An Exclusive Interview with Common Sense Skeptic; 10 Questions to Help You Understand how Musk is a Walking, Talking Disaster, plus a bonus in-depth analysis as introduction.
This is the third and last part of our “Elon Musk, the Man, the Myth, the Disaster” Q&A series. This final part concerns Elon Musk, the disaster, the second part was about the myths surrounding Musk, and the first part was about Musk's overall status.
Elon Musk earned his mythical reputation as a kind of real life Iron Man. While Tesla is an important part of Musk's myth-making prowess, he became admired as a real life Tony Stark first and foremost because of SpaceX, his rocket company.
Common Sense Skeptic (CSS) is the most prolific debunker of Musk's plans for the space sector. As you've read in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, CSS unravels Musk as a man full of nothingness. CSS has done many videos on Musk and his fantasies – make sure you check their videos before you claim that we're just trying to smear Musk's reputation.
As you'll see, Musk's claims are based on his assumption that he is untouchable, that reality won't catch up with him. CSS is on a mission to make the world see Musk for who he really is.
Just like Part 1 and Part 2, this part provides ten questions answered by CSS that will be true eye-openers.
First, I'll present a richly sourced, in-depth analysis that goes hand in hand with the interview.
Analysis
Critics of Elon Musk have known for years that Musk is a disaster in the making – on many fronts. The larger public and most reporters only started figuring this out when Musk took over the reigns at Twitter. Almost overnight, the charismatic man who was the world's richest person became known as the emperor without clothes.
The world is quickly waking up to the fact that Musk and Tesla have quickly become toxic brands – no amount of (future) personal branding and corporate branding efforts will save Musk and Tesla from these self-made disasters.
There is, however, something more sinister going on these days, and it's out in the open for all to witness. By platforming racists, fascists, and right-wingers, Musk allows them to act like his proxies. This way, Musk's latent fascist and racist philosophies are widely promoted by his kindred spirits without it explicitly or directly coming back to haunt him personally.
Musk's apartheid fantasies, his fascist tendencies, his right-wing craziness, and his sociopathic behavior are lived out through third parties; he can claim to be a free-speech absolutist and hide behind that label while the filthiest sociopaths are tweeting their hateful content on Twitter and apparently running the asylum.
When researching Musk's claims about rockets and space travel, as well as the dangers he poses to society, I found three patterns of how he is a menace to humanity. Musk is not Earth's savior as he often humble-braggingly posits himself. More about that in a bit.
Over the years, I've learned that when writing a critical analysis one should not succumb to confirmation bias. While confirmation bias can't entirely be prevented, thoroughly researching and analyzing the topic(s) at hand can help minimize wrongful presentations and/or false accusations. I've writing many analyses over the last 20+ years, and I don't think I've shown an overly biased view or that I'm predisposed to present one issue as fact while ignoring countering views and facts. I like to understand all sides to a story, I don't like to fool you or myself.
Just like Donald Trump managed to BS his way to the position of the world's most powerful man, Musk managed to BS his way to becoming the world's wealthiest person. We've witnessed two of the world's biggest charlatans reaching great power and influcence in a handful of overlapping years.
Whether it's about population collapse, humanity's violent end by AI, evangelizing brain implants, eliminating traffic jams and accidents across the world with his software, tunnels, and fully self driving Robotaxis, In-Situ Resource Utilization on Mars, creating a million-person city on Mars, or crowning himself Imperator of Mars, Musk's hubris apparently has no bounds.
To paraphrase Business Insider reporter Linette Lopez, one of Musk's best known critics, besides Common Sense Skeptic and Thunderf00t, Musk needs us to feel like we're living in a dystopian world with the end of humanity all but certain, unless Musk saves us – because he is the only one who can. I'll explain more about Linette Lopez and Musk's vile treatment of her later in this analysis.
Musk has a Messiah complex like no one before him (not even Sabbatai Zevi). This recent NYT article summarizes a few of Musk's antics that show how much self-importance there is.
Some of Musk's most questionable decisions, though, begin to make sense if seen as a result of a blunt utilitarian calculus. Last month, Reuters reported that Neuralink, Musk's medical-device company, had caused the needless deaths of dozens of laboratory animals through rushed experiments. Internal messages from Musk made it clear that the urgency came from the top. “We are simply not moving fast enough,” he wrote. “It is driving me nuts!” The cost-benefit analysis must have seemed clear to him: Neuralink had the potential to cure paralysis, he believed, which would improve the lives of millions of future humans. The suffering of a smaller number of animals was worth it.
