It has been fashionable to criticize Elon Musk as lacking the qualities of a true entrepreneur, or not being a genuine free market capitalist. His primary transgression: his companies have taken advantage of government subsidies.
Before considering whether or not these criticisms are fair or justified, or even terribly relevant, it might be a good idea to examine Musk’s body of work. Because so far, 20 years in, this 48 year old immigrant from South Africa arguably is the greatest American industrialist of the 21st century.
Musk’s early work, back in the 1990s, focused on software and online financial services, including PayPal. The sale of his stakes in these companies made Musk wealthy, but what he’s done since then is what secures his place in history.
Tesla, Musk’s best known affiliation, has brought electric cars into the mainstream. It’s easy to forget the risk Tesla’s founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, endured back in 2003 when they first bundled laptop batteries into a storage package capable of powering an electric sports car. Recognizing the potential, Musk invested millions in the company and eventually took over as CEO.
Today, 17 years later, Tesla is valued at $151 billion. In 2019 Tesla reported sales of $26 billion and an operating cash flow of $2.6 billion. Its “levered free cash flow” in 2019 (surplus cash after paying interest on debt) was $1.6 billion. According to investors, for whom economic data is paramount, Tesla is the most valuable American car maker of all time.
Elon Musk has accelerated global adoption of all-electric vehicles by making them increasingly affordable and earning unprecedented consumer satisfaction. Critics of what Tesla has accomplished are invited to drive one. But Tesla’s accomplishments go beyond just manufacturing popular electric vehicles.
In Nevada, Tesla has built the largest battery manufacturing plant in the world. This single factory now produces half the global output of electric car batteries. The Tesla Gigafactory also produces the “Powerwall,” a stationary battery that allows homeowners to store surplus electricity.
There are a lot of reasons to remain skeptical regarding renewable energy. But massive investment in battery technology by companies like Tesla has paid off. Solar-battery power plants are now able to deliver continuous electricity at a wholesale price of four cents per kilowatt-hour, and make a profit.
Tesla has also developed a network of charging stations around the nation. If you aren’t driving a Tesla, you might not realize how ubiquitous charging stations have become. Typically installed in the outer reaches of shopping center parking lots, a Tesla driver can see with one tap on the vehicle’s control screen not only where the nearest charging stations are located, but also how many slots are vacant.
All-electric cars are not yet for everyone. But with recharge times down to 30 minutes, and range topping 300 miles, they are looking better every year. They require far less maintenance than gas-powered vehicles, and are becoming more competitive on price every day. Tesla is not just building cars, it is fundamentally transforming our transportation infrastructure.
With all the attention Tesla gets, it’s easy to forget about Space X. But Musk’s accomplishments with this company are even more impressive. Founded in 2002 by Musk, SpaceX is the “first private company to launch and return a spacecraft from Earth orbit and the first to dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station.” The engineering innovations pioneered by Space X are revolutionary, including fully reusable rockets. Vertical landings of booster rockets, after many failed attempts, are now becoming routine.
Before Space X came on the scene, in the late 20th century, the Space Shuttle could deliver payload into low earth orbit at a cost of over $25,000 per kilogram. For a while, the early Space X boosters competed with NASA’s mature Atlas V booster, with costs dropping below $10,000 per kilogram on these unmanned systems. But in 2017 Space X pulled ahead, way ahead, with the Falcon 9 booster profitably delivering cargo into space at a cost of under $2,000 per kilogram, and in 2020 the Falcon Heavy has brought the price under $1,000 per kilogram.
In just a few years, and compared to the best NASA could do, Space X has dropped the price of getting into space by an order of magnitude. And in a few days, American astronauts are going to blast into outer space on an American rocket, built by Space X, for the first time since the Shuttle was retired. How is this not historic?
