Musk Is Rich As He Is Off Other’s Work and GOVERNMENT Money

The concept of people who succeed in the professional lives beyond normal measure and then “pulling up the ladder behind them” is something we all know about. It’s especially glaring when it involves people from modest or even humble beginnings who “make it big” and when given a choice to mentor others or change things to make it easier for others to get opportunities given to them instead they set about trying destroy the means where people who started out like them have their own fair chance to succeed.

Elon Musk falls squarely in the latter category as this article from Salon explains.  He’s hardly the first person in this country to become super rich, famous and powerful AND a key player in our politics.  Us old farts remember Ross Perot and his run for President in 1992 which threw a monkey wrench into the race. Trade and federal spending were his hobby horses. He was rich enough to mount an actual national campaign and polled well in a lot of places. Rich. How did he get that way? His company EDS made insane amounts of money via federal contracts to process Medicare and Medicaid payments. We the taxpayers made him “richer than god” but he railed against government spending. Or how about Justice Clarence Thomas? Poor boy who made good, got himself through Yale Law School and wound up on SCOTUS. How much time and effort has HE put into destroying opportunities for kids who started out like he did to get a decent education and move up in life?

Now, in Elon Musk’s case we have a guy born to money and privilege granted by the Apartheid policies of his native South Africa during his formative years. He’s not stupid. Far from it. However he’s not actually invented things on his own so much as like Steve Jobs taken the work of others and run with it. Yes, there’s something to be said for seeing wider opportunities that others don’t. But Musk is not the creative genius he would have everyone believe he is. From Salon:

Despite the media hype painting Musk as a genius and inventor, he largely built his financial empire on other people’s research. At every turn, he’s relied heavily on technologies developed because of the very federal largess he now deems a “ripoff.”

The linked article goes on to describe the HUGE “thank you” Musk owes to Al Gore. For all the joking and slanders of several decades ago Gore never claimed to  have ‘invented the internet.’ He did however see the value of taking the intra-inter agency computer file sharing and communication invented by DARPA and turning it into something that could be widely used. Gore worked hard to convince colleagues and in that sense did help invent what we now know as the internet by getting it turned into a communications tool that could be used by anyone. Then Gore spent the 1990s promoting it. Where would Musk be without Gore’s work to stand on?   Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn were early pioneers in developing the internet. In 2000 they were quite clear about Gore. They said  “Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development” and “no other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.”  Not that Musk wants anyone thinking about this time in his and the internet’s history, but Salon point out:

Musk got rich because of all this work. In the 90s, he built a website called Zip2 that functioned as an online Yellow Pages. He sold it to Compaq in 1999, netting $22 million. He made another huge chunk of money as the CEO of PayPal, which would also not exist but for the decades of government-funded development of the internet. Musk deserves credit for developing coding skills at a time when the internet was still new, of course. But he also just got really lucky in being a young man right when decades of taxpayer-funded research into the internet was finally paying off.

It’s an age old story. A person or persons do the heavy lifting and someone swoops in and takes over their work and either claims credit or gets rich off it. Or both. Musk is far from alone on that score but Salon has plenty more to point out. Tesla is how Musk became a household name and the price of its stock is what moved him into the ranks of the richest people. All that, and controversies with the stock and fights with the board are the subject of multiple columns but without Tesla’s success the Elon Musk we know would be just another rich guy face in the crowd. Salon points out Musk’s use of others work to build Tesla while making it seem HE was the creative spark/genius inventing all this new technology has been just more of the story of his career.

What Musk doesn’t want people to know, much less think about is that without the very government (not just federal but states too) he’s wrecking Tesla would have long ago failed. He simply didn’t have the resources to sustain it like any of the major auto manufacturers (both in the U.S. and abroad) did. What he DID have was a talent for obtaining government grants and funding, the ability to lobby for policies that would benefit the development of EVs and so on. The one thing he was good at in all this was recognizing that the old-school manufacturers were dragging their feet on electric cars but that given the right people in DC in power policies could shift and money could flow to subsidize the design and building of cars and batteries. And charging stations. AND subsidies for consumers who bought EVs.  It wasn’t engineering genius on Musk’s part, it was lobbying and marketing!

Without investment from the Department of Energy into developing batteries and other electric car technology, there would be no Tesla. Car companies were often reluctant to fund that research because it would take decades to pay off. Only the government, which works for the people and not for profits, has a motive to put money into scientific inquiry on that time scale.

So Musk became breathtakingly rich. Enough to really start flexing his “muscles” and with NASA looking to ‘privatize’ space exploration he had a new idea – Space X. Between that and all the DOD contracts he was challenging for the title of richest person the world, and had enormous political clout in multiple countries which have come to rely on both his crewed space flight advances but in military/communications satellites. It’s scary to contemplate but the fact is Musk can, and just might if he gets pissy shut it all down, if only for a while just to make a point of “Give me what I want and NOW or I’ll screw everyone!’ He showed us how easily he could do whatever he wanted when for a time he shut down DODs ability to allow Ukraine use of satellites earlier in the war after Russia’s invasion.

I’m not saying Musk would be a very rich guy without the taxpayers. He did start off well in life after all and was ambitious. However without U.S. taxpayers as I said he’d be just another rich rich guy. He’d have never wound up becoming worth many tens, then hundreds of billion dollars. But now, now that HE is so effing rich and powerful he seems determine to destroy anyone else’s chance to just become rich!  Like I say of many rich people he HATES every dollar that is in someone else’s pocket. Worse, he HATES that person with said dollar in the pocket and there is NOTHING he won’t do to force them into handing it over.

And the worst of it is he’d never be in such a position if he hadn’t been so great at milking the U.S. Government and taxpayers for the money he has!  We think of Trump as a ‘Mad King’ but Musk truly is one, or trying like hell to become the ‘Mad King of the World.’  And so he’s going about destroying not just our government but government in general. I’ve written it’s ironic that Steve Bannon and Musk are at each other’s throats because like Bannon Musk wants worldwide anarchy. You’d think they’d be thick as thieves. But Musk intends I believe not to just try and screw regular and poor people out of every dollar they have, once we are all peasants or serfs he will turn his attention into taking every bit of wealth from other rich people.

The author of the linked piece concludes by saying “Musk in particular has a long, documented obsession with pretending to be smarter and more accomplished than he actually is, even in areas as inconsequential as video gaming. (He hires people to play online games for him, and passes off their scores as his own.)”  He goes on to conclude:

Musk isn’t a scientist, he just plays one for TV. I have little doubt that he resents real scientists, as poseurs always do when confronted with the real thing. He’s probably taking his insecurities out on people whose only crime is being what he only pretends to be. Unfortunately, his petty psychodrama will have real impacts on the whole human race, which may be denied the often life-saving benefits of what real researchers do.

********** And now, a message from Ursula I hope you take to heart **********

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