I’ve been a Tesla enthusiast for a number of years. The only close comparison I can think of takes me back decades—back to when I was a toddler.
Sure, I didn’t learn to walk as early as some people do, but I figured it out eventually. Once I finally did discover how to walk, there wasn’t much chance I’d decide to go back to crawling. It’s a slower, dirtier, less efficient means of getting from place to place. It’s just not the way grown ups do it.
Point being, all of us behave ignorantly when we don’t know any better.
Now, since we’re on the subject, let’s talk some more about electric vehicles. Let’s talk about what you don’t know, why you don’t know it, and how even Elon occasionally makes a mistake. Why we’re kind of doomed unless the big guy manages to sort this particular one out.
Elon talks a lot about ‘first principles analysis.’
Ironically, this is exactly where the problem lies. Not in the first principles analyses themselves, but rather in an unwillingness to resolutely follow through on them. And while it’s unreasonable to blame the man for the faults of the company, there are several reasons I’ve chosen to use the two names interchangeably here (I won’t go into those reasons; you’ll soon see why.)
For the purposes of this piece, Elon = Tesla and Tesla = Elon.
From the company’s website:
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
This is without a doubt one of Elon’s personal missions. There’s also no doubt the company is in fact accomplishing that objective; it’s beyond reasonable debate. However, the devil has predictably crept into the details. In exactly the same way it usually happens, in fact.
Bear with me for a moment — at first this will seem pedantic. No one needs the word ‘compromise’ defined for them. However, to make this illustration clear, I’d like to focus on a particular definition for that word:
To compromise is to accept something less than desirable or ideal — to you or to what you’re aiming for. You compromise every time you accept things which aren’t consistent with what you’re after; what you represent. There are a variety of reasons we do it, of course, but more often than not it’s because other people are or need to be involved. Many times because we’re seeking to solve problems which can’t be solved by a single person. We compromise because we can’t agree on an ideal, which then encourages us to seek a middle ground satisfactory to all parties involved.
Because it’s easier and more productive not to fight when you can avoid it, and because more often than not, two heads are better than one.
Not always. Just more often than not.
The exception is with visionaries, but even they aren’t a consistent exception — as I’ll show here. This post is about how Elon ineffectively compromised.
To say a visionary is uncompromising is almost tautological; to be a visionary requires unswerving dedication to an awareness of the way things ought to be versus the way things are. In other words, you don’t become a visionary by paying homage to the way people do things just because that’s the way they’re done — you become one by noticing real shortcomings in approaches others have looked at millions or billions of times and deciding that for you, close just isn’t close enough. You choose goals and objectives over approaches; you keep searching for better and better paths — even when that DOESN’T mean what others might call ‘more perfect’ tools [this point will be expounded on later.] You don’t compromise goals and objectives merely because existing tools and systems fail to uniformly contribute to them; you build new tools and systems. The goals are what’s important. The goals are what follow from the principles, and the tools and systems are what follow from the goals. This is what Elon means when he says ‘reason up.’ It is fairly self-explanatory, but it’s also pretty easy to forget during the course of things.
Even he forgot.
A person like Elon (and granted, there aren’t many) becomes a visionary by systematically dispensing with essentially everything aside from the things which actually matter. Such a person isn’t weighed down by vestigial systems. By tradition. By consistency for consistency’s sake. Isn’t and shouldn’t be. Such a person diverges from even tradition and consistency when goals require it.
Cars aren’t traditionally built in tents, remember?
A person isn’t a visionary because they can see what matters and what doesn’t from the start: no one is simply born one. They may have a natural affinity for separating the wheat (e.g. getting the cars built) from the chaff (what industry ‘pros’ say: “it’s not done like that”), but their real key is honing such an affinity into true skill. By continuously learning what matters. In so doing, over time they eventually become adept at effective compromise. At being effectively uncompromising. That is, knowing how to yield when they should yield just as surely as how to avoid yielding when they shouldn’t. It isn’t an easy or straightforward process, but when you’re good at both teaching and learning, you don’t need to be so frequent at apologizing: people get it. They get you. When you’re effective at communicating that you know — AND want to know — better, people tend to be more than willing to listen and to help. More importantly, to follow your lead. And the helpful ones will rarely ask you for apologies or redundant proofs.
None of this is particularly easy, but most visionaries wouldn’t call it work because to them it’s easier than tolerating things which *don’t* (or won’t) work. Maybe they’re just differentially lazy.
