of post-Matisse style.

Then an idiot neighbor of mine, several houses away, woke me up with a hammer and an electrical saw, making some stupid home-improvement stuff, just as he has been waking me up -- and quite a few others in the neighborhood, I'm sure -- very early most Sunday mornings for a long, long time. However, I fell asleep again very quickly, and in my dream, now I was both in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State, and simultaneously at home in Ann Arbor. And my neighbor was no longer a home-improvement boob oblivious to his neighbors and their sleep patterns, and was now instead an artist who used the hammer and saw to make works consisting of vertical rows of wooden panels about 15 inches square. An interesting thing about the panels was that they were decorated -- with paint, mostly -- in a very wide array of colors and styles. I made two fabric panels the same size as his wooden panels, one with a silkscreened image of an early-20th-century American politician, and the other very colorful,and hard-edged, very post-Ellsworth Kelly:

I offered these pieces of fabric to my neighbor, for him to add to the wooden artworks. He bought the one with the silkscreen image of the politician for $10, and passed on the colorful hard-edged piece.

Then I was back in Columbus. I met someone I knew decades ago when I lived in Columbus, and we sat in a huge deserted student union building outside of a shuttered cafe, talking. Suddenly the cafe's manager appeared, tossed me a bunch of keys on a ring and walked away. Just like with the key I'd found outside the meeting earlier, I had no idea what I should do with these keys. Then I woke up.

Coronavirus and the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919

About 100 years ago, there was a worldwide flu pandemic which killed between 17 and 100 million people. The latest statistics I've seen for the coronavirus say that deaths are still under 1/4 of a million. After killing millions of people, influenza a century ago quickly mutated into a much less deadly strain. It wasn't until decades later that a flu vaccine was developed. And maybe someday, we'll be able to convince people to actually take the flue vaccine.

I've been thinking about the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, because it seems to me that the flu back then was about as contagious and deadly as coronavirus, and that the difference in casualties between the pandemic back then and the current one has a lot to do with the helpful, simple advice which science has given us to deal with coronavirus: stay away from other people. Don't touch your face. Wash your hands regularly.

By contrast, governments around the world censored information about the flu pandemic. They tried to keep people from finding out that there was an epidemic at all. And they did such a thorough job of that, that to to this day, many people have still never heard of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, and we still don't know whether it killed 17 million or 100 million people.

It may seem very cruel, in the midst of all the current suffering, for me to say that things have been much worst in the past. But they have, and humanity survived, and what I'm trying to do here is not to be cruel but to give people hope. For all of the sheer stupidity leading to illness and death at the current time, a century ago, a comparable outbreak of illness was handled much worse still, and we survived, and we learned, and we developed vaccines and worldwide institutions to anticipate and react intelligently to epidemics. Yes, clearly, many people are reacting stupidly to coronavirus, and it's getting people killed. Still, it's not as bad as the flu pandemic a century ago, and the main reason why is because, overall, we're reacting and behaving much better, much more intelligently and effectively. We're putting into effect what we've learned from earlier epidemics.

And as horrible as the news is now, day after day, I firmly believe that we will survive this, and that we will come out of this smarter and wiser than we were. That's how I see things, looking through the perspective of centuries.

Now, back to the daily horror: how do we get through to the people, from governors in some states to protesters in other states -- and for once the news from the US is so horrible that, frankly, I don't even know much about how things are being handled in other countries. I'm overwhelmed by the domestic news -- how do we get through to these people, and get them to follow the very simple procedures, distance, masks, washing hands, which work so well?

I don't know.

All I can think of to do is to urge everyone who reads this to think about what we can do to get through to those people, before it's a matter of horrible, obvious statistics showing in hindsight that they were wrong. We need persuasiveness so urgently right now. I feel my lack of persuasiveness so intensely.

But I can't give up. I have to urge all of you not to give up. Try to change people's minds, to save lives.

Science, Art and the Coronavirus

Perhaps you've heard: the unfortunate conflict between scientists and artists is still going on. This conflict is not always such a big deal, but, perhaps you've heard, there's a deadly worldwide plague going on.

Not every scientist is in conflict with every artist. Some scientists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of the arts, and some artists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of science. These people -- I don't know how large a group they represent, I can only hope the group is large and growing quickly -- have grasped that neither science nor art by itself can address all human needs. They realize that art and science can compliment and help each other.

Then there are people like Frank Castorf, an idiot and perhaps Germany's most famous living theatre director. He's become even more famous in the past couple of days by publicly complaining that he doesn't like being told by Angela Merkel to wash his hands, and that he resents not being able to shop and dine out as he is accustomed to do.

And so, since he is one of Germany's most prominent representatives of art, he's causing a lot of damage. Who knows how many deaths he will be directly responsible for.

I wonder, does Castorf resent Merkel telling him what to do because she's a woman? If Germany had a male Chancellor at the moment who was passing along the advice of scientists -- that's all that Merkel is doing, of course: passing along the advice of scientists about how we can best hope to survive this epidemic, not exercising any sort of personal authority over Frank Castorf -- would Castorf enthusiastically support social distancing and masks and hand washing? I suspect he might. He might think of it as a paramilitary sort of discipline. He has some stupid macho tendencies.

Castorf is also, like Donald Trump, making this worldwide crisis all about him. He claims that before the coronavirus outbreak, young people in the theatre wanted old men in the theatre to die as soon as possible. (Castorf is 68 years old.), and that now they want to save every old man they can, even with such allegedly fascist measures as compulsory hand-washing.

No sensible person I know agrees with Castorf that young theatre people were ever wishing old men dead. I suspect the truth may be more something such as that now and then, some big-mouthed, wise-assed young people have said that they wish that Castorf would retire, and Castorf is blowing that way out of proportion and using this particularly thin excuse to wallow in self-pity, at a particularly bad time and in a particularly destructive way.

This conflict between art and science comes from artists and scientists not appreciating what the other group can do. Some scientists think that science can solve all of humanity's problems, some artists think that art can solve all of humanity's problems, and, of course, they're all mistaken. We need both.

Social distancing, masks and hand-washing will save lives. Science has told us that, and there is no doubt at all that science is correct about that. We still have a problem, though, because many people are not listening to this very simple and important message from science. Scientists know how people should best respond to a pandemic, but they don't know how to convince people to respond in the best way. Convincing people to take scientifically-sound, live-saving advice is something that artists are good at -- or, at least, something they can be good at, if they're not completely infantile self-pitying idiots.