The year’s person
Billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk lashed out at Senator Elizabeth Warren on Twitter, calling the Massachusetts Democrat a “Karen” after she accused him of “freeloading” by not paying his fair share of taxes.
But Karen is definitely not a substitute for “bitch,” no no no not at all. It’s about the haircut.
Musk engaged in the Twitter spat with Warren on Tuesday, one day after the senator shared an article about the billionaire being named Time magazine’s person of the year. Warren tweeted that the “rigged tax code” should be changed “so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”
But he’s Good for the Economy.
The world’s richest person responded to the senator by tweeting a 2019 Fox News opinion article calling the then-presidential candidate a “fraud” while maintaining that she had spread “lies about being Native American” in order “to benefit from affirmative action or other preferential programs.” Musk captioned his link with the comment, “Stop projecting!”
Warren on Monday also retweeted a tweet from Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, that contended it was “‘TIME’ for Elon Musk to pay his fair share of taxes.” The senator responded that she had “a plan for that.”
Earlier this year, Warren, Jayapal and Pennsylvania Representative Brendan Boyle introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, a proposal that would place a 2 percent annual tax on households with a net worth above $50 million and a 3 percent annual tax on households with net worths above $1 billion.
So Karen of them.
I can’t stand the man. I have no clue why he seems to inspire such adoration from some of my otherwise rational friends.
Musk is a good example of what I wrote about the other day. That ultra rich people can make quite extraordinary things happen just by dint of having essentially unfettered control of resources. Musk has enabled technically interesting things to happen. With Tesla, whether the cars are any good or not, by accelerating mass production of vaguely affordable electric cars that a re useful in the real world, he has put the fear of god into the rest of the automotive industry. I think Tesla will quickly become an also ran. The ones I’ve seen have shocking quality control and the rest of the industry may be hidebound and suffer from inertia, but as they get pointed in a new direction, the momentum of the survivors will begin to show.
While I admire what Musk has achieved, or at least enabled, I don’t understand the intense devotion and worship his
customersacolytes display. I know a few. We’re good friends, but keep pushing the point that he’s personally an arsehole, that Tesla’s are less than perfect, or that his perceived enemies might have a point and they reach shrieking point really fast.I must confess, I do get a bit of a thrill watching the rockets take off and land. If he himself ends up going to Mars, we might see just what his wealth really means should his colonization efforts devolve into some ghastly, hi-tech, otherworldly replay of a mashup of the Donner Party and the Franklin Expedition.
I doubt he’s a complete fool. He won’t go to Mars if that irrevocably commits him to a one-way trip without a pretty much sure fire success. Unless he knows he’s already near end of life and will be gone before anything became dire.
We can’t sustain the economics of supplying a viable colony from earth indefinitely. We barely understand terrestrial ecosystems, let alone have perfect control over them. So best of luck creating closed loop ecosystems on Mars de novo. Small populations in tight spaces for long periods are tricky. As the nuclear submariner services of the worlds navies. Ask space programs about manning space stations with small crews for months. Ask anyone who’s spent months locked in a house with their spouse, kids and dog during this pandemic!
I reckon he’s likely to get airlocked for being too much of an arsehole, even for fans.
I met him when he was about 20. Complete narcisstic arsehole. Had I known quite how wealthy he would be, I probably would have been nice to him, but as it was I threw him out of a party.
Naif, that’s a much much better story than ‘well he was an arsehole but I sucked up to him anyway.’ Now I can brag that I know someone who once threw Musk out of a party!
Warren’s twitter bio >> “U.S. Senator, Massachusetts. She/her/hers. Official Senate account.” Why are pronouns necessary, particularly on an official account? Why so prominently displayed? I may agree with her on other things, like her plan to tax excessively wealthy individuals, but I can’t abide the pronouns in the slightest, they make her look ignorant.
Not to mention Time’s dubious popularity contest, it doesn’t put you in good company (which is my subjective assessment of their subjective assessments). It’s rubbish.
Rob,
I think it’s rather the other way around; for the new robber-barons such as Musk and Bezos, we calculate their wealth by how many resources they — or rather companies in which they have a stake — command, as abstracted by the marginal cost of a single one of these stocks on the open market. That is, we only really consider someone “ultra rich” if they have “essentially unfettered control of resources”.