Either way, they simply abhor things that don’t work. Regardless of how many others think they’re just fine. They’re basically people who don’t care how much effort it takes to make something which already works work better. There’s a crazy, circular genius in that.
They might ‘see’ perfection, but they don’t begin with it and they don’t end at it. They always keep striving. Even when they do mess up, you don’t have to scratch your head for very long wondering whether they’ll do better the next time. You don’t have to speculate as to whether they feel bad about it. You don’t have to expend energy wagging your finger or tapping your foot waiting for an apology, and you sure as heck won’t find them wasting many words on vows to do better.
Why?
Because they can hardly stand NOT to do better. It’s what they stand for!
They’re constantly trying to do better, and if they knew exactly HOW to before making whatever mistake it is you think they made, you can be “pretty sure” they wouldn’t have made it in the first place. Imagine the kind of childhood it would take for you to learn that. Just imagine how badly your mistakes would have had to suck before you found the word iterative a third of the way through an unabridged dictionary somewhere and said to yourself,
“Great Scott! That’s it! That’s the solution!”
They’re humans who learned to be iterative. Who continue to iterate with their minds on the goals NOT on transiently relevant properties of the tools. Which is a chief takeaway from this post, incidentally. [BTW…it’s fine if you don’t know WTF I’m talking about just yet, because “the people” who do know what I’m saying are the primary ones for whom I wrote this. Plus, the secret decoder ring is in the usual place.]
Once they’re convinced of what matters and what doesn’t, a visionary develops a compelling way to communicate it to others. They build a master plan, maybe. And then they get even more tenacious — because at that point they can see the pieces fitting together. They leverage whatever credibility they already have to tell a just-barely-believable story. They amass a group of people who want to believe and turn the volume WAY DOWN on the ones who *don’t* want to believe: just enough so that they can still hear the louder and truer objections. Just enough to tune out the feckless yammering yet still reap the benefits of the work done by the naysayers.
In short, they become who they are because they figure out how to communicate their vision to a broad array of people who have other ideas but find theirs remarkably persuasive.
They don’t become visionaries when they see what we don’t, they become visionaries when we see what they do.
In Elon’s case, he ‘simply’ figured out the right sort of vegetable to offer the rabbits. Who generally don’t want a carrot because it will ultimately allow them to see things more clearly, but because…well…they’re rabbits.
Look, humans are essentially no different: they want because their limbic system tells them they want. It’s really not terribly complicated.
Let’s face facts: people don’t love Teslas because they are the cleanest, most efficient way of getting from point A to point B. Some convince themselves that’s the reason, but the truth is they love their performance.
They love Tesla because of the way a Tesla makes them feel.
If they loved them because they were so clean, then virtually every person who owns one would also own solar panels and be driving them exclusively on sunshine. They’d be complaining that Teslas consume more energy per mile traveled than, say, a BMW i3 electric. They’d be telling Elon to slow them down. To make them even cleaner.
News flash: they’re not.
They’re cheering for him to make them even quicker. They’re gushing when he unveils yet another cherry on top (Signature Red, of course.) They’re goading him into giving them yet another ludicrous toy to put in their virtue-signaling garage. Hell, they’d buy a toaster if Elon designed one.
They’ve plainly gotten used to his knack for building things better. Including building the teams to build things better. [Random note: see attached résumé]
Performance is the carrot which makes the rabbits jump.
Unfortunately, the thing which is downright stellar at making Elon jump is all the rabbits hopping up and down: He relishes his role as rockstar.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. That is not, in and of itself, the problem. It’s only problematic when it significantly distracts — and then potentially detracts — from the goal. So let’s be honest about it: he doesn’t always jump because sustainability. He sometimes jumps because he loves to watch the rabbits hop. On the one hand, this is okay. It’s fine for twitter, for example. It’s even fine for Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan bought a P100D. Joe Rogan reported “it’s like it’s punching its way through a wormhole using alien technology.”
If Joe wasn’t a believer before, he sure is now:
So what was Joe’s excuse for not knowing the above before Elon decided to do the podcast? Any comparison shopping at all before dropping $190,000 on a “sooo slow” Porsche, Joe? Rely on media flash or public commentary did ya?
No offense, man. A lot of people build their mind palaces with dogshit.
Just look at all the other people who could be buying a quicker, cleaner, smarter, safer, all-around superior (and often less expensive) car — but are instead buying yet another tired old Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, etc. etc. etc.