This form of crude long-term-ism, in which the sheer size of future generations gives them added ethical weight, even shows up in Musk's statements about buying Twitter. He called Twitter a “digital town square” that was responsible for nothing less than preventing a new American civil war. “I didn't do it to make more money,” he wrote. “I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”
Autopilot and F.S.D. represent the culmination of this approach. “The overarching goal of Tesla engineering,” Musk wrote, “is maximize area under user happiness curve.” Unlike with Twitter or even Neuralink, people were dying as a result of his decisions — but no matter. In 2019, in a testy exchange of email with the activist investor and steadfast Tesla critic Aaron Greenspan, Musk bristled at the suggestion that Autopilot was anything other than lifesaving technology. “The data is unequivocal that Autopilot is safer than human driving by a significant margin,” he wrote. “It is unethical and false of you to claim otherwise. In doing so, you are endangering the public.”
It quickly becomes clear to anyone looking into Musk's many absurdities that this is a dangerous man with too much power. While my interview with Common Sense Skeptic discusses ten specific phenomena (published below), I categorize Musk, the person, as a disaster in three ways:
- Deadly: Musk's companies and projects are and will be causing many deaths;
- Deliberate: Musk has carefully crafted a praiseworthy image as visionary and savior;
- Delusional: Musk promises the Moon and Mars, literally, without a credible solution.
Let's dissect that before we get to the interview. We'll kick off with the most harmful Musk issues.
DEADLY
Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder and CEO of the now-defunct company Theranos, bullshitted her way out of trouble for years; she was promoting technology and devices that couldn't deliver on her promises. Only recently, Holmes was convicted sentenced to over eleven years in prison for defrauding investors. That was after her silly startup was valued at a staggering US$9 billion. The Theranos Board of Directors included Henry Kissinger and George Schultz – go figure.
Holmes finally got a tax-payer funded concrete jungle vacation for eleven years – deservedly so, but her company didn't cause any deaths. It could have, maybe, but it didn't. Musk's company, Tesla, that accounts for the vast majority of his wealth, on the other hand, has caused many deaths. These deaths weren't the results of traffic accidents per say, they were most likely caused by faulty technology and materials of the Tesla cars.
On Thanksgiving Day, last year, there was a crash in the far-left lane of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, involving eight vehicles.
Ken Klippenstein reported on January 10 in The Intercept:
Just hours before the crash, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had triumphantly announced that Tesla's “Full Self-Driving” capability was available in North America, congratulating Tesla employees on a “major milestone.” By the end of last year, Tesla had rolled out the feature to over 285,000 people in North America, according to the company.
Tesla vehicles using its “Autopilot” driver assistance system — “Full Self-Driving” mode has an expanded set of features atop “Autopilot” — were involved in 273 known crashes from July 2021 to June of last year, according to NHTSA data. Teslas accounted for almost 70 percent of 329 crashes in which advanced driver assistance systems were involved, as well as a majority of fatalities and serious injuries associated with them, the data shows. Since 2016, the federal agency has investigated a total of 35 crashes in which Tesla's “Full Self-Driving” or “Autopilot” systems were likely in use. Together, these accidents have killed 19 people.
I've been quite vocal about Musk's deadly FSD software, and I'm among the many people who believe that – because it's ultimately Musk's decision to release this faulty software on public roads, he should be held accountable for all damages – lethal, physical, and material.
The wisest thing for Tesla would have been to let specialists pilot-test the FSD software in special environments. Instead, Musk decided to release it to thousands of Tesla drivers and cash in on the promise of FSD, charging up to US$15,000 per car.
If paying full price for an untested, unfinished service isn't ridiculous enough, check out what Auto Evolution writes about the FSD business model.
If an FSD buyer sells the car with the software, they do not get to keep it if they buy a new Tesla. The vehicle's new owner also does not get it: it simply vanishes. The only logical conclusion possible is that only Tesla owns the software. Anything you pay for it – a monthly subscription fee or $15,000 – is just a use license.
What makes matter worse is the fact that Musk directed and released a video, which promoted FSD as the best thing since the invention of the wheel. The public learned about that just recently.
Just two weeks ago, Christopher Cox of the New York Times wrote an article, aptly titled, Elon Musk's Apetite for Destruction (January 17, 2023). He summarizes the deceptive moves:
Ever since Autopilot was released in October 2015, Musk has encouraged drivers to think of it as more advanced than it was, stating in January 2016 that it was “probably better” than a human driver. That November, the company released a video of a Tesla navigating the roads of the Bay Area with the disclaimer: “The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” Musk also rejected the name “Copilot” in favor of “Autopilot.”
