Elon Musk

From Climate Wiki
Revision as of 18:05, 31 January 2023 by TH (talk | contribs) (→‎Mass Transit)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Imperialism

Apartheid Emeralds

Apartheid Emeralds.png

Elon Musk grew up in an very wealthy family in Apartheid South Africa. According to Elon's father, Errol Musk, “we had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”[1] Much of this wealth derived from Errol's purchase and ownership of half a Zambian emerald mine in the 1980s. These emeralds helped to fund the Musk family's "lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing holidays, and expensive computers" - a lifestyle which Errol says turned Elon into a "merchant adventurer" and influenced his "break the rules" approach to his businesses such as Tesla and SpaceX.[2]

Indeed, Errol's wealth played a pivotal role in providing the initial capital for Elon and his brother Kimbal's first venture, Zip2: "most of their startup costs were covered by their father, Errol Musk, who gave them $28,000 to get going."[3]

Bolivia Coup

In July of 2020, Elon responded to online criticism on Twitter: “You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there,” with a shocking confession:

“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

Only a week before the coup, the former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, canceled a 2018 deal with ACISA, a German company that makes electric car batteries from Lithium.[4] This partnership’s ambition was to produce batteries for Tesla, one of ACISA’s clients,[5][6] by opening to ACISA & Tesla the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in southwestern Bolivia, home to an estimated 50-70% of the world’s lithium.

Despite having won the most votes [7] by November 10th, 2019, Morales was forced to resign by an unelected anti-Indigenous fascist coup government[8][9][10] which received covert support from the U.S. Military[11], forcing him to flee to Mexico.[12]

Federal Ties

CIA / In-Q-Tel

In February 2002, Musk traveled to Russia with Mike Griffin (then president of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm) to acquire three ICBMs for Mars colonization. After rejecting an offer to purchase one rocket for $8 million, Musk founded SpaceX to make the rockets instead.[13]

NASA

Griffin continued to support SpaceX as a consultant from its inception, referring to Musk as the "Henry Ford" the rocket industry needed.[14]

Soon after, Mike Griffin left In-Q-Tel to become NASA's Chief Engineer and Associate Administrator for Space Exploration in the second Bush Administration. In 2005, George W. Bush appointed Griffin to become the new head of NASA - which paid off tremendously for Musk and SpaceX.

Griffin oversaw the privatization of NASA's orbital transport program, launching a new Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. NASA received applications from twenty aerospace companies, yet only SpaceX was selected and given $396 million - despite the new company having never flown a rocket at this point.[15]

In December 2008, with SpaceX again on the verge of bankruptcy, Griffin awarded the company along with his own Orbital Sciences company each contracts with a combined value of $3.5 billion.[16] Elon credited the NASA contract as saving his company, after three of its four initial launches crashed and burned. [17]

By 2011, with the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft had become NASA's sole means of reaching the International Space Station.[18]

Space Development Agency

Shortly after Donald Trump appointed Mike Griffin as Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, Griffin created the Space Development Agency.[19][20]

The organization sought to procure a proliferated constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to combat China and Russia. Contracts to develop the constellation were given to L3Harris and SpaceX to build Starlink military satellites.[21]

Both China and Russia brought concerns to the United Nations about the program,[22] and various organizations warn it could be destabilizing and trigger an arms race in space.[23][24][25]

Then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo called the project a “Strategic Defense Initiative for our time, the SDI II".[26]

Transit

Hyperloop

"Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with oligarch Elon Musk in 2018 to discuss building a hyperloop. (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)"

"Musk’s ridiculous proposal is clearly little more than a cocktail napkin fantasy being publicized to keep Tesla’s stock price in the rarified strata where it presently resides so undeservingly."[27]

In 2018, Musk flew on his private jet from California to Chicago to advocate alongside former Mayor Rahm Emanuel for Musk's The Boring Company to build a hyperloop in Chicago with the backing of the City.[28]

Mass Transit

Despite the Boring Company's involvement in building mass transit infrastructure, Musk has criticized public transport and promoted individualized transport (private vehicles). His comments have been called "elitist" and have sparked widespread criticism from both transportation and urban planning experts, who have pointed out that public transportation in dense urban areas is more economical, more energy efficient, and requires much less space than private cars.[29][30][31][32][33]

Private Jet

According to the Washington Post, in 2018 Elon Musk flew more than 150,000 miles in 2018 as he "raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire." The plane is a 2015 Gulfstream G650ER that costs $70 million, operated by SpaceX and one of only a few hundred made.

The plane's use for frivolous, high-polluting activities was also juxtaposed by the Washington Post to illustrate Musk's hypocrisy regarding energy and climate:

In September, a few days after calling fossil fuels “the dumbest experiment in human history,” his plane burned thousands of pounds of jet fuel flying 300 miles from L.A. to Oakland so Musk could view a competitive video-gaming event.[34]

Hollywood Propaganda

In their book "National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood," authors Matthew Alford & Tom Secker drawn on declassified documents and other materials to illustrate how the U.S. government - primarily the U.S. Military and the CIA - have influenced the production of over 2,000 Hollywood movies and U.S. television shows.

As a high-profile oligarch with extensive U.S. military contracts, Elon's occasional appearances in such productions and above-all his self-cultivation as a kind of real-life "Iron Man" illustrate how this propaganda machinery has played an important role in whitewashing and fictionalizing Elon's public image.