Because they don’t know any better? Because it’s more ‘luxurious’?
Uh huh. Marginally more luxurious while it stinks up the neighborhood and continues to kick a planet already starting to look like it’s down for the count. I wouldn’t step foot in one and neither would anyone else who knows any better. There’s a time and a place for things, isn’t there? Do you let your dog crap all over the place? Why do it with your car? Why now, especially?
So now Joe knows better. People might actually listen to Joe Rogan. That Elon Musk guy? Too controversial. Too hard to believe.
I know, right? Wild times we live in.
Elon took a chance. In fact, it was a chance I’m glad he took. (It made illustrating this puzzle a lot easier, for one.)
He weighed the negatives of a single puff on a joint against the positives of presenting himself as a relatable human being. As an approachable, affable, “bro” of a guy. In all likelihood because people too frequently treat him like he’s a machine. And he correctly reasoned that it’s more important to be accepted as human than to pretend you’re perfect. Does he need to dance within the hastily chalked boundaries of the insufferably uptight? I don’t think so. Does he need to be regarded as a human being? Yeah, I think he does. The latter is helpful, anyway. The former? Not so much.
Pragmatism, nothing more. With all the other things he’s doing, the guy can still find the right time, place, and way to pragmatically smoke a joint.
As if that’s especially difficult.
By all means though, keep right on trying to interpret that sort of thing as showing bad judgment rather than good. Keep acting like straw polls are tangible evidence of what’s right.
Keep right on pretending:
“There’s just never a reason for that! For doing drugs? You say it’s LEGAL? Are you kidding me? That shouldn’t be legal ANYWHERE. Why should it be legal?
I mean, I never tried it or anything, but it can’t provide any useful function. After all, look at me. It does nothing for me. I’m perfectly fine without it.
And if I can get along fine without it, so. can. you. I’m doing just fine, obviously. [The Xanax is tucked away in my non-obvious medicine cabinet.] Drugs are for druggies [and for special people who have health insurance.] My self-assurance is natural. I’m exactly the way I’m supposed to be [Fox News tells me so!] I’m not uptight, either. Who are you calling uptight, anyway?”
Uptight? No.
Insufferably uptight is what I said.
…
So what about those thumb-sucking, still-crawling-on-the-floor infants who had a conniption fit when Elon took that symbolic puff? Don’t they matter?
Not unless they significantly delay us from getting here they sure don’t:
The tipping point to sustainability will be reached soon after we reach the tipping point to electric vehicle adoption. In that order.
And no one is bringing us to either point faster than Elon is, period. Which is a fat lot of responsibility and a fat lot of pressure, and so if the guy wants to smoke a joint once in a while, if we know what’s good for us, WE LET HIM. {Note: we certainly do not know what’s good for us, but that’s another post.}
You Tesla shareholders with your nails gnawed to the bone worried because the stock might dip 10 or 15%? You make me laugh. As if we’re not ALL Tesla stakeholders. As if you don’t know the difference between a pull and a habit, and as if you have even the foggiest idea of the way he spends his spare time. As if he needs to account for every minute of it.
Liberal spare time that it is.
<stammering> “But it’s not his spare time. He’s on…he’s on…YouTube! And drugs. I saw him! That’s MY money he’s playing with!”
Then pull it out. While you’re at it, pull your head out of wherever you have it crammed. You think Tesla is going to fail because Elon Musk relaxes too much? You can actually see him making a habit out of that? Why not do a smidgen of research and stop being so irredeemably gullible?
The truth is, you only see what the FUD-pushing media allows you to see, and that ain’t a whole lot.
Work hard, play hard. Wasn’t that the rule?
The truth is, it’s a lot more likely that Tesla fails because he finally gets fed up with the arbitrarily constructed boundaries of the know-nothings than because he smokes a joint once in a while. It’s more likely to fail because the peanut gallery finally succeeds in wearing him out than because he learns how to relax for an hour or two a week. Ultimately, the thing most likely to cause the company to implode is for Elon to decide it just isn’t fun anymore.
And though it’s partly my fault — because I really didn’t write this for you — the plain truth is that most of you probably missed the key point even here. Even after I just got through explaining it:
Elon relishes the role of rockstar.
He relishes it and he’s not going to quit relishing it. More importantly, he shouldn’t even consider doing so. It’s one of the carrots that makes HIM hop. He might manage it a little better, sure, but that’s for HIM to decide, and no one with any kind of sense is going to begrudge him his fun.
