The Danger of Elon Musk

as a way to remotely control the Kamikazi drones. Musk, having spoken to a Russian ambassador, saw Crimea as a red lion that, when crossed, would escalate the conflict, potentially even provoking a nuclear retaliation, and so he acted disabling or depending on who you ask, refusing to enable starlink access in the Crimea region. When the Ukrainian drones serbs approached their targets, they suddenly stopped communicating with the operators

and eventually washed up ashore, harmless and impotent. While the specific details of this episode are hazy, the core truth is unambiguously clear. Elon Musk is a supremely powerful individual and through action or inaction, has the ability to influence the outcome of combat operations and the bloodiest war inflicted upon Europe in generations. It's a level of power typically only reserved for nation state actors, not tech company CEOs.

Throughout history, we've seen plenty of examples of individuals and companies with outsized country like power and influence. Musk isn't unique in that regard, nor is he the sole cautionary

tale about why this shouldn't be allowed to happen. As a private individual operating within his capacities as CEO, he's unconstrained by democratic accountability, and as a private businessman he has his own conflicts of interest, from Tesla's long history of sourcing aluminum from Russian companies to his contacts with

the highest echelons of Russian leadership, including Vladimir Putin himself. Historically, the only real accountability mechanism for people like Muscus to be in the media, and yet in this case, the media is chosen instead to fate the Elon Musk creation myth that he's a trailblazing real life Tony Stark that will take humanity to the stars, rather than asking him

many hard questions of any kind. This situation is the product of a media industry dominated by journalists seeking access to popular public figures, pulling their punches in the process. The most notable access journalist is Kara Swisher, who spent decades covering the tech industry with a pantomime like aggression, asking the quote unquote hard questions without ever really pushing the level of discover that might make a source un

willing to participate. Swisher famously, in an interview during the All Things Digital conference in twenty ten, convinced Meta CEO then called Facebook Mark Zuckerberg to take off his hoodie after asking him a challenging question about Facebook's invasion of privacy, only to be distracted by the design of the inside of what he was wearing, effectively objecting to her own

line of questioning for endstainment purposes. Eight years later, Swisher would interview Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference in the twenty sixteen elections, lobbing softball questions like make a case for keeping info wars on Facebook and responding to Zuckerberg outright saying he wouldn't ban Holocaust and Sandy Hook deniers by asking how it made Zuckerberg feel when people

said Facebook killed people Myanmar. The Swisher house style is simple, ask a big meeting question, and then failed to interrogate a single answer in any way, shape or form. Around a month later, Swisher would interview Elon Musk, who at that point indid harassment campaigns against reporters, called a man saving children a pedophile, and had his companies face multiple

allegations of sexual harassment and racism. When asked about his fights with the press over Twitter must claim that the Wall Street Journal, whose Swisher used to work for, outright lied about investigation into Tesla's production figures, to which Swisher asked him if he realized the dangers of him saying such things about the press and need to help Musk paper over his claims, saying that he quote just doesn't

like falsehoods. One of the richest and most powerful men in the world sat before Swisher, and her interrogation involved asking him simple questions about why he was doing things, lightly teasing him and saying that he looks and I quote rested in calm to be clear, this is an ultra powerful billionaire, and this is a was at the

time enterprising journalist who everyone looked to. In April twenty twenty two, the week that Musk announced the Twitter acquisition, Swisher gave a strange interview to James D. Walsh of The New Yorker, defending Musk, who had of course waived du diligence on the acquisition, did not seem to have a single clear plan about how he might run the same. She claimed that you couldn't pin Musk down, that he was quite complex, and that we would be surprised about

what he likes and doesn't like. Musk, who has invented none of the core products that make him rich, is a quote visionary that gave Swisher genuine answers and arguably the most damning things she could have said, would call her back. That was her litmus test that he would return her calls. Her ultimate defensive Musk was that and I quote inventors were very difficult, problematic people, and the moderation on Twitter was not working at the time of acquisition.