Iron Man

When preparing for the filming of Iron Man in 2007, Robert Downey Jr. (who plays Tony Stark) visited SpaceX's headquarters to get "a taste of the real thing."[35]

In 2010, Elon made a brief cameo in Iron Man 2, as a rival/friend of the fictional Tony Stark who briefly discuss business as fellow 'iron men.'[36]

In 2021, Forbes Magazine referred to Eon Musk as "America's Real Iron Man" in the title of an article which celebrated the oligarch as a "billionaire genius playboy philanthropist" and "real-life superhero."

The cultivation of this image in the capitalist press is clearly and explicitly designed to empower billionaires through promoting the mythology of their genius:

"More power to Elon Musk and the other deca-billionaires. What would life be without them designing, building, and running the engines that drive economic and technological progress?"[37]

Also in 2021, a photo-op was staged at the SpaceX launch site with the creator of an "iron man"-esque suit in south Texas meeting with Elon Musk as captioned by RGV Aerial Photography on Twitter: "Real life Iron man finds his suit!"[38]

Since purchasing Twitter in 2022 and taking over the company as its new CEO, Elon's profile picture has primarily been a photo of him wearing an "iron man" suit, illustrating the public image he projects of himself amidst increasing controversy and criticism.

Machete Kills

In the 2013 Film "Machete Kills," Elon appears as himself in the role of the CEO of SpaceX. In collaboration with the US government he helps Machete, the film's protagonist, by supplying him with a SpaceX rocket in order to defeat the film's antagonist.[39]

Big Bang Theory

In a brief cameo on the Big Bang Theory, Elon is portrayed as a selfless and generous person who devotes his free time to serving the poor.

When one of the show's characters exclaims "Elon Musk! What are you doing here?" - questioning why he was in the kitchen of a food pantry on Thanksgiving doing dishes, Elon responds: "I was demoted for being too generous with the gravy."[40]

The veritable hero-worship displayed by the protagonist's adoration of Elon when he first appears in the scene illustrates the show's portrayal of Elon as an ideal "nerdy genius" to which the heroes (and audience) should naturally admire and aspire to emulate.

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family-emeralds-in-new-york-2018-2
  2. ↑ https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came-to-own-an-emerald-mine-2018-2
  3. ↑ https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/origin-stories/elon-musk
  4. ↑ https://en.mercopress.com/2018/12/13/bolivia-germany-agree-to-join-efforts-in-extracting-lithium-from-uyuni
  5. ↑ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-03/bolivia-s-almost-impossible-lithium-dream
  6. ↑ https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/bolivian-coup-comes-less-week-after-morales-stopped-multinational-firms-lithium-deal
  7. ↑ https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/bolivia-election-1.5333134
  8. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/20/bolivia-el-alto-violence-death-protest
  9. ↑ https://thepostmillennial.com/burning-the-wiphala-flag-how-canada-and-the-u-s-fueled-chaos-in-bolivia/
  10. ↑ https://sfbayview.com/2019/12/pachamama-and-the-pope/
  11. ↑ https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/13/bolivian-coup-plotters-school-of-the-americas-fbi-police-programs/
  12. ↑ https://branchoutnow.org/elon-musk-tells-the-truth-about-teslas-anti-democracy-profiteering-we-will-coup-whoever-we-want/
  13. ↑ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-elon-musk-spacex/
  14. ↑ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-apr-22-fi-spacex22-story.html
  15. ↑ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-spacex-became-nasas-go-to-ride-orbit
  16. ↑ https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/dec/HQ_C08-069_ISS_Resupply.html
  17. ↑ https://www.space.com/25355-elon-musk-60-minutes-interview.html
  18. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/science/space/spacexs-private-cargo-rocket-heads-to-space-station.html
  19. ↑ https://spacenews.com/space-development-agency-a-huge-win-for-griffin-in-his-war-against-the-status-quo/
  20. ↑ https://www.sda.mil/what-will-the-space-development-agency-really-do/
  21. ↑ https://spacenews.com/spacex-l3harris-win-space-development-agency-contracts-to-build-missile-warning-satellites/
  22. ↑ https://russiaun.ru/en/news/261022_v
  23. ↑ https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/12/16/approaching-third-rail-trilateral-treaty-to-prohibit-space-based-missile-defenses-pub-85965
  24. ↑ https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense-0
  25. ↑ https://russiaun.ru/en/news/261022_v
  26. ↑ https://nationalinterest.org/feature/nuclear-weapons-china-and-strategic-defense-initiative-century-199549
  27. ↑ https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-elon-mush-and-the-hyperloop/
  28. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/elon-musks-highflying-2018-what-150000-miles-in-a-private-jet-reveal-about-his-excruciating-year/2019/01/29/83b5604e-20ee-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html
  29. ↑ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-transit/
  30. ↑ https://qz.com/1165724/elon-musks-comments-about-public-transit-hurts-everyone
  31. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/dec/21/elon-musk-public-transport-transit-painful-twitter
  32. ↑ https://www.axios.com/2018/01/05/elon-musks-mean-twitter-persona-1515110759
  33. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
  34. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/elon-musks-highflying-2018-what-150000-miles-in-a-private-jet-reveal-about-his-excruciating-year/2019/01/29/83b5604e-20ee-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html
  35. ↑ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-elon-musk-spacex/
  36. ↑ https://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/hollywood/when-elon-musk-rubbed-shoulders-with-iron-man-and-men-in-black-a-look-at-new-twitter-boss-screen-appearances-101650970440228.html
  37. ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertzafft/2021/12/24/americas-real-iron-man-elon-musk-and-his-50000-home/
  38. ↑ https://futurism.com/the-byte/musk-iron-man-suit
  39. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbc3iF9DxcE
  40. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGR5HP3KSBk
Retrieved from "https://climatewiki.earth/wiki/index.php?title=Elon_Musk&oldid=4926"