Member-only story

What the Hell Happened to Elon Musk?

Ray Katz
2 min readJun 2, 2023

--

Interesting guy of mixed qualities re-born as a crazy right-wing propagandist.

Photo by Milan Csizmadia on Unsplash

I always look for the good in people. Pretty much anybody, because nobody’s perfect and therefore nobody’s perfectly evil. (Ok, I’ve given up on Trump. I think he once told a funny joke, though. But he seems to be an irredeemable human being.) Musk has started several interesting companies that have demonstrated impressive engineering skills — notably SpaceX and Tesla.

He seems to have hired talented and capable people and — until he bought Twitter — seemed to stay out of the way enough to allow his skillful teams to do solid work.

Now I don’t want to give the impression that Musk is uniquely evil. Look, Google itself, who set the bar very low for itself with the motto “don’t be evil” no longer clears that low bar. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos certainly hasn’t been all that nice to his employees. And, although they seem to be trying, Apple still runs operations in China that require suicide nets to keep employees alive.

So, there’s a lot of really pitiful and cruel and often clueless behavior going around in the biggest corporations and among the most storied billionaires.

As his life draws to a close, Warren Buffett has decided to double-down on fossil fuel investments. Maybe he doesn’t want the world to…

--

--

Ray Katz
Ray Katz

Written by Ray Katz

Internet pioneer. But I’m most interested in stabilizing the Earth’s climate and promoting our common humanity. WeAreSaners.org

Responses (6)