These are all, of course demonstrably force based on the events that followed the growth of hate speech the lack of accountability, that biggest face on the platform, and the fact that every third post seems to be some kind of spambot, either selling t shirts or pornography or cryptocurrency scams.

Swisher only turned on Musk when he emailed her calling her an asshole in November twenty twenty two, including a screenshot were according to Swisher, she was actually defending him, saying that the US government should pay Elon Musk for starling. Since then, Musk has gone from a difficult to pin down visionary to carver Swisher calling his social network a

and this is agonizingly horribly written a thunderdome of toxic asininity. Swisher, it appears, only worried about what she'd called Musk's price of cocktail of ignorance and big ego until he was rude to her. One of the most famous tech journalists in the world, who has failed to take any real shot at any of the people she's questioned across decades of doing this, has now been reduced to making epic dunks that sound like a twenty one year old Harry

Potter fan trying to cast a spell. It's embarrassing. Swisher isn't the sole media figure guilty of having treated Elon Musk with kid gloves or treating his bloviating with otherwise on due credulity. This is a problem that affects almost every news outlet and reporter that covers billionaires. The assumption is always that billionaires will act with empathy, patience, and grace, three things that Musk, Bezo, Zuckerberg, and the Ilk totally lack.

Failing that, one would suppose they'd act like a normal person, a losing proposition. If you've ever read Jeff best as his texts, these people are not like us. They do not experience human struggle. They don't have bills or bosses or fear of anything, let alone authority. Each and every billionaire is effectively above the law, and that is the

place that you must start to understand them. It's deeply frustrating, especially when you consider the myriad of opportunities where the media could have taken must task and held him accountable. Take High Poloop, for example, Musk's concept for a high speed mass transit system where pressurized capsules would hurtle between cities through vacuum tubes at speeds as fast as seven

hundred and sixty miles an hour. Hyperloop Musk promise would allow commuters to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in as little as thirty minutes, and with the network powered primarily by solar power, with no real environmental impact. If anything, this could have been a much bigger deal than Tesla. High speed transit that doesn't burn fossil fuels. Could truly have changed the world. So what do you

think happened? Do you think that must delivered on this on this product that helped play a vital role in cementing his image as a real life Tony Stark. Not only would it be faster and cheaper than anything currently in existence, but it'd be greener too. What followed was a gushing or at least gredulous flow of media coverage, including from The Washington Post and The New York Times,

both papers of record. It wasn't until the hype gradually died down that people began asking serious questions about Hypepoloop's viability.

An exhaustive report published by the Transportation Research Laboratory earlier this year raises serious questions about the feasibility of hyperloop, particularly when it comes to passenger transportation writers, it noted, would be exposed to extreme physical and mental stress, with the noise, vibrations and rapid acceleration and deceleration inflicting an unknowable toll on the human body. Questions about safety still linger. And then there's the thorny issue of cost, with high

bloop requiring an all new infrastructure. Even the shortest routes would involve a multi billion dollar upfront investment. These points were for the most part, absent entirely from the earliest coverage of highperloop. The media also missed the fact that hypeloop wasn't even a new idea. In the nineteenth century, countless inventors toyed with the notion of an atmospheric railway where vehicles traveled through a near vacuum environment on the

momentum of pressurized air. A small demonstrator route was even built by Ismbard Kingdom Brunel, the legendary British engineer who designed the first transatlantic steamship. While Highpoloop differdence and meaningful ways, it was still, nonetheless, much like many Musk products, a derivative of an earlier idea. The boring company Musk's hilariously

named tunnel. Boring startup earned similar credulous C coverage upon its inception, driven in no small part due to Musk's decision to raise working capital by selling branded flame throwers dubbed the not a flame Thrower to anyone that paid five hundred dollars. This stunt, aside, the Boring Company one praise due to its state admission to reduce the cost of digging tunnels, which are often an inevitable and expensive

