August 15, 2013
Elon Musk
Most of Tesla’s profits and the accompanying stock rise have little to do with electric motors. They were driven not by moving automobiles but market speculation and selling greenhouse gas “emission credits.”
Now this allegedly brilliant venture capitalist is sounding out ideas for his Hypno-Tunnel that has the media in a dither. For three hours it mesmerized me with every newsreader more breathless than the previous. This notion is so far from a novel idea it was probably copyrighted around the time of Gutenberg.
Before Popular Mechanics got into government PSYOPs it was full of this sort of thing. Circa 1930 to 1960 the magazine was more Amazing Stories than anything. Pneumatic transport has been in use at your local bank since approximately the day before you were born.
One is probably thinking Musk has perfected some practicality in the theory? Not at all. He hasn’t even made it feasible with a price of $70 billion to Fifth Third bankers from one part of California to another.
But that’s just the kind of guy Musk is, exactly like his name sounds: odiferous and repulsively overpowering. And he is as good a model as any for these self-aggrandizing jackpot winners.
Why not do what others did once and fund resistance to our steamrolling bureaucracy? Spend their wealth as men before them in an effort to derail the welfare state. My family rebelled against FDR and lost three yachts in the process. (FDR generously gave $1 each when they were pressed into service for his private war.) We paid a price, but at least we weren’t sniveling suckers at the government teat.
As if this billionaire exemplar of smug satisfaction in the face of sheer luck wasn’t annoying enough, one press release (er, report) claims that Musk was the model for the character Tony Stark of Iron Man fame. The problem with this claim is that Musk was born in 1971 and Stark was created in 1963 by Stan “The Man” Lee.
Either Elon invented a time machine for which he very uncharacteristically doesn”t want to take unearned credit, or he and his media cronies are peddling an even more outlandish load of manure than usual. My money (admittedly less than a billion) is on the “Musk Excrement Theory of Overzealous Self-Promotion.”
