Dump Truck

I saw one of Elon Musk's crap trucks driving through Villa Park the other day, and I feel compelled to take a picture every time I see one just to commemorate the stupidity of it. You know, they say now that the side panels have been flying off these things on the road, and that you can pull those cheap plastic fenders off with your bare hands. The stainless steel rusts if you don't clean it every day, but you can't get them wet without destroying the battery. Water collects in the button that operates the trunk cover and shorts it out so you can't open it, but that's okay because raccoons can easily chew through it. The interior door panels pop off if you slam the doors, but if you have a wreck and the battery explodes, the doors automatically lock and trap you inside unbreakable glass. They're crap cars, which makes sense, because everything Elon Musk touches is crap. You can follow the trail of it. Pay-Pal ... Tesla ... Twitter ... the Federal Government of the United States of America ...

 

There was recently a small hubbub about that on Robin's Facebook page, when people who often post political stuff got mad because Robin posted political stuff. (This is not an uncommon reaction.) Robin posted something about Musk's wild and slash-and-burn rampage through government agencies he knows nothing about and has no actual legal authority to affect, and the Facebook reaction was eye rolling. "Do you honestly think they are not consulting on these things?" one of them said. "Do you really think they are so absolutely stupid that they are just arbitrarily doing things?"

 

The answer is, of course, an emphatic yes, and everything in Musk's history proves it. That truck up there serves as a microcosm of his entire career. Dude comes up with a dumb idea, does absolutely no research to figure out how to make the idea, rushes some half-ass version of it to market with almost no testing to see if it works, and dares anybody to call him on it. His motto is "move fast and break things," and he doesn't care what gets broken or how costly it is to fix. He just likes blowing shit up for no reason, and then running around some stage somewhere with a chainsaw looking like a dumbass.

 

I've been ranting about the guy for more than a decade, and I've seen this kind of thing from him time after time. People think he's some supergenius because he made a lot of money, but none of his cash came from anything inside his own brain. The seed of his wealth came from his dad's blood emeralds (though he denies that now), which he used to buy ideas off other people. He's never invented anything. He bought Pay-Pal, then used Pay-Pal money to buy Tesla, then used Tesla money to buy SpaceX and Twitter and the presidency. (I'd say he bought Donald Trump, but he only rents Trump from Vladimir Putin.) He came up with none of that on his own, and his only real skill has been convincing people that he did. He has been masterful at marketing himself as some once-in-a-lifetime beautiful mind, but everything he ever says is some of the dumbest shit you'll ever hear. I've seen it said that he's what stupid people assume a smart guy would be, and that's the most apt description of him I've ever heard.

 

I first remember hearing about him early in the Tesla era, when he got all the techies excited with talk of robot cars. I tend to be skeptical of anything that gets techies excited, so I rolled my eyes, made a few disparaging comments on the internet (starting around 2012 or so -- that's how long I've been onto the guy), and mostly ignored him. What really caught my attention was when he started talking about this idea of his called a "hyperloop," some kind of Star Trek train running through vacuum tubes at a thousand miles an hour that would supposedly get you from New York to Washington in 20 minutes. The concept is absurd for any number of reasons that should be obvious to anyone with even a little knowledge of the current state of physics and engineering -- "how you gonna maintain a vacuum in a tube a thousand miles long?" was one of many questions I frequently asked on the boards -- but Musk fans are very gullible, and they ate it all up. They attacked anybody who questioned the man with religious zeal and ignored every failure, every missed deadline or forgotten promise. According to Musk's acolytes circa 2015, the roads would be full of fully autonomous robot cars by 2020. Musk promised that his rockets would carry people on trips out past the Moon by 2018. He promised to have a hyperloop up and running between downtown Chicago and O'Hare airport before the mayor two mayors ago left office.

 

That last one is a perfect example of one time when Musk's lack of knowledge or expertise in ... um, anything was made very obvious to me. Musk came Chicago in about 2017 with this scheme to build a hyperloop tunnel that would let people ride robot pods to O'Hare from downtown in about 20 minutes. I got curious about his tunnel technology (mostly for an internet argument), so I took a look at his tunneling company's web site to see what it had to say about drilling through glacial sedimentary geology like you find around Chicago versus the types of rock he'd have to drill in places like Los Angeles or Las Vegas. There was a question in the FAQ section about the safety of tunnels in earthquakes, and while the exact quote has long vanished from the internet, the gist of it was, "Tunnels are perfectly safe during earthquakes, because it's the ground that moves, so the tunnel just moves with the ground! People inside tunnels barely notice!" Which is among the dumbest things I've ever read. The idea he had in his head was that the entire ground moves as a unit, like a giant block of solid concrete, I guess, because he'd never heard of compression or shearing. It's a baby's understanding of earthquakes, something you might see on a cartoon. And of course, he's a genius, so he never thought to check with a geologist on that. He was talking about running a vacuum tube from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at time, and I thought about how he'd have to run that across the San Andreas Fault, and how that fault had slipped 16 feet along a stretch north of San Francisco in 1906. You're going to notice 16 feet of lateral movement in a tunnel cutting across a fault, especially if you're in a space pod traveling at a thousand miles an hour.

 

I made a post on the Facebook back in 2018 that said, "Though the competition is fierce, I believe the worst human currently alive is Elon Musk." I stand by that statement. Donald Trump is a horrible waste of human flesh, but he's little more than a puppet these days. Elon Musk is doing this crap because he wants to, hoping to remake the world into whatever screwy vision he has in his brain. He knows how nothing works and has no interest in learning. He just wants to blow everything up, and anybody who falls for his shit gets what they deserve.

Done