The fine print made clear that the technology was for driver assistance only, but that message received a fraction of the attention of Musk's announcements. A large number of drivers seemed genuinely confused about Autopilot's capabilities. (Tesla also declined to disclose that the car in the 2016 video crashed in the company's parking lot.) Slavik's legal complaint doesn't hold back: “Tesla's conduct was despicable, and so contemptible that it would be looked down upon and despised by ordinary decent people.”
The many claims of the pending lawsuits come back to a single theme: Tesla consistently inflated consumer expectations and played down the dangers involved. The cars didn't have sufficient driver monitoring because Musk didn't want drivers to think that the car needed human supervision. (Musk in April 2019: “If you have a system that's at or below human-level reliability, then driver monitoring makes sense. But if your system is dramatically better, more reliable than a human, then monitoring does not help much.”) Drivers weren't warned about problems with automatic braking or “uncommanded lane changes.” The company would admit to the technology's limitations in the user manual but publish viral videos of a Tesla driving a complicated route with no human intervention.
Also recently, Reuters published an article with the headline: “Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies.” Reuters reported that in July 2022, a Tesla engineer testified -under oath- that Tesla's fantastic autopilot video was faked. Musk's critics are already wondering what the difference here is from the frauds that got Nikola's founder and CEO, Trevor Milton, incarcerated. Mind you, Milton's stunts didn't cause any bodily injuries or deaths.
Also, as Thunderf00T points out in this video, Elizabeth Holmes didn't sell shares in Theranos to cash in billions of dollars. Musk did enrich himself royally, to the tune of $40 billion – thanks to many fraudulent and misleading claims, which have been crucial for him to reach the levels of wealth and influence he's enjoying today.
Then there is the issue of Musk's much-anticipated Starship rockets. The problem is simple to pinpoint, which I described in my critical analysis of rockets, and also in this Twitter thread.
Maybe SpaceX will survive this disaster, and they launch a few more Starships.
— Neal Lachman 🚀 Space Industry Disruptor ❤🌍🌊🌌 (@nealx1) September 3, 2022
But Musk plans to launch 1,000+ Starships every 24 months.
1% failures / 1,000 launches = 10 disasters.
Ergo: 1,000 lives lost in a matter of less than one month (the Hohman Transfer window).
9/
As CSS has explained in detail in this thoroughly researched debunking video series, Starship will be a huge failure one way or the other. More importantly, Musk's one-million-person city on Mars is an absolute joke in terms of feasibility. One may think why Musk is still pursuing Starship if failure is so obvious. The answer lies, most likely, in Musk's desire to be continued to be seen as a real life Tony Stark, the Iron Man. There's nothing more sexier than a combination of rockets and cars.
However, as I asked in the above tweets, what will happen if astronauts and space tourists start dying upon launch?
The above is just a collection of quick thoughts about the deadly adventures of Elon Musk hitherto. As shown, Musk thinks he's on a mission to save humanity from many threats – he's not going to stop on his own account. Most of the time, Musk escapes accountability in the courts. Regulators have to step in some time soon again. We'll find out in the near future.
Let's move on to the second fact.
DELIBERATE
Musk and his companies have been on the wrong side of the law many times.
On January 2, just a month ago, Tesla was fined for exaggerating the driving range of Tesla cars. South Korea's antitrust regulator said it would impose a 2.85 billion won ($2.2 million) fine on Tesla for failing to tell its customers about the shorter driving range of its electric vehicles in low temperatures. (Source: CNBC)
In 2019, Musk and Tesla settled with the SEC in an agreement to pay a total of $40 million. Musk was also forced to step down as Tesla's Chairman. Musk also agreed, as part of the settlement, to have guardrails for his tweets – a promise he didn't keep. Mind you, that guardrail was meant to protect investors, not Musk.
Then there are the many other misleading market manipulation acts carried out by Musk.
A Musk watcher on Twitter, going by the username @FactsChaser, provided a Twitter thread with a fascinating list of the ten biggest “fibs Musk peddled to sell Teslas, boost $TSLA stock, his wealth”.
Biggest fibs Musk peddled to sell Teslas, boost $TSLA stock, his wealth:
— Facts Chaser 🌎 🐶 🤦🏻♂️ (@Factschaser) January 16, 2023
1. Range (is actually 20%-70% less depending on conditions)
2. 1 million “Robotaxis” by end of 2020
3. “FSD” / Autopilot are safer than human drivers
4. Teslas are appreciating assets due to “self driving” pic.twitter.com/xqCVYx2olO
Musk also lied or at least (deliberately) misrepresented important projects, such as The Boring Company. Just recently, Florida got ghosted by Musk and TBC.
