[The Tesla CEO’s mythmaking often obscures an uglier truth. The
public is finally reckoning with it. ]
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ELON MUSK AND SMELL OF BS  
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Edward Niedermeyer
May 27, 2022
Slate
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_ The Tesla CEO’s mythmaking often obscures an uglier truth. The
public is finally reckoning with it. _

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On a beautiful day in May 2015, I drove the 13 hours from my home in
Portland, Oregon, to Harris Ranch, California, halfway between San
Francisco and Los Angeles. At the time, Tesla was touting a battery
swap station that could send Tesla drivers on their way in a fully
powered vehicle in less than the time it takes to fill up a car with
gas. Overtaken by curiosity, I had decided to spend a long Memorial
Day weekend in California’s Central Valley to see if Elon Musk’s
latest bit of dream weaving could stand up to reality.

There, amid the pervasive stench of cow droppings from a nearby
feedlot, I discovered that Tesla’s battery swap station
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being made available to owners who regularly drove between
California’s two largest cities. Instead, the company was running
diesel generators to power additional Superchargers (the kind that
take 30 to 60 minutes to recharge a battery) to handle the holiday
rush, their exhaust mingling with the unmistakable smell of bullshit.

That one decision to go and find the truth underlying Elon Musk’s
promises, rather than just take his word for it, changed my life in
ways I never could have anticipated. Now, seven long and often lonely
years later, the world seems to be understanding what I learned from
the experience: Once you stop taking Musk at his word, his heroic
popular image evaporates and a far darker reality begins to reveal
itself.

Finding those diesel-powered Superchargers
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into question the two pillars of Tesla’s image: an environmental
mission and technological leadership. This led me to start digging,
and I found that Tesla was getting nearly double the California
Zero-Emission Vehicle credits for every car it sold
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to its Potemkin swap station
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and that its claimed carbon impact didn’t reflect the actual energy
mix used by its Superchargers
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This duplicity on Tesla’s part, I reasoned, couldn’t be a mere
accident. To borrow the folksy saying favored by Warren Buffett: There
is never just one cockroach. So I began digging into every aspect of
Tesla’s business, and in the years that followed, my investigations
turned up no shortage of cockroaches.

The following year, in 2016, I discovered some of the ways Tesla
maintained this gap between public idealism and private cynicism, when
I found the company had been requiring customers to sign
nondisclosure agreements in return for free repairs to defects
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This practice not only propped up Tesla’s buoyant stock price by
keeping bad news away from investors’ ears, but also cut off auto
safety regulators from their only independent source of information
about defects. Then, even after major media outlets picked up the
story
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the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration called the
practice “unacceptable,”
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published a blog post
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the story, implying I had done so because I was short selling their
stock in order to profit from the declines caused by my story.

Despite having not even known what short selling was up to that point,
I was mobbed by an online army of angry fans who repeated these
smears. Here was the turducken of Tesla’s information control
strategy: NDAs for customers, smears against critical reporters, a
vicious pack of online enforcers, and a total disregard for facts
holding it all together
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matter how much evidence I had and how little Musk had, there was
always a large and growing “community” willing to assert that I
had to be wrong, biased, and outright evil to contradict their hero.

As the years wore on, this pattern repeated itself again and again:
Factual reporting drew attacks rather than refutation, Musk’s
unofficial social media enforcers evolved from a mob to an ecosystem
of influencers and media outlets, and the stock always kept
climbing. Clear evidence
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Musk’s overpromising, and stories that would have earned any other
automaker a congressional hearing
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lost in the shadow of his ever-growing legend. Countless stories never
even saw the light of day for lack of corroboration, including some of
the most eye-opening anecdotes I heard in more than 100 interviews
with former employees, as Musk’s reputation for aggression cowed
many potential sources into silence.

By the time my book _Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla
Motors_ [[link removed]] was
released in 2019, I’d nearly given up on the possibility that my
reporting and analysis could cut through Tesla’s runaway narrative
to explain the realities of auto manufacturing and autonomous driving
at real scale. Only one thing seemed to matter to Tesla’s fortunes:
unconditional faith in Musk himself. I realized that this wasn’t a
story from which most people were going to learn important lessons
about critical industries and technologies; this was a celebrity
story.

[_Read: There Are Just Three Explanations for Elon Musk’s Unhinged
Behavior Right Now_
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But Musk’s celebrity has proved to be as resilient as it is unique,
at least in part because of the genuine enthusiasm for the products
Tesla did deliver. Whether calling one of the Thai cave rescuers a
“pedo”
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that Saudi funding for taking Tesla private was “secured” when it
wasn’t
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the third such move in Tesla history, as I show in my book), Musk’s
ability to evade serious consequences for his outrageous behavior has
been unmatched. Even Tesla’s rampant violations of the Clean Air
Act
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its Fremont, California, factory paint shop—yet another story
showing the deep cynicism behind Tesla’s ostensible environmental
mission
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touch his ascendant status.

Sure enough, in the years since then, Musk’s fame and Tesla’s
stock price have grown to even more dizzying heights, even as his
behavior became more erratic and his science fiction fantasies became
less plausible. For years I’d heard stories and rumors about his
personal life that suggested it was as out of control as his public
persona, but even as I realized that his personality was the key to
his entire empire, I didn’t want to become a celebrity journalist.
When Insider recently reported
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Musk had paid a cabin crew member on his private jet $250,000 to
settle allegations of sexual misconduct, the only surprise for me was
that reporters who do cover celebrity scandals had taken so long to
catch on.

I’ve never known how this story would play out, and many of the
twists and turns over the years have been total surprises, but a
single intuition has never left me: Musk’s trajectory is
unsustainable. It was only a matter of time before impunity and
arrogance caused his mask to slip, and then the world would be ready
to learn that Tesla’s runaway valuation was underwritten by memes,
corner-cutting, information control, and outright deception.

As it happened, Musk’s decision to turn Peter Thiel’s “we were
promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” bon mot on its head
and buy Twitter seems to have finally punctured his seemingly airtight
mystique. Unlike manufacturing or regulatory compliance or autonomous
driving, social media is a relatable enough topic that everyday
observers were able to see that Musk’s judgment could in fact be
questioned, especially as Musk jostled to buy Twitter, and now
attempts to go back on the deal, in public. Though Musk’s plans for
Twitter (like quintupling revenue while reducing reliance on
advertising
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are no more implausible than his “Full Self-Driving” or humanoid
robot, they are easier to reason through … and the ability to think
for yourself is Elon Musk’s kryptonite.

As I write this, I am no more certain of what the immediate future
holds for Tesla and Elon Musk than I have been at any point in this
seven-year roller coaster. But if people are ready to learn what I
have discovered in my time not taking Musk at his word, at least some
part of his spell must have been broken. And if my own experience has
taught me anything, it’s this: Once you stop taking Elon’s words
at face value, you can never see or hear him the same again.

_EDWARD NIEDERMEYER [[link removed]] has
been covering and commentating on the auto industry and mobility
technology sector since 2008. He is the author of Ludicrous: The
Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
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of Autonocast [[link removed]], a podcast about driving
automation technology and the future of mobility. He lives in
Portland, Oregon._

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more._ [[link removed]]

* Elon Musk
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* twitter
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* Tesla
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