Nobody Killed the Electric Car!

I first saw Chris Paine's documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? over 15 years ago. I've seen it several times, watching very carefully, because I'm very much interested in electric cars. But only in the past few days has it occurred to me what a melodramatic, overstated and misleading title and outlook and approach the movie has. 

The movie has to do with the General Motors EV1, an electric car made from 1996 to 1999 in order to comply with California regulations. A total of 1,117 were made. They were leased, not sold, to customers in California. And then in 2002, when Republican took over the California legislature and rescinded the electric vehicle requirements, they were all recalled, and all but a few dozen were destroyed. Most of the remaining EV1's are now in museums. I think a few may actually be on the roads, but I'm not sure about that.

I still find GM's behavior with the EV1 to have been deplorable: refusing to sell this breakthrough electric vehicle, only leasing it, although there were customers begging to be allowed to buy them, and then taking them all back and scrapping them. I am in no way defending GM's scrapping of the EV1.

But Chris Paine's movie is, I repeat, a bit melodramatic. It consists for the most part of interviews with GM employees, some of whom worked on the EV1 project and were passionately in favor of the development of the electric vehicle, and some who seemed rather sleazy; and with some of those people to whom GM leased the EV1. 

As far as the viewer can tell by the movie, GM leased the EV1 only to movie stars. I'm guessing that GM leased some of them to people who weren't movie stars. But Paine didn't interview any of them. 

And one thing about actors is that we can get pretty dramatic at times. I say "we," although I haven't acted in a while, because I know I have the drama-queen gene. 

GM didn't kill the electric car, they discontinued the EV1 leases and recalled and scrapped the EV1's. That was not nice, and in my opinion it wasn't smart at all either, but there were still other EV's on the roads. You can see some of them in Who Killed the Electric Car? For example, the Toyota Rav4 EV. In the movie, in a melodramatically tense highway scene, one of the movie stars sees a truckload of these electric Rav4's and exclaims, OMG they're going to destroy all of THOSE too! (Nope. Toyota kept making the electric Rav4 until 2014.) 

Paine's camera shakes during that scene, as if he was getting caught up in the drama. I don't think he intentionally mislead anyone. I think he was caught up. Maybe most people who interviewed that many movie stars in that short a time would get caught up. Movie stars are very riveting, persuasive people. That's why they're stars.

But all this drama had to do with around 1,000 EV's. General Motors has sold about 200,000 Chevy Bolts. Recently, they announced they were going to discontinue the Bolt, and then they quickly reversed that decision. Maybe they've learned from the negative reaction of their handling of the EV1. Before the Bolt, they sold almost as many Volts. The electric Silverado, Sierra, Celestiq, Equinox and Blazer from GM are all already on the roads and showrooms, or coming very, very soon. The recall of the EV1 represents barely a hiccup in the overall scheme of EV production from General Motors. In his follow-up documentary, Revenge of the Electric Car, Paine represents the development of the Bolt as a change of heart for General Motors, but there's no real proof that GM wasn't committed to the most effective technology all along, and in case you didn't know it, EV's are the most technologically effective vehicles, and are rapidly pulling away from internal combustion in terms of their superior function.

And that's only GM. It's a very similar story at Ford, Hyundai/Kia, VW, Sellantis, BMW, Mercedes and almost every single other major automotive manufacturer. The transition to EV's is real, and Elon Musk didn't make it happen. He just jumped out in front of this parade and has pretended to lead it. And maybe, just possibly, he watched Who Killed the Electric Car? and saw how much fuss movie stars could stir up over a thousand EV's, and so decided to make them his first marketing niche and unwitting advertising department.

Will Musk Destroy His Own Success?

The thing about Musk is, he's always talking about himself, and he's always lying.

And -- now this is significant -- he's not even particularly good at lying. The thing he does all day long  every day, and he's not good at it. So people notice.

 

He keeps alienating one significant demographic after another. He refers to himself as an engineering genius, but any actual engineer can easily see that he's faking being an engineer, and taking the credit for the work of many engineers who've worked for him. How many engineers are there in the world? A job at Tesla used to be a dream destination for many engineering students. It surely is much less so than it once was. Less than outstanding pay, a boss who takes credit for everything you do, the risk of being rage-fired at any moment for no good reason...

He claims he's autistic, and we autistic people can easily see he's not. So can psychologists who specialize in the autistic spectrum, and family members and friends of autistic people. As one of those psychologists recently put it, we're not saying that autistic people can't be assholes. We can be. But even the assholes among us tend to care very much about improving our situation through accurate understanding of our condition. Musk trying to piggy-back on us, why? So people will feel sorry for him and more inclined to forgive his bad behavior? It's deeply annoying on several levels, even before we get to those of his fans who are trying the same thing.

Ha says he was bullied as a child. I imagine that people who actually were bullied as children, or who care about children whom have been or are being being bullied, can see pretty easily that he's a bully.

He says he was poor when he was young, saying, for example, that he had to live on a dollar a day as a undergrad, and that he often had nothing to eat but ramen noodles, but it's come out that his family owned an emerald mine. He has also talked publicly about the private plane his family owned when he was a child.

If you want people to believe you were poor as a child, and you're a good liar, or even a very mediocre liar, you don't talk about things like the family's private plane.

So let's see. So far we've got engineers, autistic people, victims of bullying and poor people, all of of whom Musk has given reason to take a particular personal dislike toward him. And how many more groups has he alienated in exactly the same way, just by unnecessary lies about himself? It's adding up. That's even before we get to his spectacularly bad behavior as an employer, executive and businessman. 

Billionaires

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and claim that billionaires aren't all exactly the same.

At least, I'd be going out on a limb if I said that in some of the places I hang out. I like those places, it's nice to have found places where nearly everyone hates Elon Musk, but all the same, the frequent, unchallenged assertion that all billionaires are the same is getting to be a pain in the ass. 

 

It's possible that I might dislike every single billionaire, if I examined each one closely. But I haven't examined each and every single billionaire closely. Which is why I'm unable to say that they're all the same.

But there's more than that. Yes, even more. There are differences which anyone can see. Some billionaires are Republicans, some are Democrats. The they're-all-the-same yahoos will respond that they're just pretending to be different, while they pull the strings behind the scenes in our one-party system. Have we gotten to the 100 mark yet, 100 times of me mentioning, in this blog, that brilliant remark of Kurt Vonnegut's, that we are what we pretend to be?

