Exclusive Interview with Common Sense Skeptic; 10 Questions to Help You Understand the Real Elon Musk
This is the first of a three-part series. This part is about Elon Musk, the man. The second part will be about the myths that helped Elon Musk's achieve God-like status among his followers, and the third part is about how Musk became a disaster on many fronts – from his shareholders, to rooting for Russia's Vladimir Putin, to his Twitter persona.
Introduction
By now, most of the world's population has heard about Elon Musk and his ambitious projects. He is celebrated by many as the man who's determined to save planet Earth from climate change with his electric cars, and he has promised to build a 1-million-person colony on Mars to make humanity an interplanetary species.
In 2021, while researching claims about Elon Musk's planned SpaceX Starship rocket and Mars colonization plans, we came across a Youtube channel run by a team named Common Sense Skeptic, or CSS. Surprised by the high quality of their research, we quickly came to trust CSS as a reliable source of information – on Starship issues as well as about Elon Musk's antics.
I'm not a fan of rockets as a long term solution for space travel, and I recently wrote a critical analysis on the future of rocket launch systems that are known as the most dangerous mode of transportation ever invented. We were considering approaching SpaceX for potential partnerships for our own ambitious projects, but after much consideration, we decided against that.
As CSS explains in the interview below, people believe too much at face value, especially if they don't really grasp the topic well. The fact that people believe Musk to be a billionaire rocket scientist makes him a mythical figure to them.
However, even when you're a die-hard Elon Musk fan, after viewing just one of CSS's videos, you'll have ample factual evidence to distrust the man's claims (and most probably the man himself). If there ever was a corporate descent down a rabbit hole, it must be Musk's wild and -upon further inspection- outright ridiculous, or even misleading statements over the years.
You'll soon come to realize that Elon Musk is no real life Tony Stark. In fact, when asked who Musk could best be compared with, CSS said, “Justin Hammer, the wannabe from Iron Man 2 who copies Tony's tech poorly.”
Titles like “Is Elon Musk a Psychopath“ and “Tesla's Autopilot Scam (featured work of BS Exposed)” may initially sound like clickbait, but hoo boy, they are truly explosive fact-finding tours that expose Elon Musk as an outright –and longtime- fraudster.
From lawsuits for retro-active recognition as co-founder of Paypal or Tesla, to rescinding his promises to the original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard, and from pushing the Hyperloop as an alternative for “soul-crushing traffic jams”, and later admitting he just wanted to torpedo California's high-speed line; from spontaneously-combusting Tesla cars to releasing a deadly autonomous driving software called Full Self Driving (FSD) on public roads in the hands of non-specialist, everyday Tesla drivers; from parroting Russia's murderous Putin, to calling a real hero “pedo guy“… the list of Musk's wrongs is longer than your arm.
Last year, CSS did a deep-dive, analyzing Musk's Ted Talk with Chris Anderson in a series of videos. You'll find that Musk is deliberately presenting nonsense as fact, and his hubris is exposed by CSS in a masterful way through in-depth analysis and extensive research.
While most people or groups discussing Musk's projects tend to specialize in one area (i.e. SpaceX or Tesla or Neuralink), this series analyzes all of them in detail, then pushes even further into the extraordinary claims Musk has made about his childhood. Every question asked by Chris Anderson, and every response from Musk, is dissected down to the skeleton. By the end of it, Musk has very little meat left on his bones.
You can find the Debunking Musk's Ted Talk video at the bottom of this post, but the below exclusive interview with Common Sense Skeptic on behalf of BizzInfoHub.com is a must-read to discover the story behind Common Sense Skeptic and their mission.
Interview
NSL: When did you start the Musk rebuttals?
CSS: We started making the videos in July 2020, but they weren't specifically Musk. Earlier episodes really focused on Starship, and to a broader extent the issues of transporting people and “colonies” to Mars. The first Musk debunking two-parter was January 2021, and is our top episode of all time.
NSL: Why did you feel the need to do that?
CSS: A growing concern about how easily people are fooled into believing scams, or bad science, or thinking that the person on the TV is smarter than they are by virtue of the fact that person is on TV and they aren't. People lose money to scams everyday that they really can't afford to lose. More importantly, they lose time in their own lives by idolizing people they shouldn't.
