Elon Musk

One must always look askew at anything and everything Mr. Musk spouts, in spite of his brilliance. For many believe insanity may be the other side of genius.

I’m incessantly harangued by pin heads – about everything.

Al Gore’s bombast and hypocrisy, an energy debacle “no one saw coming,” lessons for USA.

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.