The Sun Sentinel reported one of the Fort Lauderdale commissioners saying that “he was also baffled as to why The Boring Company had not bothered to come up with a business plan and pricing model — and why the company was requiring the city to pay for the research.” (Source)
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that The Boring Company has also ghosted officials in Maryland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and California's San Bernardino County.
Ghosting comes easy to Musk. In one of my own tweets (with more than 200,000 views), I point out the arrogant and irresponsible way Musk behaves towards his investors.
This particular tweet is about Leo Koguan, the third largest individual shareholder (after Musk and Larry Ellison), having invested $3 billion in Tesla. Koguan complained that Musk invested only $200 million and took out $40 billion while he remains committed to the declining stock. His biggest beef with Musk is how toxic Musk has become for the Tesla brand.
This man owns $3 Billion worth of Tesla shares. That's billion with a B. Third-largest owner of Tesla stock.
— Neal Lachman 🚀 Space Industry Disruptor ❤🌍🌊🌌 (@nealx1) January 8, 2023
Musk unfollowed him on Twitter and isn't willing to talk with him.
If Musk treats this major shareholder like this, do you think he cares about retail investors? $tsla https://t.co/9cvYwibIKY
It's remarkable that Musk is on the record saying that people who can't handle the velocity of Tesla stock shouldn't be buying it, and at the same time, he is continuously pumping and pushing the stock higher with all kinds of announcements and unveilings. Critics like to point out that Musk tweeted on June 5, 2013:
Forgot to say one thing at Tesla annual shareholders meeting: just as my money was the first in, it will be the last out.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2013
Should we ignore that Musk sold $40 billion worth of shares after repeatedly stating he wouldn't sell any? Even more important is the fact that Musk has recently suggested Tesla becoming worth more than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. Forbes quotes Musk:
“Tesla can far exceed Apple's current market cap” he said, “I can see a potential path for Tesla to be worth more than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. Doesn't mean it will happen or it will be easy. But for the first time I can see a way for Tesla to be roughly twice the value of Saudi Aramco.”
However, Musk keeps selling Tesla shares, he's not buying any, and other Tesla insiders don't seem to believe him either. As Twitter user Dana Marlene points out, not one insider has bought Tesla shares since at least February 2022.
$TSLA not a single insider buy since at least Feb 2022. pic.twitter.com/bD7VDbtp7i
— dmac (@dana_marlane) January 31, 2023
Some Musk fans quickly point out that insiders do not necessarily have to buy shares because they may have options, but if you think Tesla is going to be worth 5, 10, 20x in the near future, you'd want as many shares as possible.
The Apple-Aramco statement shows that Musk simply can't resist overhyping Tesla – he may even think his reality distortion can make things happen. It won't.
Musk is at the height of his success, which makes him act like he's untouchable and invincible, spreading promises and announcing amazing projects and achievements that make him something like a mythical figure. However, people are slowly catching up with reality, waking up, and smelling the sewer. Musk will follow soon; it's just a matter of time.
Musk has no regard for the public at large, he's perfectly happy unleashing his deadly FSD software on public roads everywhere. He has no regard for Tesla's retail investors, witness his toxic behavior that often tanks Tesla stock. He has no regard for human life, laughing when he says people will probably die on (their way to) Mars.
People should know, while it seems there are still millions worshiping Musk as if he's the second coming of Christ, most are bots.
Journalist Russ Mitchell cites a study in his April 22, 2022 article for the LA Times:
Over the 10-year study period, of about 1.4 million tweets from the top 400 accounts posting to the “cashtag” $TSLA, 10% were produced by bots. Of 157,000 tweets posted to the hashtag #TSLA, 23% were from bots, the research showed.
and
The paper calls Musk “a singular figure on Twitter,” with his 80 million followers. “It's not clear if this strategy could be replicated by other firms,” the authors write.
In the 10 months that have passed since that article was published, Musk's Twitter follower count has now reached a cool 127 million. A SparkToro audit done yesterday by me (Feb 5, 2023) shows that 70.2% of Musk's Twitter followers are fake. That refers to 89.7 million of his 127.7 million followers.
Musk simply doesn't care that the world can easily see through his tricks. He just counts on the fact that most people don't take the time to research the truth.
This brings us to Musk's third disastrous characteristic.
Delusional
Devin Gordon, a writer for Vanity Fair stated about Musk's third wife, singer Grimes:
“She told me repeatedly that Musk has this theory of her that she is not real, that she is a simulation who was created by him and exists in his cerebral cortex as sort of the perfect companion for him.” (Source: The Elon Musk Show).
