The Musk Mission: Help or Get Out of the Way
By: T P Seward
Tags: Tesla, Elon Musk, Future, Climate Change, Technology

Warning: Adult language ahead

Tesla unveiled the new Cybertruck this week, and it’s… well its expressive. It’s setting the stage for a new kind of canvas that 250,000 people already want to make their own work of art. We’re seeing the Cubism revolution of the truck world, and Musk is our new engineering Picasso.

While I think it’s expressive, many are saying it’s hideous. It’s ridiculous, it will never sell, it looks like something from an outlandish dystopian sci-fi novel and is no doubt the creation of a lunatic at the helm of a failing company. They say Musk is a struggle pornstar, a foolish dreamer, a cult leader, and an ignorant narcissist. He’s abusive to his employees and cares only about himself. Blah, blah, blah.

I want to know where this criticism come from, because I don’t hear enough about what Musk has done.

Elon Musk has taken on not only the auto industry, but also the space industry and the oil companies, possibly the three most ingrained and subsidized industries in the world. What a lot of people may not know is that he was one of the founders of PayPal, and had big aspirations of overhauling the banking industry. Unfortunately, it took Satoshi Nakamoto to do this after PayPal went public and lost it’s virility to Wall Street.

People say Musk is egoic. I don’t know him, I don’t know if he is. But anyone can see that he does what he does because he really believes humanity will end if these things don’t happen. He, and many others, really believe that if we don’t get to Mars and we don’t stop pumping our skies full of CO2 and smog, we humans will die. That will be the end. This is kind of important shit, here. If we don’t get it done, we are fucked.

His dedication should be obvious, given his results. Tesla doesn’t seem to be going broke yet, despite the analysts predictions, and SpaceX is the leader in the new space race by a long shot. What many fail to see is this is not about stock valuations. Tesla has released its patents for any car company with half its wits about it to use and improve upon.

It’s really damn hard to compete with a hundred-year-old company that has sold the same thing year after year to millions upon millions of the same people, all with the aid of subsidies, lobbying, and bailouts. Tesla is not the first electric company to come along. Just look in the middle of the California desert and see what happened to that idea two decades ago. It’s uncertain if it was the auto industry who killed the electric car, but it was probably due in no small part to the oil companies. If you think Jeff Bezos has a shit load of money, add up all the money hoarded by the oil tycoons across the world and tell me money doesn’t talk.

Tesla is not just selling cars, They’re selling an ethos. You don’t believe in Ford, you’re loyal to it. If you believe in a future of progress, you buy a Tesla. That’s why they are maybe the most vandalized car out there and rednecks park their diesels in three electric charging station spots so they can post photos of it to Facebook for their friends to circle jerk over.

And that’s just the auto industry. SpaceX is taking on the telecommunications industry as we write this. It already has two payloads of satellites orbiting the Earth and is working for the Air Force. By 2023, the plan is to have 33,000 satellites in the air, all this while governments throttle internet and create information silos. Good luck to Iran when the people rebel and the government shuts off the information highways yet the web is 700 miles above their theocratic heads.

These are the forces Musk is up against, and I haven’t even touched on the “you rub my back, I’ll rub yours” of the government contractors that supplied NASA for decades and milked our tax dollars like we’re all Christmas cows. So no, you don’t go to work at Tesla or SpaceX for the work-life balance. You don’t tackle the military-industrial-congressional complex by making your company better to work for than the mega monopoly known as Google. Just ask all the people on Musk’s teams that are getting real shit done and building the future.

The Dolphins, pre thumb-evolution

If I had to take on Ford, I’d be mean too. If I had to compete against the monolith Lockheed Martin, I’d be a bit of a asshole as well. It doesn’t matter if Musk is egoic. It doesn’t matter if it sucks to work for him. What matters is that we don’t let the cancerous machine of the status quo rail humanity into the ground and bury us forever where we will rot and decompose into a sticky black tar that future opposable-thumbed dolphins can pump from the ground, and with the sludged remains of our civilization used as the rocket fuel, the dolphins will blast off to a melted Titan where they can proliferate into the universe and beyond. That’s the destiny we thought we’d have, and if we don’t stop fucking up, we’ll leave it to the dolphins.

Cybertruck looks like it says, “Get out of the way.” And it does. Musk is here to get shit done. Either help, or get out of the way.