Gotta be at least close to 100 by now. 

There are differences, though. When Warren Buffett says publicly that he should pay more taxes, that's different from Elon Musk publicly saying that he shouldn't have to pay ANY taxes, because he's already publicly benefited mankind so much. And whether Musk really means that, or can barely keep a straight face while he says it and is as amazed as, for instance, I am, that anyone believes he's a public benefactor (we are what we pretend to be!), both Buffett and Musk are decidedly different than most billionaires inasmuch as they've talked about taxes at all in any way except privately.

Musk and Trump and Cuban, and very few other billionaires, seem to live for the spotlight, for public attention. They can't get enough of it, it seems. Many other billionaires seem to live very strictly by the code: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." So that we've very rarely, or perhaps never, even heard their names.

Which would make it even harder to tell if they really are all the same, and also exactly the same as the publicity-hungry type of billionaire. 

As with taxes, so also with philanthropy: some billionaires practice it openly, some by stealth, some hardly at all. Instead of "hardly at all," I was going to say "not at all," but it seems even Trump and Musk may have engaged in some charitable giving. Not as much as they would like people to believe, but a little, milked for as much publicity as possible, timed to divert from scandal.

Now, even in the cases of billionaires who give the great majority of their wealth to good causes, it could be argued that they are not making up for all of the damage they caused while accumulating that money. The Andrew Carnegie Syndrome. I'd be more than glad to debate that. On a case-by-case, billionaire-by-billionaire basis. I'm still not going to even debate the nature of all billionaires at once. 

Because, as Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia: "This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." Simple as that. I'm not having it.

But wait, there's EVEN MORE: I have come to believe that a great many of these people claiming that all billionaires are evil and all the same, are themselves millionaires who would much rather debate something else than whether and to what extent their own existence benefits society as a whole. The B-word gives them a very convenient way to change the subject. Might even work if the people they're talking to are also millionaires. Yeah, I bet in would work real well in those circumstances.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the first two people I heard spreading the billionaires-are-all trope were millionaires. Gore Vidal, and then Bernie Sanders. 

In fact, in retrospect, I've got to wonder whether Gore Vidal himself was a billionaire when he warned the public to keep both hands planted firmly over one's wallet whenever in the vicinity of a billionaire. Vidal was not merely a bestselling author when he said, he had written a great many very big bestsellers, besides some screenwriting and having been born the grandson of a US Senator and being the first cousin of Al Gore and a cousin by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy, and living half the year in a villa in Ravello and the other half in the Beverly Hills Hotel. If he wasn't worth at least $100 million in the late 1980's, when he issued his dire warning about billionaires, then he must have given most of his wealth away, or followed terrible investment advice, or been a really amazingly big tipper, or something.

You know what, maybe Gore was a billionaire and knew it, and was ironically warning his more perceptive readers, those capable of reading between the lines just as he spoke between them, to watch out for him, and maybe go into business with less treacherous types. If so -- good one, Gore! and ain't I a dope.

My point was that when I read that article in Vanity Fair where Gore talked about the billionaires and the hands clamped on wallets just for safety's sake, it struck me as very odd that someone that rich was warning the public about the rich. 

And then in 2016, Bernie Sanders went on and on at such length about billionaires that he got a billionaire elected President. And I noticed that during 2016 he and his wife sold their second house for half a million. 

Their SECOND house. Making me very suspicious that the rest of their holdings might tally up to another half, making them the dreaded M-word, as are no doubt many if not most of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate and House. 

That was before 2019, when it became widely-known that Sanders' income in 2017 had been over $1 million, leading to his famous public gaff about how you, too, can become a millionaire if you write a bestselling book. 

Who knew it was so easy, right?

Seemed disingenuous to me, because Sanders seemed to be saying that only in 2017 had he become a millionaire. 

But again my point is: a rich person warning me about those evil, evil rich people like movie stars and the Clintons!

Also, I suspect that very many of the people around me these days repeating the all-billionaires-are-the-same trope, may have learned it directly from Bernie Sanders, thus adding to the reasons I dislike him.

Method to Musk's Madness?

Many observers assume that Elon Musk has been unraveling a bit lately, because that's what it looks like.

But we've got to remember that Musk has occasionally been pretty good at putting over a public perception. Remember, for example, when people thought he was a nice guy who invented all sorts of stuff and didn't care about money and just wanted to save the planet? That was because Musk wanted people to believe that.

Maybe Musk's recent announcement that he has switched from Democrat to Republican, claiming that the Democratic Party has become "the party of division and hate," is just more calculated shaping of his public image.

 

Maybe it's part of his exit strategy from Tesla. It would fit in with a time-honoured tradition of people moving from Left to Right politically, and then proclaiming that their younger selves meant well, but were hopelessly naive. In Musk's case, the stereotypical headshaking over his younger librul self could go something like: "Once I, too, believed that mankind could survive without oil. And I tried my best to make that hopelessly naive dream a reality [...]" And then he becomes a US Senator from Montana, taking some of Montana's wealthy Democrats with him into the GOP. 

Either that, or he really is going completely crazy. Because, Republican and the owner/Dear Leader of one of the world's largest EV manufacturers at the same time -- that's not a good fit.

It didn't occur to me until just this moment that perhaps Musk has announced that he's a Republican precisely because it's a bad fit with leading Tesla. And because he senses that he may have pumped about as much money out of Tesla as he can -- if he can sell his Tesla shares before they become relatively worthless.

Dream Log: Small-Town Politics and Autism

I dreamed I was in a small town on the west coast, in Oregon, Washington or British Columbia. The town's population couldn't have been as much as 50,000. It had many restaurants, bars, hotels and clubs which did a flourishing out-of -town business. Two men were among those struggling for control of the town's money and politics, one who looked and acted like Elon Musk and one who looked and acted like Mark Zuckerberg. 

 

But they weren't world-famous billionaires. Their business was concentrated in this small town. It was speculated that they both might be autistic.