For Musk in particular, as I understand it he does not even take a nominal salary at any of his companies, and only makes his personal fortune from the sale or dividends of the stocks that he owns (possibly even just in those companies he actually operates, but I am not confident in that). And while this income is likely still an order of magnitude more than any of our incomes, and I suspect its real value is even higher because he can likely deduct virtually all of his living expenses (especially those expenses out of reach to us, such as private helicopter or jet rides) as some kind of business expense, his nominal income and actual personal fortune are almost certainly paltry in comparison to his “net worth” as calculated by various list makers.
In other words, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and the rest do not have Scrooge McDuck piles of gold coins lying around, but they own a certain amount of stock in their (and other) companies, and the value of selling a single one of those stocks at any particular time is multiplied by how many stocks are owned to come up with a “net worth” that these people supposedly personally command. But this is an absurd way of measuring both net worth and personal wealth. The marginal cost of a stock multiplied by the number of stocks is an aggregation of what the people trading those stocks believe a single stock is worth, and the worth of a single stock multiplied by the total stock on offer is only correlated to the supposed value of the company for which the stock is tendered (and this only if the stock market is “efficient”, according to economists, which cannot be the case if the stock market actually yields profit to stock traders).
The ridiculously-high numbers Musk and Bezos et al. get assigned in lists of wealth are better thought of as measures of their stake in the economy, to the extent the stocks used to generate these figures are stocks in companies that make actual goods or services (and not, say, simply financial instruments cooked up by Goldman Sachs-level banking types whose value evaporates the instant someone pays attention). And while if Musk were to kick the bucket in some outlandish mishap or through the simple bad luck of health the value of the stocks he holds in his companies would certainly diminish, that doesn’t map cleanly on to him personally owning a hundred and fifty billion dollars with which he could fill a swimming pool.
Those billions should be regulated and taxed for what they are, as should Musk’s (much smaller) personal wealth. Capital gains, especially of abstract financial instruments of dubious real value, should be much more heavily taxed (at least as heavily as honest-to-god income, and likely more heavily). But I fear the effort to “tax ultra-millionaires”, while it sounds just and right, is a recipe for defeat in detail — including the details of the arguments I’ve broadly outlined above, which any robber-baron could use to reduce their actual household net worth to or near whatever threshold is the cutoff for the special wealth taxes.
Re #8
I’d say “it is what it is”, but it’s probably more accurate to say “It isn’t what it isn’t”. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s not an honor. It’s an assessment of someone as influential, and I think it’s reasonable to assert that Musk has been influential. As were Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Khomeini, and Ken Starr, previous designated individuals. But so many people assume it’s some kind of honor.
You give us more credit than I do. I know we don’t really understand terrestrial ecosystems, not even barely. That’s why the bulk of our attempts to build or restore them meet with only marginal success.
#9, from what I have seen (and this may only be in America; I can’t speak for the rest of the world), your comment explains exactly why they take no salary. It’s a way of avoiding income taxes. There are ways of salting away personal wealth (and I suspect Musk and Bezos have more of that than you give them credit for, but of course it’s not piles of money. Only an idiot would do that), and those ways can result in a much lower tax base than their secretary or anyone who works for them. I imagine they have plenty of assets they can put their hands on when they wish, but those will be well hidden in some sort of tax-free haven.
@ 3 and 4 – he’s not going to Mars at all. Nobody is. It can’t be done. I keep saying – engineers keep reminding people: it takes an immense amount of fuel just to get out of earth orbit. Sending whole entire people and everything they would need to survive to Mars isn’t possible.
Musk is an ass, but let’s talk about Karen.
I keep being told that Karen is a racist white woman that uses her white privilege to harass POC who work in customer service roles.
Now Karen is any woman, of any color with an opinion. We know most men hate us, but that internalized misogyny is one hell of a drug too.
Indeed.
@12, there you go, pissing on my dream of waking up in the morning to the news he’s been tossed out of Habitat 1.
Ophelia Benson #12
And even if it’s technically possible, nature is not very forgiving of post-truthism. The rest of the universe should be safe.
Well, we don’t attribute it to God(s) anymore, so yeah. But point taken.
If you have a few days to kill I highly recommend “Common Sense Skeptic” for debunking everything Musk:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgKWj1pn3_7hRSFIypunYog/videos
Despite having “skeptic” in the name it’s a very good channel. TL;DW: He is a fraud, he is not remotely an engineer worth anything. He thinks a vacuum tube hyperloop is as easy as an air hockey table (there’s a video clip of him saying almost exactly that). Tesla was stolen from the actual founders who probably would have made it a profitable company by now. SpaceX is ripping off NASA (and the US taxpayer) and all he cares about is his bloody stupid “Starship” which is never ever going to fly but it will kill people and is currently destroying Boca Chica TX. There’s so much more and it is always worse than you think.
