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.

Musk isn’t the genius he’s propped up to be.

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.

Musk once showed he knew how to fill a market niche, but lately he has specialized in taking the easy way to more wealth, bilking taxpayers out of billions of dollars through various crony socialist schemes requiring generous state and federal subsidies doled out to his high tech money-losing efforts.

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…

Penn Jillette, the world-famous magician (and fellow of the Cato Institute), has a saying: “Everybody got a gris-gris.” By that, Jillette means everyone has some irrational belief or superstition, something one believes even when knowing it is an unreasonable. We carry these superstitions through life like talismans, and we defend them when confronted with the cold light of reason. My gris-gris is NASA.

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.

Transparency, honesty and conclusive findings have been mostly absent from lithium ion battery incidents that affect the transportation sector. Taxpayers have been forced to heavily “invest” in this stuff and they deserve the truth.