Gordon continues to say that Grimes agrees with Musk. It's no wonder then that Musk and Grimes decided to name their children X Æ A-12 and Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.
Musk takes huge inspiration from personalities, movies, books, and TV series. Many thousand fluff pieces have been published to stroke his fragile ego – just search for “Elon Musk Tony Stark” to see how he's often portrayed. It's not hard then to imagine why Musk also chooses to ignore reality in the process – through his Reality Distortion Field fantasy.
From Wikipedia:
Reality distortion field (RDF) is a term first used by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs‘ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project. Tribble said that the term came from Star Trek, where in the episode “The Menagerie“, it was used to describe how the aliens created their own new world through mental force.
Thousands of startup founders “fake it till they make it”, and I can't really blame them for trying to succeed, as long as they don't defraud people. However, entrepreneurs like Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk are taking things beyond “fake it till they make it”, even beyond the reality distortion field. Sadly, most often than not, their delusions have proven to be a gateway to fraudulent actions.
While Musk was promoting the Tesla Roadster as “a zero emission sports car that can go head to head with a Ferrari and a Porsche and win,” the car was far from ready. Dave Lyons, Tesla's director of engineering 2004-2008 is on the record saying:
People were buying cars, I was surprised… I didn't know that many people who would just up and buy a car that wasn't ready for $199,000 at that point… Behind the scenes, there wasn't enough ability to keep the batteries thermally regulated, and they'd get too hot.
And next thing you know, it's starting to smell… So, we would cool the battery pack with ice packs. But it felt like we had to build the enthusiasm with a promise that was, you know, maybe a stretch. But Elon had a way dancing through that. (The Elon Musk Show, Episode 1)
Everybody should know this simple fact about Game Theory: if you tell a thousand lies, a few will become thruth, eventually. Musk is very much aware of that.
Musk has a simple strategy to get his projects financed by the public – either through taxpayer subsidies or straightup asking them to trust him and pay desposits years in advance.
Musk showed the Tesla Model S prototype and started taking deposits, just like he did with the Roadster. Even one year later, Tesla only had a few prototypes; it didn't have the factory or the staff to produce the cars. So, what does Musk do? He floated the company, even though it had never made a profit – in fact, the company had incurred losses of $260 million since its founding.
Musk has been very lucky with SpaceX too. When his rocket company had barely made one successful launch, the small startup got a huge contract from NASA – one of the many lifelines NASA has thrown at SpaceX over the years.
Musk has been failing his way up ever since he started his first company, which would be OK with me, if he weren't such a dangerous character. Even more worrisome are the deaths and wounded caused by Musk's Tesla car, but there's so much going on. What about the financial wizardry going on at Tesla, spontaneous combustion of the cars, phantom breaking, whompy wheels, selling a Level 2 FSD for $15,000, racism, sexual harassment, bitcoin and DOGE pump and dump, continuous stock/market manipulations through pushing unreliable or unrealistic claims etc. – the list of questionable and even outright illegal behavior is long.
Elizabeth Holmes got eleven years in prison for her actions, Musk is still roaming free. I don't see Musk as someone who initially set out to hurt and defraud people, it just turned out this way. But the same goes for Holmes, or John DeLorean, the disgraced car visionary. They had good intentions initially.
Speaking of DeLorean, you should see the similarities of the DeLorean car and Musk's Cybertruck, a vehicle promised by Musk since 2019.
An earlier, similar design is the James Bond's Lotus Esprit submarine car From ‘The Spy Who Loved Me, which Musk bought for a cool million dollars in 2014.
Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes & even seas that aren't too choppy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2022
As stated before, Musk is inspired by many fantasies. Nowadays we can witness him putting Tesla resources in making future Cybertrucks capable to cross rivers, lakes, and even seas – James Bond did it, so Elon Musk will do it too.
We shouldn't forget that Musk has build a reputation as humanity's most brilliant entrepreneur ever and planet Earth's savior, mostly hinging on his grand promise to have us transition to electric vehicles.
There is, however, a major hurdle on that path, and the truth about electric vehicles is uglier and dirtier than most people realize.
Teslas are remarkably prone to fires, but what makes matter worse is the amount of water needed to contain a Tesla car fire – somewhere between 6,000 to 30,000 gallons (22,800 – 113,000 liters!), and let's not ask how much harm the amount of toxic fumes are causing.