Like the real Elon Musk, the local businessman who looked like him lied all the time, about absolutely everything, so that being autistic appeared to be just one more thing he was lying about. Like the real Mark Zuckerberg, the businessman who looked and acted like him really did seem to be autistic, and like Zuckerberg, and unlike, say, Daryl Hannah, he definitely could not be said to be glamorizing  the condition, except perhaps for hardcore Brent Spiner fans,

I was little-known in this town and wanted to stay that way, but video and audio of me looking and sounding strangely -- for example, I sing. Sometimes I sing intentionally badly, to amuse myself -- began showing up in the local media and on the Internet. This led to my becoming enmeshed in the business struggle between the liar who looked like Musk and the creepy dweeb who looked like Zuckerberg. I wasn't sure I trusted Not-Zuck, but he was definitely better than Not-Musk, so by default I ended up on Team Not-Zuck. (In the dream these two were called by their names, but I don't remember their names.)

Then the whole dream shifted to something resembling the TV series "Alias." Not-Musk now did the majority of his business  from local clubs, sending his minions out to physically fight with Not-Zuck's minions. 

At one point I and two other members of Team Not-Zuck were racing through town in an Audi e-tron at dusk, heading toward the beach. There was a Chase bank on the beach. One of the exterior walls of this small bank building was completely covered with video screens and neon stock tickers, and buried somewhere within all of that was the clue to our next move.

We slammed to a screeching stop in the parking lot, poured out of the car, and soon one of the other guys was howling with glee. "Chase is going to give me $225 to open an account," he yelled. 

This guy had ADD. We got his head back in the game, and eventually we found the time and place where Not-Musk and Not-Zuck could secretly meet, out of the eye of the extraordinarily-vigilant local business journalists.

At this point I made up my mind to face Not-Zuck, and tell him that I had had enough, that I was out.

More Musk Math

If Musk's Tesla stock was evenly divided between every Tesla employee, each one would get over $4 million worth of stock. And a lot of of them are making less than $40k/year.

It would be beautiful to see Musk forced out of Tesla, the way he forced out the founders. I realize that it wouldn't result in every poor schmuck Tesla employee getting $4 million, but I think that the boost to the company might just be huge. The boost in wages and other benefits, the boost in working conditions, the boost in the company's public image -- all of those things could be huge.

 

I know I'm dreaming. But I also know something else that not everybody knows: EVERYbody who tries to predict the future more than a week ahead is dreaming. We just don't know how things will work out. With Tesla or with anything else. There are simply too many factors. In this case: will the general public begin to see Musk as a bad man, bad for Tesla, bad for the environment, bad for himself, bad for just about everything except his net worth? I see him that way. A growing number of people see him that way. 

A number big enough to matter? Not yet. And if and when the number is big enough than Musk could be forced out of Tesla, out of the EV industry, so that all of those high ideals he claims to represent, but doesn't, could in fact be represented by millions of ex-Musk fans, spearheaded by a Tesla which actually did operate in a green and humanistic way -- if and when that will happen, is unknowable. There are too many factors. 

Such as the success or failure of other makers of EV's, and the quality of those companies. Such as how many people will no longer drive at all, such as public transportation and bicycles and plain old walking. 

Is Rivian a better company than Tesla? Is it run by people who are not monsters, who actually care about things other than their own net worths? I have no idea. They've made almost 700 RT1's. Still not very many at all, but they're much faster now than they were in September. 

Do Rivian's low production numbers mean they won't exist as a company a year from now? Or do they mean that Rivian wants to be known as the all-EV company which DOESN'T have panel gaps and other quality-control issues for the first 10 years?  

Things few people know yet. Things nobody knows.

Another SLOW Month in Non-Tesla Murrkin EV News

Lucid have actually delivered some vehicles to customers! I don't know how many.

 

So what do you think, is Lucid currently delivering units at a faster pace than Rivian?

Rivian has said they will deliver 1,000 units in 2021, so I think the only question about that is, how late in 2022 will the 1,000th unit be delivered? (I'm highly confident that they can do it before January 1, 2023.)

Seriously, though, I wish Rivian and Lucid well. And Bollinger, and Farraday Future and Fisker, and... I was about to say "and Nikola too," but it's really hard to wish those assholes well.

But someone has to crush Tesla.

Another question: Musk has always said, in media interviews, that he wishes nothing but success for anyone making EV's, and that Tesla want to do everything they can to help all of those other EV manufacturers.

So my question is: am I actually the only person on Earth who sees that Musk is completely full of shit when he says those things? Does no-one else have the computing power in their brain-grease to see that, if Tesla was actually helping even a little bit, the combined deliveries of all non-Tesla Murrkin EV-only manufacturers would currently be a lot higher than a few hundred? (Not counting aftermarket conversions, which I would guess number in the thousands in the US alone by now.)

 

Am I the only one on Earth who suspects Tesla of actual illegal interference with other EV manufacturers? Not just everyday hardball business-as-usual dirty tricks, but actual completely illegal sabotage? Answer me! Am I the only one? I did a Google search, tesla sabotage of other ev manufacturers, all I got were some stories from 2018 about Musk yelling that someone had sabotaged Tesla, no doubt to divert from the latest horrible thing he himself had done. FEAR MY SUPER-POWERED AUTISTIC BRAIN-GREASE, MUSK! You fool all these others. Not me.

The Master Took Everything

I'd been trying to remember what novel it was I'd read, which novel I was reminded of by Elon Musk and his fans, in which the protagonist, a follower, a hero-worshipper, breaks down and sobs toward the end of the story, an old man who has wasted his life serving someone who didn't deserve it. 1984? No, that wasn't it, although Winston Smith weeping as he loves Big Brother at last is a similar scene, a similarly heartbreaking catastrophic defeat. Today I remembered: it was The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I read it not long after the movie came out in 1993. And I was struck above all by that scene near the end, and I have always felt that I was taught an important lesson there, not to give myself away to those who are not worthy.

I remembered the lesson always, and the image of the old man crying because the Master had taken everything from him, although I forgot for a while which book it was from. So what does this have to do with EV's? Well, I think about Elon Musk's fans. Tesla owners, Tesla shareholders. I also think about Trump's fans. Trump and Musk, and other narcissistic sociopaths, only take, they don't give back. I feel sorry for those who waste their lives giving to unworthy heroes, expecting rewards which they will not receive.

