“They that sow the wind – shall reap the whirlwind.” From the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Hosea, it means that if you choose to do X, expect to get X – good and hard.

The Myth of Elon Musk is that of daring entrepreneur. An avant garde, cutting edge businessman who sees a little bit further around the curve of the Earth – to get a glimpse of the Next Big Thing before the rest of us are able see it.

With $5 billion from the taxpayers, I could be John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie myself. But those famous industrialists and financiers made huge fortunes on their own. They weren’t kept in business by a steady stream of taxpayer funds.

Conventional wisdom is that Elon Musk is a genius. That he’s an avant-garde innovator – taking entrepreneurial risks way out on the edge. Here is but a sample of the paean news coverage – media members genuflecting so much that their pants are now baggy.

Alt-energy/transport-tech CEO Elon Musk and his trio of companies (Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX) didn’t cooperate with the Los Angeles Times on its article that tabulated his businesses’ whopping sum of corporate welfare ($4.9 billion), and he was predictably miffed by the (accurate) portrayal.

Billionaire Elon Musk, one of the top one percent in the world in terms of income and wealth, is among the largest recipients of government largesse. He gets millions of…

There’s that uncomfortable juxtaposition of words again: “Tesla” and “fire.” This time was quite an accomplishment by the electric automaker’s publicity department: they kept the Irvine, Calif. garage fire quiet for over a month. The secrecy expired on the November 15 incident when the Orange County Fire Authority attributed the incident to the EV’s re-powering set-up, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

Following incidents in Washington state, Mexico and Tennessee, theNational Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it would probe fires that occurred recently over a six week period inTesla Motors’ electric Model S. And this week, as revealed in aDetroit News story, the NHTSA looks like they’re serious – at least more serious than Germany’s transportation safety authority.

Tesla’s once-Teflon Elon Musk has another lithium ion battery fire to explain. Two Model S fires in less than a month have knocked Musk down to earth, while Tesla’s stock has been brought back into this planet’s atmosphere. Despite the Volt findings and the Tesla causes, all is not right in the electric transportation sector and taxpayers ought not to be forced into financing the speculation.