He loves to watch the rabbits hop, and it *almost* doesn’t matter why they’re hopping. It’s amusing to him, and that’s a crucial part of the limbic system which initiates — though it does not exactly drive — the more rational thoughts HE is capable of kicking around. It’s about as smart to screw with that as it is to change the diet of the goose laying the golden eggs.
Read: not very fucking smart.
It’s something for him to look forward to; something which gives him a reason other than responsibility to get up in the morning. It puts a smile on his face. Kind of an “I wonder what this button will do” sort of thing.
The guy loves to wonder.
He enjoys wondering, and he balances it out just fine with a desire to know. Which, in essence, is curiosity. That’s what he’s preserved a seven year old’s sense of for the last forty years, and we ought to be glad about it — not excessively nervous that he’s going to take it too far.
After all, it’s not like he’s talking to the Russians about buying rockets or planning to nuke Mars or something…
Can you even doubt that some of his tweets are sent specifically with the objective of trying to determine how many retweets/likes he can get from something which is objectively pointless?
Pointless aside from the hopping, anyway.
Is it less than obvious that he values both the capacity to be serious and the ability to lighten up once in a while? Don’t you? More importantly, wouldn’t you if you were him? The guy is constantly under a microscope. And thousands of people are going to lose millions — even billions — when he succeeds.
Their priority has become stopping him from doing so.
Which means DECELERATING the world’s transition to sustainable energy. [Reminder: this is not good for you, for your kids, for anyone else’s kids, for anyone else who might want to live here once we get done, or for any other species aside from maybe the cockroaches or something.]
Why?
Because the loudest of the toddlers are the fossil fuel (and the Big Auto) pushers — and they’re not especially keen on having their rattles taken away. Some of them are just bad people, though most probably aren’t.
Either way, they hardly want you to get used to cars you can fill up with your roof built by companies which are not them. Is that really very complicated?
Your objective — that is, if you have any sense at all — should be to stop them from stopping him advance sustainability. Even if you’re not an Elon Musk fan. (That’s where we can stop conflating Elon with the company, BTW. Don’t like Elon? Fine. Don’t like Tesla? Take a good look around, buddy. Take a good, long, hard look around.)
Incidentally, you don’t have to like someone to respect them. To wish they’d be treated fairly. All you have to know is the difference between right and wrong.
If that’s too terribly complicated for you, let’s just start by being accurate.
Let’s just begin with getting our fucking facts straight, shall we? How about we refrain from blatantly cheating people regardless of who they are or whether we think they can afford it.
You know, like kids. Like marginalizing a future they OWN in an effort to make it easier on ourselves for just a wee bit longer. Not because it’s the right thing to do, of course. Just because we can.
Let’s stop short of jilting, cheating, defrauding, misleading, or conniving one another, eh? Let’s try this ugly and terribly boring thing called ‘honesty’ on for size, hmm? How about we see if it’s possible to avoid straight up lying about people regardless of whether or not it’s profitable for us to do so.
Regardless of whether we have concrete, recent proof they can’t fight back.
While we’re at it? Let’s remember that a few minutes can easily erase years of established trust.
60 Minutes is FAR more than enough.
Oh, yeah. Bet you thought I’d leave that one out, didn’t you CBS?
About as likely as forgetting that moronic Ray Liotta commercial you had playing on an infinite loop.
Not. A. CHANCE.
The guy trusts you enough to waive his obvious right to review (or at least have someone at Tesla review) the edited tape of the interview he was so generous as to grant you — you know, the one dumbass Pfizer paid you God knows what for the commercial rights to — and you seize that chance to deliberately paint him as a pompous jerk?
Even worse, you take an audience you’ve cultivated over the span of more than half a century — an audience at least mildly interested in getting to the truth of the matter — and you feed them full of misleading crap.
Way to buy some clicks by flushing your credibility down the toilet, schmucks. What, was the real story seriously not dramatic enough for you? Even after he wasted an hour of his time trying to explain it to you?
You know what? I’ll tell you what:
You can stick a fork in Old Glory if we can’t get something that simple right.
We’re more than cooked if an immigrant can come here, build an almost impossibly unlikely success story like that one, and then have one of the most well-respected news programs we once had traipse it before John and Jane Q. Citizen as if to say,
“There’s controversy here. We’re still not sure where he’s going with this whole ‘electric car’ thing. Wait there poised on the edge of your seats while tough guy Ray explains to you how THIS OTHER COMPANY can help you kick your habit of puffing noxious smoke into the air…we’ll get to truth in just a few minutes more.”
