Anyone who thinks that “fake news” is limited to the Washington, D.C., press corpse (that’s what will be left of our free press when the political hacks finish with it), hasn’t been noticing the fawning coverage tech billionaires get in the media these days.
I think we might look at several of these guys. Today it’s Elon Musk, who told CNBC that he wants to become very boring. He means it quite literally. He wants to bore tunnels underneath Los Angeles, so he can travel back and forth between SpaceX and the airport more quickly.
In Elon’s TED Talk on the topic, he is obviously thinking bigger, describing a three-dimensional tunnel system underneath the city with projectiles traveling at 130 miles per hour. What he never explains – and is never asked – is how the vast majority of people clogging up the surface streets and freeways in L.A. are going to participate in this tunnel system.
It might be nice to know how the businesses on the surface, which depend on traffic going by their location, are going to survive when their no-longer customers are whisked underneath the store at 130 mph. As a bonus this gets rid of the employees who worked there, too. Not to mention the building owner and the bank loan.
At the moment, it looks like self-driving Telsa’s on the surface streets are the best that the rest of us can hope for. That rumbling you hear underneath the road is just the boss making his six-minute trip from SpaceX to the airport. He’ll be to San Fran before you get to work.
Isn’t it fair to ask, if the self-driving Telsa is such a great solution, why isn’t the boss using one to get to the airport?
Elon’s Wikipedia bio says his “goals include reducing global warming through sustainable energy production and consumption, and reducing the ‘risk of human extinction’ by ‘making life multiplanetary,'” beginning with a human colony on Mars.
Don’t get me wrong: I like big ideas! We all do. They give us hope for the future. But what I see happening in the tech tycoon realm is big ideas for me and thee, but private solutions for the tycoon. If an idea is so great and solves so many problems, why isn’t the developer using it him/herself? If electric vehicles are going to save the planet, why isn’t Al Gore driving a Telsa from the left coast to the east, then flying commercial to his CO2 climate change conferences?
Does anybody else wonder the same thing? Or are those kinds of question just “off the table” in interviews with these guys? In Elon’s case, shouldn’t the taxpayers get something for their involvement in his ventures, other than higher taxes?
Well, due to the size of the tech bubble, there’s lots of these guys around. Leave a comment if you want to look at any of the others.
Is this the beginning of the end? Reconnaissance.
Media wishing to interview Craige McMillan, please contact [email protected].
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