That’s my claim.
If you have a better candidate let me know.
He co-founded a new way of paying online, that became PayPal. He sold out of that with some tens of millions, on which he could have retired. But he put it back in play with Tesla. Which was not an immediate success: a couple of early failed models nearly sent him bankrupt, until he hit the sweet spot with the Tesla S model. Now he’s boss of the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world. Almost as an aside, he’s built mega-factories for modern Li-ion batteries. Including one in Adelaide, Australia, which saved that government during bushfires which knocked out the electricity grid. This would not have happened without Elon.
Then he set up SpaceX. That didn’t fall into his lap. He went to Russia to look at what he could buy off the shelf; nothing good enough, so he had his people build its own. Now he runs the world’s most advanced and successful private space company. This would not have happened without Elon.
He also founded Neuralink, a tech start up which aims to make a link between computer and the brain, so that people with profound disabilities, like being paraplegic, will one day be able to walk. That day being somewhere, he predicts, in the next years, not decades. Not many people know about this one, but he spends a lot of time at it and clearly believes in its mission.
Other companies he owns or has substantial shareholding in: the Boreing Company, which digs tunnels for cities to get around traffic congestion; Solar City: a financially innovative rooftop solar company allowing many more families to install solar on their rooftops.
Instead of celebrating this, The New York Times has decided that it’s very bad. Why? Basically because he bought Twitter and Musk does not adhere to the pieties of the left. He’s going to allow free speech on Twitter! Horror! He says things he ought not say, things no correct-thinking person of the correct-party, the Dems, ought to think.
Not that Musk is on the Right. He is not. He is more of a classic free-speech liberal. But it’s enough that he doesn’t wholeheartedly support the whole of the NYT woke agenda for them to decide that he is Voldemort. The one who must be destroyed.
They’ve begun with a front page story about the horrors of Twitter under a free speech absolutist.
And on an inside page, there’s a “Guest Essay” -- "The Robber Barons Had Nothing on Elon Musk”-- by one David Nasaw, a retired history professor and sometime author. It’s a hit piece, and I want to go through it, below the fold:
I want to go through Nasaw’s article because I find it full of resentful ill will, projection and straight out disinformation. Which we used to call “lies". The NYT fact checking on this piece appears to be zero. Which is pretty weird for a paper that prides itself on fact checking.The article is available at the NYT at the link here.
And it’s available at my Word.doc here. At this one you can see my highlights in RED, the ones I’ll concentrate on. And I’ll be relying on definitions quite a bit. Because I think that these days we tend to use words rather loosely. I’m against that. We need to go back to definitions. No, not everyone is a “nazi”. You are not “unsafe” because of words. Stuff like that has had meanings changed, and we must resist.
First, the headline: “Robber Barons”. Wiki:
By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who purportedly used exploitative practices to amass their wealth.
These practices included exerting control over natural resources, influencing high levels of government, paying subsistence wages, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors to create monopolies and raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors.[2] The term combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy (a baron is an illegitimate role in a republic).[3]
Is this in the slightest bit fair? I submit: no. If the New York Times, or its “Goest essayist” have evidence of any of the above they should provide it. This hit piece does not. It simply states and smears.
First para: Must is a “rogue” billionaire. Smart Lookup: "a dishonest or unprincipled man: synonyms scoundrel, villain, reprobate, rascal, good-for-nothing, wretch, picaro, cad, ne'er-do-well, miscreant, blackguard, dastard, knave, varlet, wastrel, mountebank, picaroon
Again, is this the slightest bit fair? To call Musk a "dishonest or unprincipled man”? I submit: no.
In just the headline, then, we have two claims of robbery and dishonesty, neither of which is substantiated in the subsequent article.
The rest of the article is no better. It’s a farrago of misinformation itself, while calling for less misinformation. Eg:
“...rapidly disintegrating regulatory state apparatus...”:This would be news to anyone doing business in the US, which are beset be constantly increasing numbers of regulations. That’s what regulators, legislator do. That’s their job and they do it tirelessly and without pause.
“... subsidies...”:Musk did not get “subsidies” to manufacture the Tesla. He got low-interest loans as did Ford and Chrysler. Both immensely bigger than Tesla, by the way. Musk and Tesla repaid the loans in full and ahead of time. Ford and Chrysler have not yet repaid theirs. And where are their electric vehicles? Can you name one? I can only think of one, the Chrysler Volt. It’s now out of production. So to claim that Tesla had subsidies, with avoided competition, is nonsense. More: it wasn’t just Ford and Chrysler that were -- and remain -- his competitors. There’s also Toyota, Nissan, and let’s not forget the Chinese, with their BYD and X-Peng.
"Mr. Musk has done the opposite. His wealth is based not on factories he has built, products he sells or real estate he has acquired, but on the billions of dollars of shares he owns in Tesla, SpaceX, cryptocurrency companies and Twitter.”:
This shows why the author ought to stick to history and not finance. Certainly not writing “guest essays” for the New York Times.
To say that Musk’s wealth is not based “on factories he has build, products he sells...” but on stocks, is illiterate. Musk’s stocks are worth what they are because of the factories he has built and the products he sells! And, for SpaceX, the rockets and launch sites he has built. It’s not been through some devious stock manipulation. He owns stock in Tesla. He builds factories to make Teslas. People love Teslas. They buy heaps. The share price goes up. That makes Musk wealthy. That’s how it works.
"He paints stewards of fair play — regulators and boards — as pettifogging enemies of progress.”:
Pettifogging: Smart Lookup: placing undue emphasis on petty details; petty or trivial:
I’ve been in government. I know how they work. And “undue emphasis on petty details”, is precisely and absolutely it. It’s their life blood. Musk is 100% right to mock them.
"It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.”:
Pure projection. You’d do this so you assume he’ll do this. No sign that’s what he wants to do. Even if so, it would only be a shift back for a forum, Twitter, that’s done exactly that, from the Left, since 2015.
“...his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials...”:Abetted: Smart Lookup: encourage or assist (someone) to do something wrong, in particular to commit a crime:Again, a slur of criminal intent up to criminal act. What’s the evidence? None in the article. And none in the many biographies of Musk.
All up I think the New York Times ought be ashamed of allowing a poorly written, badly mistaken, slanderous article to appear on its pages. The “paper of record” ought to take more care, even if it agrees with poorly argued cases.
ADDED: An interesting take on the Musk/Dorsey relationship. Which ends up calling Musk a “sociopath”. I don’t think so. His empathy is for the human race. He’s not just said so. He’s put a sizeable chunk of money to the end of helping the longterm survival of the human race. Weird kind of sociopathy.