 

Over and over again, we hear people who've been cast aside by Trump, from chumps who'd paid for Trump University all the way up to former Cabinet members. After they had served him loyally, extremely loyally, but not extremely enough. They express their surprise, and we are surprised, wondering how they could have failed to noticed the thousands of similar cases which preceded their own. We're astonished that they could have been surprised.

 

The difference between Musk and Trump is that Musk is a little bit more clever, a little bit less obvious in his predatory behavior. But only a little bit. 

 

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.

I've Changed My Mind About the Tesla Truck

Two days ago, after seeing it for the first time, I blogged about the Tesla pickup truck, calling it an unmitigated disaster. And now I'm back to tell you two things: 1) I have a very different opinion of the truck now; and 2) a lot of other people have experience something similar: shock at first seeing the truck, and then a very quick change of mind as we keep looking at it.

Let me put this in very plain terms: my first reaction to Tesla's pickup truck was wrong. And I have much less excuse for it than do many other people, because I've studied a bit of art history, and anyone who's studied art history can tell you that, over and over, works of Western art, paintings, mostly, have gotten severely negative reactions when they are first shown, and then gone on to be widely loved and regarded as masterpieces. I've learned not to make a snap judgement if I see a painting and hate it at first. I should have been able to apply this to my reaction to the Tesla pickup, a reaction which, as I admitted in the previous post, was entirely based on its looks. I have less excuse for this than many other people commenting who have never studied art history.

And of course, trucks are not entirely about looks. They are -- theoretically, at least, and in many cases actually -- made for work, and when it comes to horsepower, torque, load capacity, towing capacity and other truck stuff, the Tesla pickup puts up very impressive numbers. Also, of course, it will be much cheaper to maintain and fuel than an internal-combustion-engine truck.

And the people who actually work with trucks, as opposed to driving them as big obnoxious status symbols, pay close attention to such numbers. Because it's work. It's business. It's about the numbers. And looking at the numbers may already have induced quite a number of people look at the Tesla pickup differently, literally and figuratively.

To go back to literally looking at it: I think that the launch may have been unfortunate for more than just the shattered windows. The way that Elon Musk stood in front of it on stage, the angle at which Elon and the truck are shown in most photos and videos, makes the truck look smaller, and above all lower, than it actually is. In those photos, the truck is reminding people of the El Camino, which is not a good association unless you're going for laughs. The El Camino is a 70's-style American sedan with a small truck bed where the back seats and trunk should be, and about the same ground clearance as most other sedans, whereas the Tesla pickup is a big truck with front and back seats and a lot of ground clearance.

So, would I buy one? No. I think it's a good truck, maybe so good that it will be game-changing. If so, it wouldn't be Tesla's first game-changing vehicle. So why won't I buy one? Well, for one thing, I don't need a truck, and unlike many other people who don't need trucks, I'm not going to to buy one. There's also the fact that I'm broke.

But also, it's a Tesla. Teslas are great vehicles, but Tesla is a terrible company. Elon Musk poses as an unworldly geek who just wants to help the world, while ripping off Tesla to the tune of billions of dollars per year. That means that if I bought a Tesla, several thousand dollars' worth of the purchase price would be going straight into Musk's pocket. Meanwhile, everyone except Musk who works at Tesla is underpaid. Anyone who even talks about unions vanishes. Working conditions are nightmarish, "layoffs" are frequent. Musk lies about prices. Musk says the truck will start at $39,900. He also said that the Tesla model 3 would start at $35,000. No-one has ever bought a $35,000 Model 3, and if anyone thinks they're going to get a Tesla pickup for $40,000, their stupidity angers and saddens me. Tesla still won't share their Superchargers with any other electric vehicles. Tesla doesn't sell Tesla parts, or authorize very many people at all to make Tesla repairs. Tesla customer service is a nightmare. And all of the above makes it a more shameless lie when Musk says he's just a selfless friend of humanity.

I might consider buying a Tesla someday if Tesla got rid of Musk and fixed all of those problems. Not before. But there's no denying that Tesla's vehicles are outstanding.

The Tesla Truck is Here, And it's an Unmitigated Disaster

This is really what it looks like:

I stayed up a little bit past my bedtime last night to watch the official launch of this ugly thing at the LA Auto Show, and the reactions on various YouTube channels devoted to EV's, and far and away the most frequent reaction was: "OMG it's so ugly." Even on the channel Now You Know, haven of far-gone Tesla zombies, the top comments this morning are all negative. YouTubers who literally build their own electric vehicles couldn't talk about anything except how ugly it is. I've never knowingly seen an adult man who has just pooped his pants, but after the reveal, Elon Musk, and Zac and Jesse, hosts of Now You Know, all looked as if they had pooped their pants: very embarrassed, physically ill, and trying very hard to smile, but not quite being able to do it.

Two of the officially shatter-proof windows on the truck at the LA Auto Show shattered when they were hit with a sledgehammer to show how shatterproof they are, and yet, no-one talked about that, except as a metaphor for someone's career having been shattered: "Who will be fired?" they asked. And if someone is fired, it won't be because the windows shattered. It will be because this thing is so goddamned ugly.

Maybe we once thought that pickup truck buyers didn't care about looks, and just wanted a truck that would haul. We now know that that isn't true. Looks matter, for pickup trucks too. And this is very, very bad news for Tesla.

There were the usual Tesla fans -- for some reason, they're often referred to as fanboys. They're also often referred to as zombies, but the reason for that is perfectly clear to me -- yelling "Alright! Yeah, Woooooooo!" and "Okay, Elon!" and so forth, at last night's reveal. But last night, there was also a lot more laughter. And it didn't sound like friendly laughter. I think that the model reveals up until now were overwhelmingly attended by the zombies. But the Model 3 is selling several times as fast as any previous Tesla, and it has changed things. Tesla is getting much more mainstream attention now. I think this was the first really public Tesla model unveiling, and oh my God did it go badly.

I haven't talked about how this thing actually functions as a truck. That's because I don't know any of its specs, and I don't know anything about trucks, so its specs wouldn't tell me anything anyway. There are plenty of other people who can tell you all about that. The usual car and truck guys. But, as I mentioned above, last night those guys weren't talking about anything else except how ugly this truck is. It might be the best pickup truck ever made, from the perspectives of performance, reliability, maintenance costs and so forth. But that wouldn't matter as much as how ugly it is. One of those guys who literally builds his own electric vehicles said last night, "That's it, I'm buying a Rivian." Rivian is another manufacturer who will be offering an electric pickup truck for sale soon. And they've been showing pictures of the truck all along, and letting journalists look up-close at the prototypes. (It looks pretty much like a pickup truck. Completely different than this monstrosity from Tesla.)