Sell outs, one and all. Highest bidder and stuff. Makes it more valuable right? No matter what sort of cheap shots you’re taking. Just like the National Parks. Like native lands. Because oil.
And it’s a solid bet you’re sitting there ready to hit me with the good old nationalist flamethrower for having the audacity to put all of this in other-than-customary terms for you. For not coddling you. Not playing your usual fiddle. For openly wondering whether it’s a good idea to grill up and sell off pieces of just about anything you can grill up and sell off, Zuckerberg.
For ‘traitorously’ pointing out the flies in the red, white, and blue ointment.
As if you need me to dress up in a special costume to explain how truth and justice belong in the same sentence as the American way.
Me? I find this all to be hysterical. That’s the only way I can keep from crying my laser beam eyes right out of the back of my head. Most of you probably still think this is about Elon Musk and some fluffy little rabbits.
What a fucking riot! Twice over, actually.
Y’all ain’t got no respect.
[At least in my terribly-protected-by-the-First-Amendment opinion you don’t.]
You got no respect and you’re digging a grave for yourselves and everyone else, can’t you see that? NO? Not even when it’s all juxtaposed and stuff?
You’re ready to run rampant all over anything and everything regardless of how much work it took to build, how irreplaceable it (or they) are, and regardless of whether we may well be out of chances this time. Take a shot at a guy even a brain dead cave diver can take potshots at with impunity, why don’t you? Now there’s a difficult target.
“It’s about the money. Has to be about the money. Who the hell is this guy anyway? He probably just wants a job or something. He’s barking up the wrong tree right now, I can tell you. He better stop talking about the stupid shit I and my fellow ‘real Americans’ do or I’ll string that chihuahua right up. Probably another fucking foreigner this guy…”
Rochester, ass-hat. Third generation. As if that makes any difference *AT ALL* to a ‘real American.’ A person doesn’t have to throw the old Frisbee very damn high for it to go right the hell over your head, do they?
Nah, it couldn’t be about the difference between right and wrong. Couldn’t be about judgment — at least recognizing what it is before you start blithely throwing the labels around:
“Good? Bad? Ah, what’s the difference? I’ll just put this one over here and that one over there. I mean, it sure felt to ME like Lesley Stahl was suggesting he’s off the rails…”
You think you’re awfully good at knowing when someone or something goes off the rails, huh? I mean, maybe. Maybe you’re the smart one. You sure might be. There’s definitely a nonzero chance that you’ll know when to jump right in and make sure this train we’re all on keeps going in the right direction. You’ll get around to it at some point, anyway.
At least you’ll know when I’m talking to you and when I’m not.
Though I must say…
…if you haven’t figured out the recipe for conventional television programming by the time you’re old enough to watch the 42 minutes of content in a program which bills itself as 60 Minutes…
...not even after they’ve done it for FIFTY YEARS STRAIGHT and not even after their own most beloved commentator [Andy Rooney] straight up pointed it out DURING THE PROGRAM…
…you are WAY beyond my help.
I mean shit, SpaceX probably can’t even reach the likes of you.
Still — just to be absolutely certain — let’s test that:
On this planet it has to be one or the other, right?
Everyone’s gotta be a hero or a villain, and all the time, certainly. Can’t be a bunch of generally clueless apes who occasionally know the difference between right and wrong, but all of whom always think they do.
Even without thinking about it very much, actually.
The funniest part?
If you’re like most people, you no doubt think *I* think I have it all figured out, just because *you* think you have it all figured out. You sincerely believe that if it’s down ‘on paper’ — that is, if your lordship is going to be asked to actually read it — then certainly it should be in final form. Certainly it should be without any obvious flaws.
Like you, actually.
You never curse. And you never use words people don’t understand, either. You never openly mock them, and you certainly never question their motives. You only question their behaviors — because even though the end doesn’t exactly justify the means, it sort of does…I mean, when it’s convenient to you it obviously does. When you know what you were trying to do, surely.
Because you’re accepting. You really and truly are.
Of you.
Well…and at least nearly half of all the other people on this side of that wall.
You don’t sniff around for a few more things to complain about every now and every then — Heavens no! You’re careful about where and when and how and who you judge! And no one better have the balls to force you to use that unprecedentedly excellent judgment you’ve worked so agonizingly hard to perfect, either. Point your nose in all sorts of directions and ask you to find your own way? That’s a good way to have it get bent right out of shape, and you don’t screw around with your sniffer, you use that thing.
