It should have been! I’m in the process of checking all of the mutual funds and ETFs I own and if they have any piece of anything Tesla they are gone. I called this back on May 1st for the loyal readers of this blog. The problem of Elon Musk has only gotten worse, not better. He seems physically incapable of understanding the socks-in-sandles-wearing-tree-huggers are the only ones buying his electric vehicles. None of them liked Trump.
Fast forward to May 22, 2022. Forbes is reporting the $140 Billion one day drop of Tesla (TSLA) and just about every financial news agency is questioning the long-term viability of all things Tesla/Elon Musk. Now we are seeing studies that the fumes from SpaceX and Blue Origin’s rockets are harmful to humans and climate. Adding insult to injury, both organizations want to turn their rocket business into something akin to O’Hare Airport. With NASA it didn’t matter. They only got a handful of rockets up every year. Now we need emissions standards for rocket and space exploration companies.
AGILE Failed Here
AGILE is just the latest name for hacking on the fly. Yes, with nearly unlimited funds and masses of asses you can somehow create a rocket. What you lack is structure, discipline, and big-boy pants. AGILE is for the kids in diapers. AGILE is how you end up using a propulsion system that is extremely toxic and then plan to launch it enough times in a single year to end all life on the planet or something pretty close to that.
There were no adults in the room.
An adult would have pointed out that you cannot burn 4-billion gallons (or however much) of that stuff in the atmosphere over the course of a year without killing the planet. Kids in diapers hacking on the fly don’t care. That’s a User Story in the backlog that will never get into a Sprint.
Adults are working on this solution.
In a localized area you have to be able to change the gravitational constant of the universe. With that you need almost no propulsion to break orbit.
Dual-Quad Carb of Space Travel
Right now we are in the dual-quad carb era of space travel.
No matter how much fun it was, it was never good for the universe. The 1955 Chrysler C-300 came factory equipped with dual-quad 331-cubic-inch Hemi V8 churning out 300 horsepower.
Gasoline was around 6-cents per gallon and nobody cared. Thanks to that era though, space travel can’t have its dual-quad era. It has to have emissions standards and it has to figure out how to change the gravitational constant of the universe in a localized area. Yes, it seems impossible, but a wonder drug like Penicillin seemed impossible at one point as well.
Tesla has bigger problems headed its way
This was yet another massive AGILE failure. Kids in diapers hacking on the fly don’t think of this shit. Adults do. Court case is now determining who should be held liable when a self-driving Tesla kills people by slamming into them. Make no mistake, this is Big Tobacco 3.0 (Big Tobacco 2.0 would be the Opioid trials in case you didn’t now that.) The personal injury lawyers are lining up. The kids in diapers didn’t bother to get the federal government to pass laws regulating this shit before they shipped it! Now the entire corporation could well go belly up. If you doubt that, read up on the Purdue opioid bankruptcy.
Adults using true Software Engineering don’t make such mistakes. Getting the laws passed long before anything was actually built would have been easy. When a product doesn’t yet exist or only exists in science fiction, damned few people care about it. You can buy a Senator’s vote cheap then. Not so much now. Bodies are stacking up. There are lobbyists on the other side with deep pockets. Every Senator knows you make the most money from lobbyists claiming you are “undecided.” The money spigot doesn’t shut off until you decide.
The batteries are the new nuclear waste
Remember how nuclear energy was going to provide limitless clean energy? We were all sold that bill of goods. Only have to change the rods once every 30 years so just store the waste on site for the first century while we figure out what to do with it.
All of it was a lie!
They change the rods a lot. We now have a massive nuclear waste crisis in America. Dropping it in a whole will ruin ground water. I’ve railed against nuclear power before. I’m not some tree-hugging pacifist. I know the nuclear power plants were a front so we could make nuclear weapons and the space program was a front so we could build an ICBM right out there in front of everybody. That was kinda the point from the beginning.
What I do hate is everything that could replace nuclear energy quickly gets shut down. Only things like electric vehicles with extremely toxic batteries seem to get huge funding. In my view, you shouldn’t be able to build an electric (or hybrid) vehicle until you have a 100% safely recyclable battery. Are you aware that most of today’s electronics, including your imbecile phone aren’t safely recyclable? We ship the stuff to third world countries and let them become the toxic waste dumps because New Jersey is full up.
Dead batteries are the new planet killer. They might do us in before global warming.
I never cared about Elon Musk
It’s true. I never gave a rats ass about him. Never bought Tesla stock. Wasn’t diligent about avoiding mutual funds and ETFs that might hold Tesla stock. All of that is changing now. Given the recent announcement of wanting to end Trump Twitter ban this is a company on a non-stop path to implosion. I’m also wondering where Elon Musk got his early funding.
Like I said, I never gave a rat’s ass about him but now he sounds like he is trying to be Putin’s new Useful Imbecile. We’ve known for decades that Trump was kept afloat by Russian Oligarchs. I gotta wonder if Musk didn’t take the same path now. I don’t have time to look into it. I’m sure some journalist will.
For now I care enough to purge all things Elon Musk from my investment portfolio and I’m not the only one. You don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed. You just have to not piss-off the people buying your product. The socks-in-sandle-wearing tree huggers aren’t Trump Turds. You can’t publicly be a Trump Turd and get them to give you money. You can privately be a Trump Turd, but you can’t publicly be one.
Even if the token few remaining Tesla investors kick Musk out ala Uber, this company cannot be saved. Uber just had an asshole and bro-culture to deal with. Well, a dash of sexual harassment if memory serves. That’s fixable.
Shipping self-driving before federal regs were in place is not fixable. The massive tonnage of toxic waste from your rockets, no way to paint that as “green.” Ah, and finally there are your batteries.
Someday the tree huggers will have to learn, electricity isn’t green. If you have to store it, the stuff is toxic as all Hell.