Tesla didn't do that. They allow a normal amount of glimpses into their upcoming models, usually, but with this pickup, they were completely secretive. It was very unusual. Musk kept saying that it was not going to look like any pickup anyone had ever seen. Turns out he was actually telling the truth for once. I figured that it would be a sort of mild let-down when we finally saw it. I figured people would say, Hm, yeah, it looks like a pickup.

But it doesn't look like a pickup. And not in a good way.

If some Tesla zombies read this post, they will call it a hit piece. But it's not. Musk hit himself right in the face last night. All I'm doing is reporting about it.

Elon Musk and Publicity and Money

Recently, Elon Musk donated $1 million dollars to a charity which plants trees, and claims that 1 tree will be planted for every dollar people donate. So, that's good. That's a million trees, assuming that the charity's claims are correct, and I haven't seen any claims to the contrary. The donation has gotten a lot of publicity, and hopefully will lead to many other similar donations, large and small.

Musk probably made the donation because he needed some good publicity, badly -- but still, those million plantings are a very good thing. The example, and the challenge to others to follow the example, are good. Afforestation and reforestation are important parts of repairing Earth's climate and saving our own lives.

And it's especially remarkable that Musk would donate $1 million, given that he is earning no money whatsoever.

No, I didn't really mean that last part. Me saying that Musk is earning no money, that's sarcasm. It's also the claim which Musk is making in his defense in the lawsuit being brought against him by the guy who rescued a youth soccer team from an underwater cave in 2018, and Musk was rushing to the scene to be a part of the rescue with a submarine he'd built, and the young soccer players were rescued before Musk's submarine got there, and Musk reacted to that by calling the rescuer a pedophile.

Musk really needs good publicity from things like the $1 million for trees, because of the bad publicity from things like the whole rescue incident, which make it look like appearing to be a hero is more important to Musk than being one, and that it is extremely difficult for him to share credit with others.

It also seems perfectly obvious to me that it is extremely hard for Musk to share money with others. How can I say that about someone who just gave $1 million to a good cause? I can say it because it seems to me that Musk was just buying goodwill with that $1 million, and buying it pretty cheaply. For a guy who receives $2 billion a year, $1 million is 1/40 of a week's pay. For a new employee at Tesla, who receives $16 an hour, 1/40 of one week's pay would be $16. Which would be a nice contribution to a good cause, but not really astonishingly generous.

Musk was given Tesla stock options worth over $2 billion dollars in 2018. That's what Tesla's own SEC proxy statement says. That statement also says that the $2 billion worth of options are part of Musk's compensation for 2018. I have to admit, I got very tired before I found out what other parts there were, but if anyone wants to look: it's called a proxy statement, filed by Tesla with the SEC.

So, it's good that Musk gave $1 million to that charity. It's also good that Telsa makes EV's, and has sold so many of them.

But the very widespread opinion that the emerging success of the EV industry is due above all to Musk, I think that opinion is mistaken. I disagree. I think we don't know, can't know, what Tesla would have done by now if Musk hadn't taken the company over from its original founders, forced them out, and then won a lawsuit giving him the legal right to refer to himself as the founder of the company. I don't think we know, I don't think we can know, how well other EV manufacturers, and other EV models made by traditional automakers, would have been doing by now, if Musk had never gotten into the automotive industry.

I don't think we can know how well Tesla would be doing if those billions of dollars per year which have been going into Musk's compensation, had instead been going into higher wages for Tesla employees, and lower prices for Tesla automobiles, power-storage systems, solar panels and solar roof tiles and other Tesla products, and so forth.

I certainly don't think that we can know how different the world would be today, it the CEO of the world's largest manufacturer of EV's were actually a nice guy, instead of a ruthless narcissist multi-billionaire who has hit on pretending to be a nice guy as a successful business model.

I don't think anyone can know for sure how much of the technical excellence of Tesla's car is directly attributable to Musk. I'm completely certain that he gets way too much credit for it. (Quick, name 5 other people who've been involved in designing Teslas! Name them right now! No googling allowed!)

Now, being a fan of electric vehicles, and being concerned about the Earth's climate, doesn't necessarily mean that you're blind. There are many intelligent EV enthusiasts who are familiar with his methods of finance and self-promotion. Still, they maintain they the EV "community" owes Musk a lot. I don't think anybody owes this guy, who already has over $20 billion, anything. I don't see exactly how life has been unfair to him. I think that Tesla, and the EV industry in general, would be much better off if it and Musk went their separate ways. Even if that meant a multi-billion-dollar golden parachute for Musk. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm literally the only member of the EV "community" who feels this way. I'm certainly not the only person on Earth who does.

The More I Learn About Tesla, The More Appalled I Become

It's hard to talk sense to fanatics -- maybe impossible. If you criticize anything said by any New Atheist, you are immediately denounced as a fundamentalist believer, whether you actually believe that God or gods exist, or not.

If you criticize anything about Tesla or Elon Musk, the Elon fanboys immediately accuse you of being in league with Big Oil, CNBC and the German automaking industry. Tesla doesn't publicize the fact that many of the parts of their cars have been made in Germany, by Bosch or Daimler or other companies whom they publicly diss. If you try to bring this up with the fanboys, chances aren't they won't hear you, because they'll immediately begin drowning you out (and perhaps also drowning out their own attempts at rational thought?) by calling you a liar and repeating the company's talking points.

So I don't know whether I'm going to change any of the fanboys' minds. This is addressed more to the general public about the fanboys, than to the fanboys. But if I do change some of their minds too, well wouldn't that blow my mind.

Tesla is worse than most car companies, because they're more dishonest, and more ruthlessly dedicated to squeezing every last penny they can out of their adoring fans, and giving billions of that revenue, yearly, to Musk. Who is always referred to as Elon, as if he were everybody's pal. He's not your pal.

