I am slow to get to this point, but I arrived.
I had thought Elon Musk was the genius America needed. Now I think he mostly breaks things.
X marks the spot.
I was slow to get here because I liked the idea of a big, bold thinker. I buy Japanese-branded cars now. I was happy some American came in to re-think the auto industry so I could buy American again. I test drove a Tesla about six years ago, and I liked it. That acceleration from a dead start pressing me back in the seat was fun. I admit it.
Tesla cars are nifty. Cool. Sort of like Apple products. I likened Elon Musk to Dick Fosbury, the high-jumper who re-thought how people should go over the bar, doing it back-down. He defied traditions. The 1960's "Question Authority" vibe appealed to me still, even though I have grown old and comfortable.
I was even less irritated than was most of the commentary I read about Musk taking over Twitter and opening it up to Q-Anon crazies and anti-Semites and 2020 election conspiracists. I am mostly a free-speech absolutist. I have long thought Twitter was a dangerous garbage pit. I thought efforts by the old Twitter management to make it safe garbage misunderstood its true character. I have experience with raw unfiltered free speech by my efforts to moderate the comments section of this blog. Crazy, angry people submit garbage. Twitter has always been like eating food that dropped on the floor of public restrooms, so let's not pretend otherwise.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me came in two parts, happening together. Musk announced he wanted his company, X, to be a universal platform for communication, news, and payments. People would have an X app and pay bills with it. We could send money to each other with X. It would be the rule-breaking, out-of-the-box financial company which could do to money what Musk did to the auto industry.
That set off alarm bells. I experienced the catastrophic results from swashbucklers in financial institutions. Their institutions chase opportunities right up until they destroy themselves and their customers. Remember program trading? And junk bonds; derivatives; corrupt research; liar loans collateralized mortgage bonds; too big to fail; bailouts; Non-Fungible Tokens; Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACS.)? Remember these institutions? Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Long Term Capital Management, Countrywide Mortgage, Washington Mutual, Enron, WorldCom, Accenture, Fannie Mae?
Rule-breaking companies get into trouble sooner and worse.
The huge bright X on top of his building -- a sign placed without permits, and which turned the nigh-time neighborhood into daylight -- sent a message to me that was as blindingly clear as the sign's light. Musk is an entitled show-off rule-breaker in all the ways that I have seen end in disaster. It looks good and exciting, until it doesn't. They are bad in every venue, but especially around other people's money. I know this. I experienced this.
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| Bumper strip to put on Teslas. |
The bloom is off the Elon Musk brand. I will probably buy an electric car sooner or later, but it probably won't be a Tesla. He ruined it for me. And I won't be using his financial app.
17 comments:
Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump were focused on launching a mission to Mars. I couldn’t imagine anything better for the country than putting them both on the next SpaceX rocket and sending them there.
Elon Musk is living proof that genius in one area does not necessarily transfer to other areas.
What Musk did with rocketry is truly revolutionary genius. No one else even thought to try to create reusable rocket boosters.
Musk created a profitable electric car company when no one else thought it was possible.
You don’t do either of these things by thinking inside the box. Thinking outside of the box may be dangerous in areas like finance, but it is important in tech areas.
I suspect that Musk is way out there on the spectrum, as are many tech genius innovators. That same characteristic can lead to them being unsuccessful and/or annoying in other areas.
I am not up there with those geniuses, but I am somewhere on the spectrum. I’ve been very successful in tech, but sometimes alarmingly less so in other areas. 😱🤷♂️😀
Musk fooled lots of people, Peter, and I lost count if the Tesla autos I saw to and from Portland last week, with many of them sporting new paper license plates.
Personally, I try to stay away from them on the Freeway in case the Steering wheel comes off, or the batteries burst into flames.
There are two things I really don’t like about Teslas:
* touchscreen instead of physical controls
* windshield that extends way behind your head so that the sun can beat down on you
We all love my daughter's Tesla. It goes 0-60 mph in under three seconds, and top speed is in the 180 mph bracket.
Whatever for? Wouldn’t it be better to give it even better “gas mileage” and/or even longer range beaten charges
She doesn’t really need a car faster than the Carol Shelby Cobra, with its 427 cubic inch V8…
You might say that Elon Musk is the Howard Hughes of the 21st century.
You get amazing acceleration for free with electric motors. They develop their highest torque when they are just starting to rotate, as opposed to internal combustion engines, which have to spin up before they develop significant torque. You would have to purposely limit the performance of an electric motor to reduce its ability to accelerate from a standing stop.
Michael, you’re right about maximum torque. But couldn’t teslas utilize a smaller GP motor to reduce max acceleration and increase miles per kWh?
For example, my recent golf cart's, Club Car, max speed was 14 mph. My new EVolution cart has a noticeably larger motor, and reaches 25 mph. Each is powered by 48 volts. One is lead acid, the other lithium ion.
Be assured, I’m not an electrical engineer!
Note: my daughter's Tesla comes with one, two, or three motors as options…one motor for 2WD, two motors for 4WD and blazing speed, and three motors for incredible speed. Hers has two motors.
I am not sure about this, but I think that it doesn’t matter what size an electric motor is the way it does with an internal combustion engine, when it comes to efficiency. It takes a certain amount of force to propel a car at a particular speed, and I think that electric motors of whatever size would use approximately the same amount of energy to produce that force.
I think you’re mistaken, Michael! Surely you can’t take, say, a heater fan dc motor and make it power an entire car at normal performance. As another example, I installed a 90 horsepower exhaust fan in a furniture factory annex I built, back in the day. It was not small. Indeed, it was about two feet in diameter, and I moved it into position with a forklift. Way too heavy for using the Armstrong Method:)
Regardless, electric motors certainly are amazingly powerful.
I figure each Tesla motor, in proportion to that exhaust fan, would need to be about three feet in diameter. Hmm. Put them WHERE?
670 hp vs 90 hp. (Think cube root)
And if she had the “Plaid” model, with three engines, it would have 1020 hp. Overkill, much?
Any electric motor has some maximum power output. A car rolling at a particular speed needs the power it takes to push it along that fast. But I suspect that any electric motor that can put out that much power would probably move the car at the same efficiency, assuming equivalent internal friction, etc.
True
A 1020 hp Tesla. And here I was, in 1964, driving a 1960 VW Bug, with a 30 hp motor, and didn’t at all miss having another 990 hp. The bug was quite peppy around town, tho admittedly weak above 60 mph or so. And after moving the driver seat track back six inches, I had the most leg and head room of provably any other car I ever sat in. At 6'6” I could even wear my Stetson while driving.
This will be a great country when we no longer head about Musk or TFG.
Both are self-centered asses who will get what's coming to them.
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