part of road and mass transportation development like hyperloop. The Boring Company fed into the Tony Stark image of a billionaire that could, through sheer force of will, change the world and fix once intractable problems. I quote Mashable when they said, must build machines to travel more efficiently on the Earth and above it. So traveling through Earth seems

within the realm of his capabilities. If anyone can transform the seemingly absent minded half joke into world changing technology, it's Elon Musk, said The Guardian, and then reality here. The Boring Company's first commercial project, a one point seven mile tunnel in Las Vegas, where I in fact live, wasn't a traditional road tunnel or part of an underground metro system. It was in fact far less impressive, a

single lane loop where human driven tests. There's varied passengers between points of interest in the Las Vegas Convention Center and where traffic jams are a routine frustration for passengers. Other projects in other cities, most notably Chicago and Los Angeles, have either been canceled or are on indefinite hiatus. There is nothing that the boring company has done. The tunnel in Vegas is useless. It's claustrophobic, it's ugly, feels like

being in an airport lounge, except there's no food. It's strange. It doesn't feel like it solves a problem other than how can Elon must get more attention, and that really is what he craves. Musk's wafer thin skin, his volatility, and his propensity to overpromise an under the liver has never been a secret. While he's been able with some success to obfiscate a misdirect through a well crafted media persona,

the clues have always been there. Musk's reality distortion field goes some way to explaining how he has managed to amass the extent of the power he has and how he cemented himself into our nation's most vital industries like transportation, communications, infrastructure, and social media. He has a fairly consistent battle plan. He makes a big promise, he delivers enough to make the media believe he's for real, and then he relies upon the fact that very few parts of the media

will ever follow up with him. There is no challenging Elon Musk in the media. The thinnest amounts of criticism are usually met by a horde of crazed tesla fans, or at times Elon Musk himself. He's created the paper thin media image built on the smallest, thinnest structures of reality. He has found a way to manipulate the media using his large amounts of power, money, and his few friends.

Elon mush Usk is a danger to society. He's a capricious demagogue, desperate for more power and attention, and he will do whatever he wants, whereever he wants, wherever he wants, because we are societally unprepared for billionaires. It's no longer healthy, or safe or honest to see Elon Musk as a dorky charlatan carrying sinks into offices or destroying social networks to settle insular beefs Elon Musk is a nation state level actor with a net worth larger than the GDP

of Ukraine. He associates only with equally spurious reactionaries like Bill Maher, Ronda Santis, and David Sachs, and he's easily influenced by anyone who agrees with his thinly backed beliefs. Musk isn't polarizing. He's polarization given life, an empty man made of contrarianism and grievances, and he'll happily change the

world based on his own personal beliefs. As a result of our market driven government and compliant media, Musk has caused and will continue to cause human suffering an actual death in his pursuit of fame, power, and capital. It's time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor, an executive, or an industry blow hard. As a result of our market driven government and compliant media, Musk has caused and will continue to cause human suffering an actual

death in his pursuit of fame, power and capital. It's time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur, an investor, an executive, or an industry blow hard and see him as a man who has used his incredible wealth and status to twist the world to his petty, ignorant, and selfish desires. It's important to realize with complete clarity that Musk makes electric cars that are sold around the world

and sells rockets to NASA. He runs Twitter X or whatever it's called these days, one of the largest communication networks in the world, and of course Starlink, the satellite isp used aroount the world that is specifically marketed to places that are otherwise inaccessi to traditional broadband. This is not just the goofy redditor posting epic means and saying exactly anymore. Elon Musk has chosen to and will continue to choose to use his influence over these networks to

interfere with global events. And because the media and the government has been so utterly tepid in their approach to him, he's accumulated such power and influence that he is on some level unstoppable. Since his acquisition of Twitter in twenty twenty two and the subsequent layoffs of six thousand people, Musk has revealed to the world his deep seated reactionary

beliefs and his noxious pathetic victim complex. He has become obsessed with the woke mind virus, a term that he uses to vaguely refer to everything from progressive education on college campuses to San Francisco's growing homeless problem. He's made Twitter's bot problem, one that he tried to use to cancel the original acquisition, significantly worse, littering replies with bots trying to sell you T shirts or make you join the latest script ocurrency scam, some of which even include