Musk’s projects extend well beyond electric cars and electric batteries, or paving the way to the colonization of the solar system. His Boring Company aspires to revolutionize tunneling technology by achieving the benchmarks stated on their FAQ page: “(1) Triple the power output of the tunnel boring machine’s cutting unit, (2) Continuously tunnel instead of alternating between boring and installing supporting walls, (3) Automate the tunnel boring machine, eliminating most human operators, (4) Go electric, and (5) Engage in tunneling R&D.” And why not? If you can innovate above the earth, you can innovate beneath the earth.
In describing the Boring Company, Musk said, “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.” He’s right. The world needs more innovators who are not only able to envision how new technologies can coalesce to transform the world, but who also have the guts to do something with their ideas.
When people criticize Elon Musk, what are they trying to prove? Do they think that his companies aren’t part of a modern industrial revolution that rivals the great breakthroughs ushered in during the great age of steel and steam, or during this ongoing digital revolution? Do they think the railroads that opened up a continent weren’t subsidized? Do they think the internet, providing the backbone of a communications revolution, was not subsidized?
More to the point, does anyone think that if the total value of the subsidies awarded Space X were instead invested in NASA, it would still be possible to launch a payload into space for under $1,000 per kilogram?
Another reason Musk attracts criticism is his eccentric personality. Examples abound. Enigmatic tweets. Selling flamethrowers. Smoking pot (after California legalized it) during an interview. Naming his sixth son X Æ A-Xii! Fair enough. But what about other great American industrialists, equally creative, equally driven, equally eccentric? What about Thomas Edison, J. Paul Getty, Henry Ford, or Howard Hughes? Heck, what about Steve Jobs?
Maybe being eccentric is just a part of being brilliant, driven, creative, and willing to take extraordinary risks. Shall we shame all these great, and very eccentric Americans? If so, Musk’s critics may get in line behind every nihilistic Luddite and socialist pack animal determined to undermine everything and everyone that made America great.
Which brings us to a final criticism of Musk, that he is a “socialist.” Evidence for this is thin. It is primarily based on the idea that if you accept government subsidies, you are not a true capitalist. But Musk expressed his version of socialism very accurately in one of his tweets, writing “By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.”
While this is a tweet guaranteed to make libertarian heads explode, it appeals to common sense. Government, by definition, is to some degree socialist. The only thing separating a mixed-capitalist economy and a full-blown socialist economy is the degree to which the government controls the economy. The middle of Musk’s sentence is controversial, but not because it’s too socialist. It is because it exposes the uncomfortable choice that governments have to make. Shall they yield to the populist demands of demagogic Democrats, and spend government revenue on the “least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm,” or shall government revenue instead be invested in public/private partnerships that secure technological preeminence and economic security, benefiting everyone?
A libertarian would emphatically argue neither, and this reflects an absurd naïveté for several reasons. First, other nations have no compunction about exporting subsidized products, thus making it impossible for American manufacturers to compete. When this happens in critical industries, from steel to pharmaceuticals, eventually our nation loses its independence. That’s reason enough to subsidize strategic industries. But there are more.
When libertarians argue against government spending in all sectors, they get strong support from the Left to stop spending on industry and infrastructure. This splits the Right, which then lacks the strength to prevent spending shifting to welfare entitlements at the expense of spending on industry and infrastructure. When the anti-socialist politicians are divided, the socialists win.
Shaming Elon Musk is easy, but it isn’t accurate. It’s based on half-baked libertarian theories that don’t work in the real world. As for accusing Elon Musk of not being a “conservative,” what does that even mean? “Conservatives” stood by for decades as American business exported jobs and imported unskilled laborers, killing jobs and wages. Anyone concerned about America’s future in this grim world should be utterly indifferent about being called a “conservative.”
Ultimately, how history judges Elon Musk may come down to forces beyond his control. What is going to happen between the United States and China? If there is a new cold war, how will Musk manage his overseas investments, his supply chain, his factories in Berlin and Beijing? Like many industrialists in the 21st century, he may soon face difficult decisions. But to-date, Elon Musk has played a vital role in maintaining American industrial leadership. He deserves better than cheap shots.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