Maybe not enough to be called nosy or anything, but you DO use it.
Plus, you’d never take advantage of the process of complaining about stupid shit to hide the fact that you’re terribly uninformed whenever your trusty Smartphone isn’t perched on the end of that schnozzola.
NEVER. Not you.
Because you always know exactly what to think. Damned if anyone is ever going to put you in a place where you don’t have the slightest fucking idea.
You’re different than those others. Making up your mind is not a thing you’re not good at. You’re quite good at being very decisive…when you wanna be. That’s the secret behind your incomparable wisdom— it’s the fools who mull things over.
Who puff on a joint and wax quixotic now and then.
Certainly you’d never do that sort of thing. You’re over your discovery phase permanently. You’ve advanced to getting the right people to tell you the right answers very clearly and right away. To having them tell you precisely. That makes it a whole lot easier on an exceptionally discerning person such as yourself. And even when they don’t have the common courtesy to tell you what to think, you do an impeccable job of self-discovery. Of figuring things out. You like to pick through things, sure. Just so long as you can do it on your own time and at your own discretion. Who would ever mash together a bunch of stupid nonsense and hand it over to you like it’s some kind of picking chore? That just isn’t the way things are done.
Someone would have to actually trust you for something like that to happen.
Besides, you don’t want to wonder anyway. Wondering is for little kids, not for big impressive grownups like you. You’re exactly as curious as you ought to be, and not one whit more. You know what and when and where AND how to quit.
Just like I do, actually.
So certain are you what should and should not be done? So certain you can tell the difference between doing something and overdoing something? Because I’m not. I’m not so sure of it AT ALL.
I’m not sure you know, I’m not sure I know, and I’m not even sure that Elon Musk knows. I don’t know that any of us knows when to quit. In fact, on this particular subject, the only thing I am very certain of is that
YOU don’t have the vaguest idea of whether HE is overdoing anything. EVER.
Not EVER.
Not the marijuana, not the tweeting, and not the anything else. You’re like a kazoo at a church in the hands of a three year old who’s had one too many Sugar Smacks.
And not the three year old, mind you. The kazoo.
You just can’t help but make noise. You’re going to make noise even after someone just got through vociferously explaining what respect is to the three year old who’s in charge of you. You’re bloody well going to, and I can hear your bossman getting red in the face ready to toot like there’s no tomorrow.
You sure as shit act like there’s no tomorrow. Carpe diem, right? And if you happen to snatch a few days off the kids, no biggie. It’s not like there’s a damn thing about it, eh?
Nothing but sit around outside their schools and protest, anyway. And that’s just cutting off their noses to spite their faces, right? How are they going to be led around by the grownups when they don’t have a nose to put the ring into?
Those dummies.
If you weren’t a part timer you wouldn’t be entertaining yourself reading an analyst’s summary of what’s sadly amusing about all of this — you’d be doing your own research. You’d have already scanned to the bottom. To where the secret decoder rings are always kept, remember? The reason you polished off all those tasty Trix you silly wabbit!
Face facts: you’re just fine with conventional approaches, and even though you probably question things plenty when you have a mind to, you’re not used to questioning absolutely everything from the ground up all of the time. Sometimes you just get led around by the nose. Things are usually good enough, right? They’re good enough for now anyway.
Elon, on the other hand, uses his nose to follow an actual scent. Something might be burning. [You think?!] He doesn’t always follow cents — so easy to mix up those blasted homonyms, I know. He uses it to look for actual trouble. He persistently keeps his nose where it belongs: on his own business. If you want to spend your time second guessing someone, at least have the decency to do a tiny bit of your own homework.
Me? I’ve spent countless hours studying this subject. As an estimate, something like twelve or fourteen thousand out of my last thirty five. And I’m *still* not 100% certain he’s overdoing anything. I still spent a full week writing all that not remotely debatable stuff up above as a preface to calling the man out directly.
Because even though it’s obvious to me that there’s a nonzero chance I’m right…
…even though it seems pretty clear to me that Elon faltered a little bit and probably ought to correct a couple things before they get too far out of hand…
I’m still not positive, and so maybe I just won’t. I sure might not. Not yet, anyway.
Even though I promised to above.
Looks like you mighta gotten cheated, eh?