Tesla is so dishonest, they can't even tell you how much their cars cost, and the fanboys are so hypnotized that they'll insist all day long that Tesla was never misleading about their prices. The Tesla Model 3 is known as the $35,000 Tesla. The only problem is that it actually costs $44,000, except that it actually costs $49,000, except that it actually costs $50,200, except that it actually costs more than that. Realistically, $60,000 or more. But the hypnotized fans who've actually payed this much for Model 3's will tell you that they haven't. There may actually be some $35,000 Model 3's -- a dozen or so. In Canada. Since early in 2019. Or maybe that was just another lie.

Back in 2017, when Tesla began to establish the lie of the $35,000 Model 3 in the public consciousness, they got the figure of $35,000 by taking the retail price, subtracting the Federal and state rebates in California, and then also figuring in the fuel cost savings. (Fuel cost savings compared to what? I'm sure the fanboys don't care.) Tesla says they're not an average car company. By God, they're not. A normal car company will actually state the retail prices of their vehicles.

Tesla is supposedly a liberal, Leftist, humans-before-cash company. But they're completely union-free, and the low-paid employees routinely work 80 to 100 hours a week. Less humane than the big carmakers, while claiming to be really good guys. Press cameras aren't allowed inside the Fremont, California factory, but they can get close enough (briefly) to the perimeter fence to see the campers of employees in the parking lot. From the factory to the camper and back again -- or is the camper home?

The people most likely to shout down any and all objections to Tesla's practices -- the employees, the shareholders, the owners of the vehicles, and very often two or all of the above in one person -- are the very ones I and other critics are trying to help, by pointing out how they're being used.

Elon Musk: Not MY Hero

Let's start with those patents which Tesla allegedly "released" in 2014, in order, supposedly, to stimulate others to build electric vehicles. For the good of the whole planet, dontcha know.

But if you read the fine print, the release of the patents is stipulated to be for the use of companies who are "not competing" with Tesla. How exactly are you supposed to build electric vehicles at all and not compete with Tesla? The release also stipulates that other companies who use Tesla's patents must be "operating in good faith." What "operating in good faith" is, is not more precisely defined.

But perhaps the biggest whopper in the patent release is that any company which uses a Tesla patent must agree not to sue Tesla -- not just in matters related to these patents, but not to sue them at all, over anything.

This is truly diabolical: if you use any of Tesla's patents, Tesla can sue you if they deem you to be competing with them -- and just let me know if you know how it's possible to build an electric vehicle and not compete with Tesla -- or operating in bad faith, and you can't sue them for anything at all. Not even a counter-suit in response to a frivolous lawsuit. To me, the conventional arrangement where you just pay the patent owner an agreed-upon price to use their patent, and then just move on from there with no further restrictions, looks a lot more attractive. I don't see how this so-called "release" of patents does anything but restrict and discourage the making of electric vehicles by other companies.

And, to make the diabolical nature of it all quite complete, Musk was able to sell this "release" of patents to his adoring fans and customers, and for the most part to the general public as well, as an act of phenomenal generosity, as just one more example of how he is better than other CEO's. Morally better.

In reality, the "release" of the patents is one more example of how Musk is worse than other CEO's. It's one more piece of evidence of his extreme tendency toward control.

Teslas are good cars, but Tesla owners have to wait extremely long times to get the cars repaired, because authorized Tesla repair centers are few and far between. Tesla doesn't want to sell parts to do-it-yourselfers who work on the cars themselves -- the way all other car manufacturers have done for a century and a third now -- because they make less money that way. They want your money when you buy a Tesla, and more of your money every time you have it repaired -- and even more of your money every time you charge up at one of those Teslas Superchargers where only Teslas can charge up, and Teslas can't use other superchargers without an adapter. Does having an entire network of charging stations which only Teslas can use encourage the growth of the entire electric-vehicle sector? Of course not, it does exactly the opposite. And to top that off and make it perfectly diabolical, they've somehow managed to convince the Tesla fans that the non-compatibility in charging stations is 100% the fault of other electric vehicle manufacturers. Tesla TRIED to work with the other companies on the charging stations, the fans insist, and the other companies all refused.

Did you notice how all of the other companies had no difficulty making chargers that were compatible with everybody except Tesla? And did you notice how none of the other companies had patented charging technology which other companies were free to use, but only if they agreed that the company with the charging technology could sue them for anything, and they couldn't sue that company for anything?

Back in the early 80's, when it was Beta vs VHS, did Sony keep making Betas and get its customers to blame all the other video-cassette manufacturers for the fact that there were two incompatible formats? No, Sony started making VHS cassettes and didn't complain. Why? Because Sony isn't as evil as Tesla.

It's the lying that's evil: the narrative which Tesla sells (just like the narrative which Apple sells), which says that this company is morally superior to all of the others, when in fact their management is a bit sleazier.

Successfully selling the lies means that the company's fans will constantly make excuses for the company.

And this brings us to the lie that Elon Musk IS Tesla, that The Man and The Company are one and the same. Well, Tesla fans may say: Elon founded the company. No, as a matter of fact he didn't. He joined the company after Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded it, then won a lawsuit giving him the legal right to call himself a founder -- the legal right to lie. This guy's good. Good at being evil -- and then forced out the actual founders.

The fans will say, but Musk made the company what it is. If by "what it is" you mean "a company which drives other electric vehicles builders out of business and then blames others for there being so few other electric vehicles," then I would tend to agree. But that's not what the fans mean. They mean that Tesla automobiles are so good because Musk designed them. Did he? Or is he really good at taking the credit for the work of other people, thousands of other people who've worked long hours for low pay and done brilliant work at Tesla and then let Musk convince them that he'd done it, not them? I don't know for sure, but I find the story where Musk takes the credit much more believable than the one where Musk actually makes the brilliant cars.

Which brings us to the money. Tesla stockholders haven't gotten any dividends yet, while Musk has been paid billions by the company. If I were a Tesla stockholder, I'd be pretty steamed about that, and calling for Musk to be dumped and replaced with a CEO who could be bought for a measly $30 million a year or so. But I can't even penetrate the denial of these fans and stockholders, who insist that Musk makes $150,000 a year or less. They focus on Musk's salary and somehow manage to ignore his bonuses. Sometimes, if the bonuses are brought up, they point out that Musk invested tens of millions of dollars in Tesla and saved the company. They're engaging in the logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc: the company has survived after Musk joined it, and the fans say that the company has survived because Musk joined it. Except that they're usually also in denial about the fact that he joined the company, as opposed to founding it. Not to mention being in denial about how investing tens of millions of dollars once, and then getting billions of dollars of return per year on that investment is pretty sharp even by the sleazy standards of billionaires.