Then there's the real environmental harm due to lithium. This article from The Guardian‘s Climate Justice Reporter, Nina Lakhani, is a great primer to understand the challenges ahead for an EV-majority planet. Here's a snippet:
The lithium rush is already gathering pace, but keeping lithium mining to an absolute minimum is crucial for frontline communities – and it also makes good economic sense, according to the report.
Most forecasters predict a supply crunch in the next five to 10 years – a period when rapid decarbonization must take place to avert even more catastrophic global heating. The price of lithium batteries – the most expensive component of an EV – went up for the first time last year as demand outweighed supply.
Linette Lopez, a reporter for Business Insider, earned Musk's hateful scorn after publishing an article about Martin Tripp, a whisteblower who tried to alert the world of Tesla's waste. This 2018 Slate article, “Elon Musk Needs to Stop Tweeting Things He Can't Prove – and grow up,” lists many instances of harassment of Ms. Lopez by Musk and his fans.
Lopez stated in a recent interview (November, 2022) with Aaron Ruper and Thor Benson:
I started investigating [Tesla] in 2018 when I got a tip from a line worker named Martin Tripp. Elon accused him of stealing trade secrets and all of this grandiose stuff and sued him. It turned into a whole debacle. I still had sources in the company even after Marty was found out, so I continued to report on it.
Around July of 2018, I reported that Elon himself had ordered Tesla to stop doing this test called the brake and roll test. That's a test that tests the alignment on every car at different speeds, rotating the wheels. It's very important in automotive. No one would ever not do that test in automotive. It's unthinkable.
Musk decided to make an example of Tripp, crushing him to show all Tesla workers what will happen to anyone who crosses him. Ms. Lopez was among the group of reporters who had the distinct honor of being banned from Twitter shortly after Musk bought the company. He especially targeted reporters who had recently written about him.
Lopez ordeal with Musk started with this 2018 article about waste at Musk's Gigafactory. She writes:
Tesla is wasting a jaw-dropping amount of raw material and cash to make the Model 3.
Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show that the company expects that as much as 40% of the raw materials used to produce batteries and driving units manufactured at Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada need to be scrapped or reworked by employees before they are sent to Tesla's factory in Fremont, California, and assembled into Model 3s. The documents were dated in the first quarter.
That is to say, for every 2,500 battery packs and driving units that leave the Gigafactory, an additional 1,000 pieces of “nonconforming material” is created. Half of that will be reworked and put into other car parts. The other half becomes scrap.
Besides selling the world an almost impossible sustainability dream – from mountains of scrap to lithium and cobalt mining to coal-powered charging station to wasting tons of water resources to toxic smoke emanating from Teslas on fire – Musk has been delusional about many other things that hurt society. First and foremost, the facts about Tesla's fatal flaws, as described in the “Deadly” section above.
I'm personally very concerned about Musk's Starship and Mars fantasies, which may end up more dangerous and more crushing. You'd think Musk, being the rocket scientist, would know better than Neal Lachman or CSS what to do for the future of mankind. You'd be wrong. Musk is as much a rocket scientist as I am: not.
Musk has this strategy to bullshit his way out of valid questions or criticisms. First he sets up a potential doom scenario, and immediately follows up explaining what his solution is. This primes people to his reality distortion, which he sets up so deliberately.
Musk is, for example, on record about curing cancer, stating
“… I think that's going to be one of the key things to solving a lot of diseases, actually, which is to just basically write a program that destroys the disease… It's just software.” (The Elon Musk Show)
From a professional perspective, I care most about Musk's muddying the waters for space travel. His claims are irresponsible and highly misleading, but as previously stated, CSS debunks Musk's Mars colony fantasies in his videos and in our interviews.
The conclusion, after watching videos by the likes of CSS, and the facts presented in our interviews (see part 1, part 2, and part 3, below) will be that Musk is not simply naive, he is outright delusional.
My primary issue with Musk is that his vision is dangerous, and bad for space travel, no matter how much praise he and his Starship is getting from NASA and others for Moon and Mars missions (that still have to be achieved).
Musk's SpaceX is spending tens of billions of dollars on Starship, but remember this: the minute one of his future Starships blow up at or after launch, the US regulators will ground it, for years, if not forever. That will be a blow for space travel. The same, by the way, goes for all rockets in general. Sadly, it's not a matter of it, but when.
This interview with CSS concerns the top 10 disastrous facts that will help you understand and unravel Musk as a disaster, not a savior.
Interview
NSL: You have been critical of Tesla as having faulty cars and being an unethical company, led by Musk, who may be a psychopath CEO. Can you elaborate?
