What If Elon Musk Succeeds?

REPORTS OF TESLA’S DEMISE HAVE BEEN greatly exaggerated, AND THAT’S WHAT SHOULD WORRY US.

- David H. Freedman

ELON MUSK WANTS TO SAVE THE PLANET, AND IN JULY THAT MEANT A boys’ soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. One diver had died on the treacherous route, and as monsoons approached and oxygen dwindled, time was running out.

Musk tweeted solutions—perhaps a nylon tube inflated like “a bouncy castle” could “create an air tunnel underwater.” The tech billionaire sent 10 engineers to Thailand; he traveled to the cave himself; he posted video of teams from SpaceX and the Boring Company (two of his businesses) developing a “tiny, kid-size submarine” and delivered the vessel to the scene.

But the rescuers, rejecting the invention as impractical, developed a Musk-free plan to save all 12 boys and their coach. British diver Vern Unsworth, who played a key role in the rescue, dismissed the mogul’s efforts as a “PR stunt,” telling CNN that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”

Musk snapped. He inexplicably called Unsworth a “pedo guy”—as in pedophile—and then doubled down amid a Twitter backlash. “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true,” he wrote, with no evidence.

While he later took back the unfounded accusation and apologized, that belch of anger was hardly a one-off. Just a few months before, Musk treated his 22 million Twitter followers to harassing rants against reporters who published critical pieces about Tesla, accusing them of bias, conflicts of interest and outright fabrications—also without evidence. He threatened to start a news site that evaluates the accuracy of news articles, tentatively called Pravda— the Russian word for “truth,” but better known as the propaganda newspaper of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union, and now of Russia.