And finally, as many of you no doubt have already noticed, I refuse to call him Elon. To me, he's Musk. Calling him Elon would imply that I regarded him as my friend, my buddy, and, as you may have noticed, I don't. I don't think he's my friend, and I don't think he's yours either. I think he's pretending to care about the environment in order to prop up a lie about him being a hero and a wonderful human being.

CEO Compensation

A front-page headline story just now on Yahoo! is critical of Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase, for making 368 times as much as an entry-level employee at Chase.

First things first: if you're going to do math, why not do it right? Using the figures provided in the sory, $31 million in compensation last year for Dimon and a $16.50-an-hour entry level wage at Chase, yields a 969-to -1 ratio, not 368-to-1. Maybe Dimon makes 368 times as much as someone who draws a yearly salary at chase instead of an hourly wage: an entry-level executive with an MBA from Harvard or Princeton. $31 divided by 368 is a little under $85,000, which sounds like it might be the starting pay at Chase for such an MBA. The Yahoo! story doesn't provide info about those starting salaries.

Starting pay at Tesla is as low as $16 an hour. As I've mentioned so often recently in this blog that some might think I'm unhealthily obsessed, Elon Musk made $2.6 billion last year. That's well over 80,000 times as much as the person making $16 an hour. Yes -- Tesla is reducing the world's carbon emissions, and, yes, that's extremely important and good. But so are a lot of other companies whose CEO's don't make 80,000 times their entry-level pay.

Maybe you don't believe me when I say that it doesn't bother me that Elon Musk is so rich. Okay, it bothers me a little when I look into the details. But what bothered me and occasioned me to write this blog post is the complaints about the CEO salaries at large banks, when 9 out the top 10 highest-earning CEO's aren't working at any sort of financial institution. What bothers me is the widespread fixation on the earnings of banking executives when other executives are earning much more. I'm using "earning' here in the sense of "being paid," with no connotation of deserving or being fair. In case you still haven't noticed: the world's not fair.

And by the way: no, Elon Musk isn't the world's wealthiest CEO. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, made $40 billion in 2018. If we assume that Bezos works an 80-hour week, that means he made about as much in 3 hours as Jamie Dimon made in 2018. Starting pay at Amazon: $11 an hour.

Like I said: if you're going to do math, why not do it right?

Nuanced Discussion of Electric Vehicles

A few years ago, I dabbled in discussions about atheism versus religion, and about whether or not Jesus ever existed. Some of my participation in these discussions can be seen on this blog. I quickly became frustrated by the general nature of these discussions: on one side were New Atheists whose attitude is nicely summed up by the sub-title of one of Christopher Hitchens' books, Religion poisons Everything, and on the other side were believers out to denigrate any and all expressions of religious doubt and/or doubt about the existence of the historical Jesus. They mostly weren't actually discussions so much as flame wars. I soon had enough.

Recently, dipping my toe into the waters on public discussion of Tesla, Inc and its allegedly charismatic CEO Elon Musk, I've been very much reminded of those earlier flame wars. In this case, on one side are people who think everything Elon does (they often call him Elon as if he were their personal friend, and often act as Elon has personally, single-handedly accomplished every good thing ever done at Tesla, Inc) is pure genius, and pure blessing for all life on Earth; and on the other side are climate-change deniers and enthusiasts of internal combustion engines, without much in between. And I have absolutely no appetite for more flame wars. I'd rather see nuanced discussion.

I'm not 100% anti-Tesla. Far from it. I'm very excited to see that sales of electric vehicles are exploding worldwide. And outside of China, where they are building electric cars for domestic consumption at a rate which dwarfs the electric vehicle (EV for short) production in the rest of the world -- outside of Chine, far and away the best-selling EV in the world is the Tesla Model 3. The Model 3 is taking EV sales to an entirely new level, and I love that. I love that that huge battery which Tesla sold to Australia is actually working, contrary to the predictions of many. I love that Teslas are made with a high percentage of green electricity, and that many of their owners also operate them with mostly or all green electricity. There is a huge upside to Tesla, from my point of view.

But that doesn't mean that I love everything Elon Musk does and says, or that I don't wonder whether he actually deserves billions of dollars a year in compensation, or that I don't worry that many Tesla owners and Tesla shareholders (are there actually any Tesla shareholders who don't own and drive at least one Tesla?) are giving way too much in return for what Musk gives them.

In between the Tesla cult members on the one side, who are not nearly concerned enough that Musk might be screwing them over financially, and the Tesla critics who have a whole bunch of facts completely wrong, asserting, for example, that electric vehicles are not better for the environment than those with internal-combustion engines (ICE for short), and that Teslas are made and operated with dirty electricity from the grid, and that demand for Teslas is about to dry up, among many other claims which are completely wrong -- in between is at least one other person besides me: Rich Benoit, Tesla owner and star of the successful YouTube channel Rich Rebuilds, on which you can see him repairing and rebuilding Teslas. Both his own Teslas, and those owned by other people who also have become frustrated by Tesla's normal way of servicing the cars they make.



Which is something which Tesla, Inc absolutely does not encourage people outside of Tesla, Inc to do. Rich says that he loves the Tesla company, but thinks that it can do much better in some areas -- like being much more like a normal car company which lets customers fix their own cars or take them to non-factory garages for repairs if they want to, the way people have been doing with every model of car for as long as there have been cars.

In other words: Rich has a lot of praise and also a lot of criticism for Tesla and is very open about both. A nuanced approach. How about that.

What is more completely Murrkin than workin' on yr car, or takin' it to yr local Mom-n-Pop gas station to get it fixed? Precious little! Hopefully Musk will relent on this subject soon. And if he doesn't, I predict that it will only help the sales of non-Tesla EV's. Lead, follow or get out of the way -- Elon.