CSS: It's hard to describe differently a company that has unleashed a beta version of software upon public streets, advertised as Full Self Driving the two-ton vehicle it's installed into.
The general public have become unwilling and unwitting participants in this experiment as these vehicles drive the streets hoping to recognize and avoid obstacles. We've all seen the videos of collisions and near misses, people literally asleep at the wheel, even crawling into the back seat for a nap. This is part of the reason why California has cracked down on the term Full Self Driving where Tesla is concerned.
If Tesla were a person, they'd be considered a sociopath for the reckless disregard for safety which has led to many deaths in the meantime. Since according to many, Musk is Tesla now, the sociopath label should apply to him instead.
That's not even touching on the quality of the vehicles, which have been in the basement of initial quality surveys for years now. Again, everyone has seen the videos of broken suspensions, flooded cabs, and the general poor build quality of Tesla cars. The company doesn't care about quality or safety whatsoever. Their only concern is making quarterly delivery numbers, and even those are padded with the numbers from used car sales.
NSL: There seems to be a self-enrichment lawsuit against Musk personally. What is that about?
CSS: The case you're referring to is probably the one where shareholders got fed up with Musk siphoning billions out of the company in the form of stock options – to the tune of almost $60 billion. Musk wrote his own compensation package based on stock-price performance rather than company milestones, and he has managed to use that wording to extract more money from he company than it has ever made in profit.
Through that package Musk can buy shares for $2.08 compared to the $6.24 prior to the 3:1 split. Meaning, his wealth has grown by leaps and bounds solely because he managed to get the stock price to almost the $1,250 level before its collapse, but he's under no obligation to return that money or those shares even when the price subsequently collapsed. The entire package is unprecedented and insane. We await the verdict on this case, hoping the judge has better news for Tesla shareholders than others before them.
NSL: You've been critical of Starlink's future. Can you explain?
CSS: Starlink, even if it works as well as other options, is running on an unsustainable and ridiculous financial model and paradigm. The same way SolarCity was. SolarCity never turned a profit because the costs of the equipment the company needed to install to collect the monthly subscription fees became overwhelming. The same is true of Starlink. They need to keep sending up more and more satellites, to reach their 42,000 unit constellation, and every five years or so those units will be falling back to Earth due to their LEO placements.
There are also cases to be made about these units ruining ground-based astronomy, including those astronomers tracking inbound objects threatening Earth. And with every unit sent up, the chances of a major Kessler syndrome event occurring. We covered all of this in our Debunking Starlink episode.
NSL: Musk's fans expect The Boring Company to be essential for planet Earth as well as for settlements on Mars. Isn't that another disaster in the making?
CSS: Honestly, The Boring Company is a nothing-burger. That's just fact. They offer no benefit over established tunnelling practices, and they're ghosting the cities where they promised to “cure traffic” with their Vegas Loop-style Tesla tunnels.
Moving traffic underground is not a step forward in any regard. Just makes accidents harder to access and far more deadly in the case of a rapidly moving fire. The Vegas Loop has become a cautionary tale, not a revolution in transit.
NSL: What is so disastrous about Musk's Starship plans?
CSS: So, to clarify, there are no plans for Starship. We have been promised internal diagrams and mockups for years now, but there's still nothing. We've gone through several episodes that dissect artist concepts of what they think Starship will look like, but no matter how they design the animation they can't get around the fact that the declared physical dimensions of a Starship are incapable of doing what Musk claims they will – including transport 100 people at a time. It's just not physically possible.
Once that claim goes up in smoke, the rest of the claims do, too.
NSL: Can you elaborate on Musk's involvement in geopolitics?
CSS: We don't generally hit politics due to their inherently divisive nature today, but let's just say that Musk will say anything he needs to, to anybody he needs something from, to get what he needs to enrich himself at the cost of others. He takes turns pretending he's on your side of the binary option, until it suits him to change teams.
NSL: There are many lawsuits haunting Musk that can be disastrous for him and his companies, please summarize for our readers.
CSS: The horseshoe Musk has up his butt with regards to these big ticket class actions will have to eventually fall out.
The SolarCity class action was a slam dunk, yet Musk charmed the vice-Chancellor into giving him that decision, which we hope is overturned on appeal in Delaware Supreme Court. Even the pedo-guy case was a no-brainer, and Musk skated. We just heard how the 420 tweet – which was determined in advance of the trial to be false and made with malicious intent – had a jury too confused by the three weeks in court to hold him accountable.