Elon Musk's face. He took Twitter's verification system, a flawed yet workable solution to verifying whether a tweak came from the person who actually sent it, and turned it into an eight dollars a month's premium account that verifies nothing other than whether someone is capable of completing a credit card transaction, and by destroying Twitter's trust and safety team, Musk has allowed the world's real time communications channel to become one rife with racism and other hate speech, leading

to Fortune five hundred advertisers worrying that the network and I quote perpetuates racism, which was raised in a Semaphore story from earlier in this year, Musk has shown he is more than willing to do things based on not what's good for the world, his businesses, or his users, but on what will confirm his biases and protect his

financial interests. As a result of these moronic and malicious choices, Twitter's valuation is tanked less than a third of the forty four billion dollars he paid for it, losing half of their advertising revenue, and changing their name to X, which some have argued killed further billions of the original company's brand value. Being a selfish, ignorant, and gormous charlatan, Musk has now blamed Jewish non profit the Anti Defamation League for ruining his company, claiming that the ADL had

pressured advertisers into killing x slash Twitter. Musk had previously sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another nonprofit that published research showing the growth and hate speech on the platform. Musk is now fine with the ADL because they resumed advertising, a deeply confused and utterly pointless exercise that only sought

to further increase bigotry on his website. For all his statements around freedom of speech, Musk is the ultimate capitalist dictator, willing to use his money to intimidate and censor those

who dared to criticize him. He's already done so on Twitter, banning an account that tracked publicly available records of private jet flights centering over four hundred tweets critical of Turkish President Urdigan in the week's running up to an election, suppressed accounts critical of Indian Prime Minister Nearendra Modi, and cut access to links to newsletter platform Substack when they

launched a network competitive to Twitter. Musk is a propagandis willing to work with any fellow reactionaries who feel scorned by progressivism, personally helping Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis launch his campaign on Twitter and funneling money to alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tait through Twitter's Creator program. On on Nations roads,

Muscus created another problem in March twenty twenty three. According to The Washington Post, a seventeen year old stepped off of a school bus on North Carolina Highway five point sixty one. As he stepped off, a Tesla Model Y, allegedly with Tesla's autonomous autopilot engaged hit him at forty five miles an hour, throwing him into the windshield and leaving him lying face down on the pavement. He thankfully survived,

but broke and fractured his leg in the process. The incident, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is still investigating, is part of a growing list of victims of Tesla's open beta test of quote full self driving, a buggy dangerous software available on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles allowing users to let the car drive, which has resulted in the deaths of seventeen people and led to seven

one hundred and thirty six other injuries and crashes. In theory, activating Tesla's full self driving lets your Tesla take the wheel, making turns, avoiding other vehicles, maintaining speed, avoiding objects, and

theoretically helping you arrive safely at your destination. The problem is that this has only ever been a beta, meaning that every new release involves some sort of new bug, such as the one that Electric Car Blog editor Fred Lambert claimed tried to kill him in September twenty twenty three by trying to veer at highway speed into the median strip on the road. One might imagine that such

a thing is illegal. Effectively unleashing beta software onto the world's roads without s efficiently testing it would for any normal person lead to imprisonment and a lifetime of fines. Musk, thanks to his incredible wealth and power equivalent to that of a small nation, has managed to avoid much scrutiny. With the occasional government investigations that never seem to go anywhere, and despite a well documented culture of racism and sexism, very little seems to happen to test the at all.

