Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer and host of the Tech Won’t Save
Us podcast. Paris is also the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon
Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.
Elon Musk is a singular visionary driving humanity toward a better
future—or at least that’s what he and his admirers want us to believe. For
the past two decades, supporters and news outlets have praised him for the
bold narratives he’s woven around Tesla and SpaceX, and by extension
allowed him to evade scrutiny and become the world’s richest man. Any time
Musk sends a tweet, you can check his replies to see the devotion of his
millions of followers.
As his profile has been elevated by relentless media attention, Musk has
become the figure everyone was looking for: a powerful man who sold the
fantasy that faith in the combined power of technology and the market
could change the world without needing a role for the government. (Just
don’t talk about the billions in subsidies that kept his companies going
over the years.)
But that collective admiration has only served to bolster an unaccountable
and increasingly hostile billionaire. The holes in those future visions,
and the dangers of applauding billionaire visionaries, have only become
harder to ignore.
Tesla’s trouble
As CEO of Tesla, Musk’s plan was to use luxury vehicles to fund a more
affordable electric car. The Model 3 was supposed to be that vehicle,
starting at $35,000. But the current starting price is $46,990, and most
buyers end up paying even more. Teslas are supposed to be the model for
“green” automobility, but the emissions required for the production of
each individual vehicle are on the rise, and there are persistent problems
with production quality which means they’re at risk of not lasting as long
as vehicles from other carmakers.
More importantly, those vehicles don’t have a clean, green supply chain.
Around the world, mining companies are salivating at the opportunity
presented by a shift to battery-powered vehicles because they’re so much
more mineral-intensive than the ones we drive today. The International
Energy Agency expects demand for battery minerals to soar by 2040,
including up to 2,100 percent for cobalt and 4,200 percent for lithium.
But that extraction comes with serious consequences for local environments
and nearby communities. In 2019, Tesla was named in a lawsuit over the
deaths of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo who died mining
cobalt at sites owned by British mining company Glencore. Despite talking
about cobalt-free batteries, Musk proceeded to sign a deal with Glencore
in 2020 to supply its Berlin and Shanghai factories. The lawsuit was
dismissed in November 2021, but in April of this year, an investigation
from Global Witness found that Tesla was among a number of companies that
may be getting minerals from mines using child workers in the DRC.
It may be easy to overlook consequences that exist at the other end of
Tesla’s supply chain, but these problems extend deep into the heart of its
manufacturing operation. Black workers dubbed the company’s Fremont
factory “the plantation” after being subject to racist abuse and a number
of women described sexual harassment at the facility as “nightmarish.”
Meanwhile, workers at the Nevada Gigafactory are suing after a mass firing
of over 500 people, following reports that Musk praised workers in Tesla’s
Shanghai factory for “burning the 3 am oil” by working 12-hour shifts and
six-day weeks while sleeping on the factory floor.
To top it off, Tesla’s customers are also being put in harm’s way. Its
vehicles have slammed into highway medians, emergency vehicles, transport
trucks, and more, while using its supposedly self-driving Autopilot
feature. Musk continually misleads the public about how safe and capable
the system really is, even as the U.S. traffic safety regulator is poised
to recall hundreds of thousands of vehicles. And Tesla is just the tip of
the iceberg.
A self-serving future
Elon Musk has wielded a virtual monopoly on how we think about the future,
but will his visions really deliver better lives for most people in our
society? For all the tech industry’s talk of “disruption,” keeping us all
trapped in cars for decades into the future by equipping them with
batteries or upgraded computers doesn’t feel like much of a revolution.
A much more sustainable alternative to mass ownership of electric vehicles
is to get people out of cars altogether—that entails making serious
investments to create more reliable public transit networks, building out
cycling infrastructure so people can safely ride a bike, and revitalizing
the rail network after decades of underinvestment. But Musk has
continually tried to stand in the way of such alternatives.
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He has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our
over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options.
The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas
amusement ride it is now. As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his
biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get
legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though
he had no plans to build it.
Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass”
where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers,
to justify his opposition. But the futures sold to us by Musk and many
others in Silicon Valley didn’t just suit their personal preferences. They
were designed to meet business needs, and were the cause of just as many
problems as they claimed to solve—if not more.
As Musk sets our collective sights on Mars, a town in south Texas and
nearby wildlife reserve are being sacrificed on the altar of his personal
ambition. SpaceX recently fired employees who wrote an open letter asking
it to distance itself from its increasingly controversial CEO, while
astronomers and Indigenous groups have expressed concern about what
Starlink is doing to the night sky. Meanwhile, scientists will tell you
living on Mars won’t be an easy task. In service of his dreams, Musk is
purposefully obscuring those challenges.
Finding new inspiration
In crafting his future visions, Musk draws on the libertarian tendencies
of Robert Heinlein and a technocratic longtermism inspired by Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation series, not to mention the dreams of Nazi-turned-NASA
rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Future visions cribbed from the pages
of science fiction—often of the dystopian variety—and reshaped to fit the
desires of the richest man in the world don’t serve the broader public.
But there are other authors who provide very different answers to the
questions of technology and the future.
In 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin took aim at this “imperialistic kind” of
science fiction that inspires Musk, in which “space and the future are
synonymous: they are a place we are going to get to, invade, colonize,
exploit, and suburbanize.” The renowned novelist explained that science
fiction is not actually about the future; it’s about us and our thoughts
and our dreams. But when we get confused about that, “we succumb to
wishful thinking and escapism, and our science fiction gets megalomania
and thinks that instead of being fiction it’s prediction.”
That’s exactly where we find ourselves now: having our future dictated by
powerful people who seek to recreate the space colonies or dystopian
virtual reality worlds they read about as kids without considering the
consequences. Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars trilogy helped inspire some
of the recent interest in colonizing the red planet, has called Musk’s
plan “the 1920s science-fiction cliché of the boy who builds a rocket to
the moon in his backyard” and one that’s dangerously distracting us from
the real problems we face here on Earth.
For Le Guin, part of the problem is how we tell the human story: as one
where a singular hero aggressively pushes it toward resolution, whether
it’s the hunter with their bow or the Great Man driving society forward.
It also infects our conception of technology, positioning it as “a heroic
undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph”—or as a call to
“build”—rather than “the active human interface with the material world”
and the more mundane technologies we rely on every day.
Make no mistake: there is a need for people to think about the future and
what a better one looks like, especially as we face serious challenges
like the climate crisis. But we also need to question the idea of
“progress” being sold to us and who it ultimately benefits. The tech
industry enjoys casting itself as our savior, delivering empowerment and
convenience, but along with it has come an unprecedented expansion of
surveillance, an erosion of workers’ rights, and the empowerment of white
nationalist and fascist groups.
For years, Elon Musk sold us fantasies to distract from the reality of the
future he’s trying to build, and to get people to accept his growing
belligerence. What we really need right now is not more cars, colonization
dreams, and technokings, but a collective project to improve the lives of
billions of people around the world while taking on the immediate
challenges we face regardless of whether it generates corporate profits.
That’s something Elon Musk can never deliver.