Musk PR

A good PR campaign can convince anyone of anything. Much like our current world order, Elon Musk is just that: a good PR campaign. Tesla, the most valuable car company in the history of our fake world, doesn't have to run advertisements, because its figurehead is all the promotion it needs.

"If you buy into the story, you buy into the product," or "people don't buy your product, they buy your story." When Coca Cola sells their drinks, they don't say how cool and refreshing they are, they tell a story. "Have a Coke and a smile" was a brilliant one-liner that told the story of how happy people drink Coca Cola. Nike doesn't say how good their shoes are, but instead urge you to "just do it," creating around their product an air of boldness and success. Tesla has Elon Musk, and that's all the story they need. Ever noticed how Tesla doesn't really advertise their cars? That's because they don't need to. Elon Musk has for decades spun around himself a story in the media, and that story sells Tesla cars.

Unfortunately and as totally expected, that story is a lie for the most part. Musk is most well known for being the creator and/or founder of PayPal and Tesla, when both statements are simply not true. What Elon Musk did create was x.com, an online financial services company he founded in 1998. His original idea was to make it possible for people to email money to each other, which is exactly what's finally been realized with bitcoin and blockchain technology, also not invented by Musk... PayPal came out of a merger between x.com and Confinity, the latter founded by Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Max Levchin in 1998. And this trio are the real founders of PayPal; they were responsible for the source code and Elon Musk was ousted as CEO in October 2000 after many disagreements between himself and the real founders. In the media however, Musk keeps saying, and reporters keep repeating, that he founded PayPal. In 2002 Musk sold his interest in PayPal, which netted him 100 million dollar. And that money allowed him to buy into Tesla...

Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. They were your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, singularly obsessed by a dream of building "a car manufacturer that is also a technology company", with its core technologies as "the battery, the computer software, and the proprietary motor." That's straight from Wikipedia, but there are tons more sources if you look for them. Musk used 6.5 million dollar to fund the young company and became its the chairman of the board of directors and its largest shareholder. That's it. In his first months there he spent a lot of time interfering with the design process while knowing literally nothing about designing cars, and consequently delayed development a lot. It's said that he did this on purpose to buy the time needed to get rid of the company's original founders; lawsuits followed and the founders eventually settled out of court.

I have no doubt that Musk turns in 80 to 100 hour work weeks. And I know he's very intelligent as well. But he doesn't work this hard for the benefit of mankind as he has so many believe. Musk's history is one of incessant lies and backstabbing. He's terrible to work with and to work for. This highly intelligent man spends most of his time on Twitter, talk-shows and so on, working hard on being the face of his companies; he's a one-man PR machine, selling an image to sell products. He's a master of over-promising and under-delivering. Why people believe his "rags to riches" narrative is beyond me, as it should be common knowledge by now that his father, who owned half of an emerald mine in South Africa, payed for his early business endeavors. SpaceX is the only company he's the sole founder of, and that's being kept afloat with government subsidies due to an ill-fated partnership with NASA. There are many lawsuits filed against him, but chances are he'll be able to settle most, if not all of them out of court like he did with Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. As billionaires go, Musk is nothing special; he's just another man making billions from dishonesty, inheritance, manipulation and ruthlessness. He's not our real life Tony stark, nor the savior of mankind. Maybe he's just a symptom of a sick society... That last bit comes literally from the below linked video, and I couldn't agree more.

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