I Just did Some Math

In my previous post, I mentioned how Zac and Jesse, big fans of Elon Musk and Tesla, said that what Musk has done to help restore Puerto Rico's hurricane-ravaged grid could be great PR for Tesla. Something I didn't mention is that Zac and Jesse also made a big deal about how Musk personally donated $250,000 to charities working in Puerto Rico. I'm not sure, but I think the phrase "right out of his own pocket" may have been bandied about.

I think it's good that Musk donated that money. I think that money helped a lot of people. Assuming it wasn't stolen by corrupt officials, and I have no knowledge of that sort of thing happening in Puerto Rico.

The math referred to in the title of this post has to do with just exactly how deep Musk's own pocket is. The math has to do with to what extent a quarter of a million dollars, for Musk, constitutes giving until it hurts.

If the reports are true that Musk got bonuses from Tesla in 2018 totaling $2.6 billion, then $250,000 would be less than 1/10,000th of his annual pay. If we stipulate that Musk works twice as long as a mere mortal, 80 hours a week, that means that he works 4000 hours a year, and THAT means that $250,000 is less than what he makes in a half hour.

Look at it another way: if Musk somehow came face-to-face with 685 panhandlers a day, every single day, 7 days every single week, and he gave a $100 bill to each one of them every time they met, in a year, it would add up to -- $250,000, less than Musk makes in a half-hour, assuming he works 80 hours a week. If he works 40 hours a week, then $250,000 is less than he makes in 15 minutes. [PS, 2 November 2019: Oops! And I'm always bragging on this blog about my superhero-level autistic arithmetic skills. Let's try that again: $100 each to 685 panhandlers a day is $68,500 a day, times 365 is $25 million a year. And it takes Musk a whole half of a week to earn $25 million.]

I have a feeling that Musk very rarely sees any panhandlers or homeless people. I could be wrong. Maybe he volunteers 20 hours a week in homeless shelters. It's just a feeling.

I'm not saying that billionaires are horrible people. Plenty of people will tell you that, but not me. I think billionaires can be horrible or wonderful, and I'm not sure what to think of Elon Musk. If I had to guess right now, I would guess that there is a mix of horrible and wonderful in him, and that his reality is so different than mine that I can't imagine all of the implications of being him. I'm just saying this: $250,000, for someone who makes $2.6 billion a year, is half an hour's pay if he works 80 hours a week, and 15 minutes' pay if he works 40 hours a week. I'm saying: if you think Elon Musk is just a down-to-Earth, folksy, regular guy, maybe you should keep on thinking.

"Now You Know" -- Cult Members, or Just Really Enthusiastic Tesla Fans?

Tesla doesn't advertise -- you know how I know that? I heard it on the YouTube channel "Now You Know," which is mainly about Tesla. With You Tube channels like "Now You Know," Tesla doesn't have to advertise. Zac and Jesse, the channel's hosts (sorry, I haven't been able to find their last names. Perhaps they actually don't have last names), present an extremely positive view of Tesla which only occasionally loses controls and looks like an out-and-out obvious cult. I don't think Elon Musk pays these guys, but he really should.

Then again, if Elon Musk has ever heard of Zac and Jesse, maybe it creeps him out a little that they always refer to him as "Elon," like it does me.

Then again, maybe Musk insists that all of his employees call him Elon, and Zac and Jesse are going for Employeee of the Month every day, although, as I say, they don't actually get paid by Tesla (I'm almost 100% sure).

Speaking of pay: recently, on several of their videos, responding to criticism of Tesla and Musk, which they refer to as FUD, the spreading of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, Zac and Jesse have mentioned that Musk's salary is $0 per year.

I researched the subject of Musk's financial compensation from Tesla, and the subject is a little controversial: some say he has no salary, some say his salary is minimum wage, some say it's a high as $53,000 a year. Some say he never cashes his salary checks, some say he donates his entire salary to charity... But I don't care about Musk's salary nearly as much as the fact that he gets billions of dollars per year from Tesla in bonuses. The same that I don't care whether Zac and Jesse's figure of $0 is exactly accurate or off by several dozen thousand dollars a year, nearly as much as I care about the fact that they don't mention the the 10-figure annual bonuses at all.

Another thing which strikes me as cultlike and disturbing: in this video from 2017, Zac and Jesse describe Tesla's efforts to set up a new electrical grid in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.



It doesn't bother me that Tesla's sending batteries to Puerto Rico and doing other helpful things there. What bothers me is this: Zac and Jesse don't refer to the situation in Puerto Rico as a humanitarian disaster. They also don't accuse the Trump administration of being responsible, by neglect, for the deaths of many Puerto Ricans. They should have mentioned both of those things, but they didn't. But they did mention that the whole Puerto Rican episode could be great, business-wise and public-relations-wise, for Tesla and Musk.

Zac and Jesse say many things with which I wholeheartedly agree. I agree with their negative take on conventional automakers and the petrochemical industry and climate-change deniers. I agree with them that it's extremely important and urgent that we stop using fossil fuels, completely and very soon.

I'm just not sure that Elon Musk is the Messiah.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Elon Musk is single-handedly saving the human race. Zac and Jesse have recently compared Musk to Steve Jobs, which set off alarm bells in my head, because I've always thought of Jobs as the most successful cult leader of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a purveyor of overpriced IT hardware which is incompatible with the rest of the IT in the world, making his cult members wholly dependent on his overpriced parts and service.

And what's the biggest complaint about Tesla, by far? Parts and service. Elon doesn't want you to get your Tesla repaired by anyone else. He wants you to wait 2 months to replace that lug nut which you can't get from anyone except Tesla. And if you're Zac or Jesse, you probably will wait, and pass the time by angrily denouncing everyone who thinks you're a chump, calling them all dishonest, corrupt dinosaurs.

Maybe I'm wrong about Steve Jobs, and maybe Musk also isn't all bad. Maybe they're only partly assholes, and partly very good. Maybe I've been all wrong all along about the quality of Apple products, which I admit I have used very rarely. I'm trying to keep an open mind about everything. One thing seems very clear: almost everyone who's ever driven a Tesla agrees that they are very good cars.

They're kinda pricy, though, too. The way that Apple products are pricy. And Starbucks coffee. And Nike shoes, and some other products as well which are purveyed by billionaires who supposedly have good hearts. I'm really trying to keep an open mind, and stay well-informed.