This is because our society, in its government, its media, and its citizen try, is woefully unprepared to deal with billionaires. Musk is able to operate as a noxious, abusive, and reckless monster in public, using his companies as vehicles to lend himself money and political weapons, with little scrutiny or

punishment on their own. One might fob off these concerns as one time things, but the reality is there's a pattern of malicious and capricious acts or one after another, again and again, done in broad daylight for all to see.

Musk has shown he will push whatever on envelope he sees fit, and as Ronan Pharaoh's New York magazine piece shows, there are very few people in the government, former and otherwise anywhere really, not investors, not other members of the Silicon Valley elite who are willing or able to get in the way. Musk is so unbelievably rich, well connected, and powerful that he can push around just about anybody,

even if they work for the Pentagon. Yet, Musk's desperation for attention and adulation mean that he can be pulled in any direction that feels like it scorns his critics, And when his critics are pretty much anyone who isn't a right wing lunatic, it almost guarantees he will continue to power around with authoritarian regimes that will influence his

remarkably malleable brain. The actual solution will be to treat Musk as what he is, a dangerous entity with a higher GDP than Ukraine and an ego that rivals their invaders president regardless of what happened in crimea Musk is the ability to know when attacks are happening and influence their outcome as a result of his for profit, privately held satellite internet communications firm that the US government is

paying for. Elon Musk is a nation state global threat and must be treated as such, he must be treated as if he will make decisions based only on what he believes will benefit or amuse him. He's the wish dot Com version of Bond's earned stavro Blofeld, an offensive, charmless, and boorish monster that has successfully bought his way into the elite and found that no matter what he does,

their patience is unlimited and their scruples are few. Musk, like another high profile narcissist, the former President Donald Trump, routinely finds himself ensnared in litigation, both from regulators and private individuals, even though the government never really seems to actually do anything to him. The SEC is currently investigating Musk for securities violations concerning his acquisition of Twitter. This would be his third tryst with the Commission, the first

in twenty eighteen, the second in twenty nineteen. In both cases, very little happen. However, at the same time, he faces actions from former employees stiffed on severance pay and from those who allege age and gender discrimination with factors in their dismissal from Twitter. For Musk, these lawsuits are unlikely to be anything other than the minor annoyance rather than any kind of existential threat or something that otherwise curbs

is most egregious of behaviors. There are people who could help. There are people that could sway you on Musk. You know, people as rich as him, Tim Cook, Mark Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the world's billionaires feel no need to correct Musk's behavior. They don't need to interfere or even chide him through his disgraceful acts, because doing so would potentially make their actions and wealth more conspicuous, which is far more important to protect than free speech

or human lives. Really, anything that normal people face. They they act as if they have civic responsibility. But the few people we have that could actually change things, the ones with the war chest to box out Musk, blocking X from app stores and excluding him from their circles, are sitting on their hands. One approach proposed by Stephen Feldstein in The Atlantic is to treat Musks businesses as they are vital to national security, and as a result,

take them into public control when necessary. This wouldn't be without precedent. The legislation that allows this, the Defense Production Act, has been invoked fifty times since its inception, both in times of war and civil necessity like the twenty twenty two infant formula shortage. While Stalink would remain a privately held company, it would be obliged to prioritize the national need. Full nationalization, Falsteine noted would also be a possibility if

Must failed to cooperate. Full nationalization would be a drastic measure. But at this point, what other options exist for Elon Musk? What other options exist for someone that is so reckless, dangerous, so selfish, and so capricious. What options exist to deal with someone who has inserted himself into the most vital aspects of the American economy, making himself billions of dollars

off of governments, subsidies, and contracts. How the hell do you handle someone who has insulated himself from media scrutiny despite holding immense nation state power. Musk is not a goofy Weirdow or the real life Tony Stark. He's a fragile, mean hearted ogre one hell bent on seeing his whims brought to life at any cost. The only way to write about this man, the only fair coverage of Elon Musk, the only clear perception of this man is to frame him as a villain, a bigot, a bully, and a crook.

But what do you do about the man who has everything? It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coulz zoned Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,