NSL: What is your main goal?
CSS: To get the audience to think for themselves. Trust their gut, use what they know, look up what they don't know, and never take anything at face value.
NSL: Do you think Musk is criminally liable?
CSS: Absolutely. If Elizabeth Holmes is a criminal headed to jail, Musk should not be very far behind her. Musk has been taking money for years from regular people for products he has failed to deliver. Making big promises is one thing, but taking money for them, and then not delivering is textbook fraud.
NSL: Who are Musk's main conspirators?
CSS: The people at his companies, especially those in board positions, who have never taken action against Musk for fear of retribution. The sycophant boards of SpaceX and Tesla are useless in their roles, and need to be held to account the same way Musk must be held accountable.
NSL: What is the real value of Tesla, Inc.?
CSS: The true value of Tesla is zero. The battery tech they use is Panasonic. The factories they operate out of are leased (no asset value). The technology they use isn't able to make a properly built, reliable car. They've lost first-mover advantage, and they have a very dated product line. Tesla Semi is a problem, not a solution. CyberTruck is a novelty at best. R2 is still a distant fantasy. All of these vehicles have thousands of deposits paid, for vehicles that should have been delivered years ago – but they still don't exist.
NSL: Many people think Musk's SpaceX has been a savior to NASA due to their ability to send cargo and people to ISS. What do you say?
CSS: SpaceX Falcon/Dragon is a workhorse. It's also based on 70's era rocket tech (multi-stage ascent, splashing down in water). NASA gave them the patents to make it work to catch up to what the Russians never stopped doing. It works, but it's not revolutionary. Not even the landing boosters. But, people make the mistake of equating the success of Falcon to an “inevitable success” of Starship, and that's sheer folly.
NSL: At times, you make predictions. Which predictions of yours have been proven correct?
CSS: In Debunking Elon Musk Part 2, we broke down why Tesla stock was incredibly overvalued compared to other automakers, and went further in our Twitter breakdown to say that his sale of tranches would collapse the stock price because their fundamentals don't support the bubble. Tesla stock now sits at a quarter of what it did a year ago.
The aft-to-aft refilling configuration for Starship that we did a full episode on was abandoned by SpaceX shortly afterwards. Of course, they haven‘t made this happen on any level yet, but now their paradigm is side-to-side. We predicted that the pump and dump scheme Musk conducted on DOGE would permanently cripple the value of that coin, which sits at 10% of its All-Time High. Musk now faces a $258 billion RICO-based lawsuit in New York over that debacle.
We predicted that there will be no orbital launch in 2022; we predicted no dearMoon mission, and it still hasn't happened. We predicted that we wouldn't see an internal diagram for Starship from Musk as promised in October, 2021. We predicted the failures to deliver on Tesla Semi, CyberTruck, and R2 in 2022, despite deposits paid. We predicted that NASA would revisit their solo contract award to SpaceX for HLS – they are in fact announcing a second team later this year.
On Starlink, we predicted the declining speeds, rising prices, installation of data caps, and the disastrous financial model requiring constant outside funds. SpaceX has had to do $3 or 4 billion funding rounds since this video was released. NASA filed complaints with the FCC about orbital junk related to StarLink, as did the EU and China with the UN.
NSL: Do you think Musk is beholden to autocratic figures like China's Xi and Russia's Putin - due to Tesla's geopolitical interests or otherwise.
CSS: China has the biggest teeth in Musk. Giga Shanghai was built by the Chinese, using loans from the Chinese government. But Musk does not own that factory. In fact, he needs to start paying rent in the form of taxes on that factory to the tune of $323 million per year this year. If he fails to makes these payments, the Chinese government can boot him from the property.
Putin's natural gas is needed at Giga Berlin, so there would be some strings in Germany that can be pulled.
NSL: Given that you also take up people like Kevin O'Leary, we can suppose you're not done exposing frauds. What drives you?
CSS: Going back to a previous answer, the drive here is to remind people that they are smarter than they realize, and can see through charlatans if they just start digging. Elementary school math is all it takes to destroy Musk's claims about Starship and Mars. A half-hour on google searches and you can see O'Leary is a piece of work. People who automatically question things they hear are far better off than people who nod along with everyone else.
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