Naif is my hero!
@12 Exactamundo. Seems like Musk is in denial of the impossibility of colonizing Mars. Science fiction is fun, but it’s not reality. I am truly amazed as to how many people can’t distinguish science from science fiction. We are inseparable from our home planet for any but the briefest amounts of time.
Like YNNB says at 3, it’s basically a suicide mission, which is fine if you can afford it, but promoting this fantastic drivel to ignorant people is just wrong, and there are a lot of ignorant people who buy into what Musk says, even if he’s completely full of shit about Mars.
Sack @10 Right, like the People rag’s ‘sexiest’ garbage. It’s so highly subjective that it’s utter rubbish, and since they haven’t named me, they are completely clueless. :P
I just want to clarify (rather pedantically) a couple of things. First up @12 and 19. Let’s not confuse ‘can’t be done’ with can’t be sustained. Remember way back up @3 I said “We can’t sustain the economics of supplying a viable colony from earth indefinitely.” The issue of getting a manned vehicle and supplies to establish some sort of habitat to Mars is a straight engineering problem. Not to trivialise it, but it’s fundamentally about control of delta-v. You have to lift everything out of Earth orbit and get it on the way to Mars. the more you need to lift, the more fuel you need. the more fuel you need the more you have to lift, so you need more fuel. It’s the Saturn 5 problem write large. Then at the other end of the trip you have to scrub off just the right amount of velocity to insert into Mars orbit. If someone or some government wants to write a big enough cheque this can be done. Someone might want to if they have enough billions to spare. Would anyone do this for the hundreds of space craft required to enable a viable long-term colony to establish? For the likely dozens more space craft per year required to maintain that colony? both very doubtful I think we’d all agree, even though the marginal cost comes down eventually as R&D and engineering costs get spread out.
And Durch @ 9, I think you said exactly what I said, but longer.
I think that’s what I meant – “go to Mars” in the sense of moving there, staying there, living there. It was way back this morning so I could be wrong, but I think that’s what I meant.
That’s the problem I was thinking of. I saw a Nova program on the Saturn 5 recently that set it out very lucidly.
Oh and also be as pedantic as you like. Pedantic is good.
Rob @12, Also what is to be gained from a Mars colony, bragging rights? Who would we impress with this collosal effort, extraterrestrials? Even the idea of it is absolute futility once you realize the massive amounts of resources it would take to do such a thing.
Yes also we visited the Moon, we did not colonize it. There’s a big difference.
And the moon is, comparatively, in our back yard. Mars not so much.
Plus all this would be happening on a planet rendered inhospitable to human life by anthropogenic climate change. How are there going to be spare resources for trying to move to Mars? There aren’t.
@24 – 27, Absolutely right on all counts. I’ve loved the idea of space exploration since I was a kid. I still find it fascinating. The scientific, engineering and personal expertise that goes into the space programme is incredible.
The reality is that for the cost (economic and social) of any serious push into space, we could solve the underlying social and environmental problems we have here on Earth. That doesn’t mean I don’t think we should have a space programme at all. I do think that rather than something as vainglorious as setting foot on Mars in the next 50 years, we should instead ensure that the planet comes through the onrushing climate crisis with all the inevitable political turmoil and wars that will be associated with it. Time enough for space when we grow up as a species.
Yeah. I hear it all the time from my colleague in the office next to mine. And from a lot of students. They all believe Mars is a possibility. And my colleague is a scientist.
Yeah, but once you get there, it becomes a biology problem, and no one I know is even talking to biologists. They treat the entire thing as an engineering problem, and tell me, oh, yes, we can too build things on Mars. Sure, I believe we can, if we can get the stuff there. But building ecosystems? We don’t even do that well on Earth.
I wrote a play one time about colonizing the moon. (It failed, they died, sad ending underscored with Ground Control to Major Tom). One line in it said that for the cost of keeping two people alive on the moon indefinitely, we could save all the ecosystems on earth. A woman who was playing one of the parts asked me if that was true. Yes. Of course, we may be too late for that, what with global warming and all.
Anyone who thinks we can somehow make Mars or the Moon or any other lifeless space rock habitable needs to try and maintain a tropical aquarium for a year. See how easy it is to keep a closed ecosystem balanced. For added fun, they could assign imaginary jobs to every fish, as if they were humans on a moon colony. Oh no, Stanley died? But he was the guy who can fix the heating system. Everyone else needs that to live!