Also more in character.
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On the one hand, Flint needs literally all the help it can get. I’m not above giving Musk an attaboy for stepping up when there has been a failure at pretty much every other level to do so.
(As opposed to the Thai mine crisis, which couldn’t be solved by simply throwing enough money at it, and already had a plan underway by the time Musk deigned to offer assistance).
On the other hand, getting a billionaire to fix a crisis because the State can’t or won’t… That’s a bad habit to get into. The fact that Musk is intervening is praiseworthy; the fact that it’s come to that is horrifying.
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It’s funny, as much as I have been skeptical of the libertarian Iron Dream, it wasn’t until recently that Elon Musk began to twick my radar as a privileged and obnoxious dumbass, the kind of character I’ve begun calling our “Magical Honkies”. Resident Rump providing the model, sliding in on a helicopter and a Powerpoint deck, with a spare flunky to run the projector and the laptop.
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Also, he needs to stop abusing his employees.
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Except that Musk succeeds, more often than not. I’m seriously interested in his potential solution to the Flint problem.
As something of a lesser Magical Honkie myself, I don’t mind the term.
Not that makes him less of a jerk, in many ways.
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So am I, but the point still stands that its citizens are dependent on a private handout to fix the problem, rather than having a government with enough power and oversight to do something.
Preferably before it got so bad as to be headline-worthy.
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Third-world countries usually don’t have governments with power and oversight and ability to solve their citizen’s problems, they’re limited to only solving the problems of those in power in the government and their closest friends. There’s been some cognitive dissonance in terms of recognizing what we’ve become, but it’s getting a bit more obvious every day. Pretty soon, the U.N. will say we have the worst poverty in the developed world - oh wait, that already happened last year.
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Shockednotshocked.gif
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He’s the PayPal guy, right?
Another mad scientist who got rich doing a man-in-the-middle attack on the world.
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Nope.
Elon is Tesla. Peter Theil was PayPal.
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PayPal Chief Executive Officer Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk, right, pose with the PayPal logo
Soon after the sale of Zip2, Musk invested $12 million of his own money into co-founding X.com, which he envisioned as the future of online banking. In early 2000, X.com merged with its rival Confinity, and the company was renamed PayPal. As the majority shareholder, Musk was ousted as CEO amid protracted boardroom squabbling. PayPal then accepted eBay’s offer to buy in July 2002 – against Musk’s advice. After the 1.5 billion deal finally went through, he came away with $180 million after taxes.
time.com/money/4883868/8-innovative-ways-elon-musk-made-money-before-he-was-a-billionaire
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Okay, I officially retract what I said before and give all the credit to Musk’s engineers.
That the guy gave money to the climate change denial party is seriously fucked up.
ETA: that explains why he’s so hell bent on showing billionaires can do a better job than governments.
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Everything Elon Musk is now famous for is because PayPal made him investment gold forever in Silicon Valley. Both Tesla and SpaceX basically were burning piles of cash for a decade or so, but somehow the top investors and Elon didn’t lose money on it - we just will never hear from those people or their money again.
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I stand corrected.
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