Column: Elon Musk is breaking his new toy. Will it cost us our democracy?
Elon Musk is breaking his new toy. Will it cost us our democracy?
When Elon was a teenager, he watched Martin Luther King speak on the television and read the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. A year later, while vacationing in Washington, he attended a Martin Luther King Jr. dinner. In 1998, he made his fortune as an inventor of electric cars and Space X, the company he founded in 2003, is among the most successful companies in the world. He also owns a stake in Tesla, the electric car maker that has become a cult status symbol in the country, garnering attention for its first cars that can run on electricity, go into space, produce zero tailpipe emissions and go from standstill to 60 miles per hour in 30 seconds.
In 2012, Elon made news worldwide when he spoke at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he warned that the planet was approaching a “Planet X” or collision with a comet. In his speech, he said that he believed the world would survive such an event, which he identified as an extinction (of the human species). What would come after? He said he did not know, but if it failed, the world would be “very, very unhappy.”
Now, Musk, 53, has become a national hero in the United States, and he is the most popular person on the Internet. His followers, who have gathered in massive numbers on Twitter and Facebook in the past 12 hours, include celebrities like Tom Hanks, Jennifer Aniston, Mark Cuban and Larry Page. His critics consider him a threat to the world and to democracy.
His fans think he is a visionary and a hero, but they are not convinced that he knows what he is talking about. They claim he is a narcissist. His critics, whose ranks are not large, accuse him of hypocrisy. They say he is arrogant, a misogynist, a racist, an anti-Semite and a homophobe, among other things.
It is his fans and haters who are now in conflict over his latest project, which he calls the Boring Company. This company intends to build the world’s largest underground tunnel network, in which high-speed train stations and a huge network of tunnels will be excavated and filled with water. It is not far off from the Hyperloop idea that Musk