We have yet to hear the determination from his self-enrichment compensation package, where Musk has siphoned $58 billion into his personal pocket for a company that has never made that much in profit. Also, the RICO class action against Musk for his pump and dump of DOGE is coming up yet, and once again it's pretty obvious to anybody with a brain that this should go the way of the class; but, it seems the people they're finding for juries these days are the type of sub-standard intellect that can't tell shit from shinola. To those lawyers: if you're reading this article, get in touch with us and we'll do everything we can to help you win that case.
Those are just the highlights, though. Musk and Tesla face approximately 1,200 legal actions at present, ranging from sexual and racial harassment at his factories to environmental violations and wrongful death suits. Musk is pretty much single-handedly putting a generation of lawyer's children through university.
NSL: Is Neuralink going to change the world, or is it another disastrous Musk fantasy?
CSS: Neuralink was never intended to do what Musk claims it will during his presentations. We did a two-part video on this, and a follow up during the TED Talk series.
Some of the most outlandish claims Musk made include: seeing in radar; digital immortality by transferring consciousness to another body (where's that body coming from, by the way?); playing video games in your head; curing Alzheimer's; curing addiction; curing obesity. The list goes on and on, and it's all pure bullshit.
There's no legitimate researcher in the field outside of Musk's den of sycophants that give any credence to Musk's claims – which is probably why most of the original founders quit the company. And those people have their name on the robot patent. Musk does not.
NSL: Twitter has shown Musk's true face, it seems. What's your take?
CSS: That would be an accurate assessment. Musk is a man-child who nobody in authority seems to be willing to keep in check, which just strengthens the hold he has over his followers. Twitter is in huge financial trouble because of his actions. They can't pay rent on their facilities. They can't pay their M&A advisors from the deal. They can't even pay their janitors.
It's our hope that the Twitter saga fully exposes Musk's incompetence so that even the most ardent follower has no choice but to concede their hero is a moron. But there seems to be no end of idiots and imbeciles to fall in locked-step behind him as he tramples whatever industry he touches.
As Musk falls further and further behind financially on Twitter, he will have to make up the shortcomings. The only way he can do that is by selling of more Tesla shares, or possibly his SpaceX shares. The shaky tripod used to be SolarCity – Tesla – SpaceX. Now it's Twitter – Tesla – SpaceX. If one leg collapses, the other two aren't far behind. People who doubt that need to look at the non-stop funding rounds SpaceX has to do to keep the lights on.
NSL: As you know, due to my company's Moon colony project, I have a professional interest in your debunking of Musk's plans to build a 1-million-person city on Mars. Can you explain its shortcomings, once and for all?
CSS: The strongest real-world case to be made against such a city is the Biosphere 2 experiment where eight people were enclosed into a 3-acre facility that was designed by experts to be a fully self-supporting ecosystem. The project failed on every level, even given every advantage they could possibly include. The participants couldn't grow enough food. They couldn't keep the air gas mix steady. And they couldn't even get along, fracturing into two cadres that have not spoken to each other since their release. From a self-sustaining perspective, they failed. From a sociological perspective, it failed even more miserably.
There's no such thing as a self-sustaining city on Earth, where we have established natural water, carbon and nitrogen cycles. So, to think for one second that we are in any position to artificially replicate those cycles in a “glass dome” as Musk suggests is folly, considering Mars has precious little nitrogen compared to Earth's atmosphere. Mars is generally resource and energy poor. The only native source of energy is solar, and even that solar irradiance is far weaker than on Earth. Having to import breathable air and the chemical elements to support plant life from Earth is a ridiculous prospect, and would take those building blocks out of the Earth's ecosystem. Harming Earth to resurrect Mars makes no sense at all.
If Musk wants to prove he can make such a city on Mars, let him build one here first, in the middle of nowhere with no lifelines and no support. Launch a Starship, land in the middle of the Sahara, or at the South Pole, and see how long it takes for the radio to go dead because everyone starved to death.
One of the greatest challenges the Imperator of Mars will face when he starts introducing people into that enclosure is, what type of society will these people create? We've got two episodes on how we expect that society might play out. It will certainly not be “just anybody who buys a ticket”, as Musk has promised, because that scenario would end in disaster even quicker than Biosphere 2.
The logistics of feeding one million people is laid out by the numbers in our Episode 6 “Feeding the Colony.” We show what farming enough wheat to feed everyone a single loaf of bread would look like on Mars, being absolutely conservative in our numbers. Substitute any other crop you like, and the numbers are similarly astronomical.
Not only is this not going to happen in the next 30 years. This isn't going to happen, ever.
Feautured Image: Jan Helebrant
Debunking Elon Musk - Ted Talk 2022
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