Google gave me 8 million hits for the phrase “Apple Tesla merger”. 

At first it sounds reasonable. Irresistible, even.

But look deeper and we see the “My Dog is a Cat” fallacy, officially called the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

The Teslapple version goes like this. 

    1. Apple had a charismatic CEO and a cult-like fanbase.

     2. Tesla has a charismatic CEO and a cult-like fanbase.

     3. Therefore Tesla is like Apple.

They should be together!

Except they shouldn’t, won’t, and can’t. 

Combining Apple and Tesla would be less mixing cats and dogs, than mixing cheetahs and chihuahuas. And Apple wouldn’t be the chihuahua.

As vacuous as most talk about corporate culture is, Apple and Tesla’s cultures are absolutely incompatible. Any collaboration would fall further south, faster, than Tesla and Toyota’s temporary partnership. And we know what happened there.  

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Apple’s Back of the Cabinet mentality

There’s a famous parable of Steve Jobs’ adoptive father teaching him to make the back of a cabinet (which no one would see) as good as the front (which everyone would). 

That lesson is one of the North Stars guiding Apple. The Back of the Cabinet mentality is Apple’s ethos. From a Twitter thread by user @MachinePlanet. 

Apple often falls short, of course. The key is that when it really does, there really are consequences. Apple postpones products (or features) when necessary. Like they did with the first white iPhones, which were long-delayed because prototype quality didn’t meet Apple’s standards. They respected the customer enough not to sell them inferior products.

And when Apple Maps was a disaster, Apple fired Scott Forstall after he refused to sign a public letter of apology to customers. Forstall was supposedly Jobs’ spiritual heir, the closest thing to a second Steve. The ethos clashed with the individual, and the ethos won.

Tesla’s Fallback: Pee on the Tree and Leave

If Apple is led by the North Star of the back of the cabinet mentality, then Tesla (well, Elon Musk) is led by the South Star of “ship sh-t and fix”.

That’s what I’d write if there was a star at the south pole (there isn’t) and if I could get away with four letter words (I probably can’t). Tesla no longer fixes customer vehicles on a timely basis either, making the “... and fix” portion questionable.

So I’ll call Tesla’s philosophy Pee on the Tree and Leave.

It’s Tesla’s philosophy because Elon Musk would rather be well-known for doing something, than known for doing something well. He lacks Steve Jobs’ perfectionist tenacity, putting the work into great product announcements, but not the products themselves.

In 2017 Tesla took deposits for 300- and 500-mile semi trucks, to great fanfare. (“Pee on the tree”) They then coasted on the publicity for four years. (“And leave”)  It’s now 2021, and with California introducing a ZEV mandate for heavy-duty trucks, Tesla has built its third prototype. Freightliner alone has deployed its 250 mile-range eCascadia semi trucks with 35 different fleets.

Many, many other cases come to mind, but I’ll only highlight two, to be mindful of readers’ time.

Where There’s SolarCity There’s Fire

Solar photovoltaics are all but foolproof. NREL found that only 0.05 per cent of photovoltaic installations ever developed faults. For systems as much as 15 years old. But 2.9 per cent of SolarCity (Tesla) solar systems installed on Wal-Mart roofs developed fires. In the first few years.

SolarCity had fires 58x as often as the entire industry had faults. (Graphic from link above.)

How could SolarCity / Tesla be so groundbreakingly bad at solar?  “Pee on the tree and leave.” High profile contracts won (“pee on the tree”) there was only corner-cutting to be done (“and leave”).

In Henkes vs. Tesla, filed in California in November 2020, a former SolarCity employee asserts that Tesla knew of the problem with its Amphenol connectors in 2017 (Wal-Mart sued Tesla in August 2019). The plaintiff claims he suffered retaliation and eventually termination when he urged the company to respect its customers enough to inform them, for their knowledge and safety. 

Tesla executed a stealth recall instead.

Soviet Style Manufacturing

Forced to choose between quality or quantity in 2018, Tesla infamously began producing Model 3’s in California in open-air tents. Not since Stalin relocated factories to the Urals and ordered tanks built before the buildings were finished, had this happened. And from accounts, build quality has been comparable. Tesla further chiselled customers by reducing the paint allocation for each Model 3, a feature now standard for Model Y buyers.

Paint quality and quantity aren’t even back of the cabinet issues. They’re front of the cabinet issues. Tesla (Elon Musk) abandoned pride-in-product to meet a production goal; it cut quality to take customers’ money (“pee on the tree”) and left them to fend for themselves (“and leave”). 

Tim Cook seems like a composed man, so he would only have sternly scolded Musk and team for their failure to plan logistics. Steve Jobs would have screamed at the team for contaminating Apple’s brand with Soviet build quality and workmanship. Imagine how Musk would’ve taken that reproach.

Keep Apple’s “back of the cabinet” mentality in mind when you consider Tesla’s Fremont factory, back of the cabinet Model Y parts, and its state-of-the-art-in-2009 Full Self Driving software below. (Click to enlarge.) 

These are less the tip of an iceberg, than the tip of an ice shelf. 

Having taken deposits since 2016, Tesla rolled out its Full Self Driving features late last year. The circa-2009 Waymo autonomous capabilities were met with widespread disappointment from fans and derision from everyone else.

The ongoing Full Self Driving fiasco would be like Apple taking payment for the iPhone 12 late in the Obama Administration, keeping customers’ money for four years, then delivering a handset with the capability of the very first Android phone ever: the T-Mobile G1, a phone so old it had a keyboard.

For a failure so feature-complete, Jobs would have gathered the Tesla team in an amphitheatre, launched into MobileMe-style tirade and relieved Musk of his duties. 

Jobs was Apple’s perfectionist bulwark against inferiority. He kept standards high. But Tesla doesn’t have a Steve Jobs. And instead of apologizing for FSD’s inadequacy, Elon Musk hyped its modest, industry lagging capabilities, celebrating improvements as determinedly as SpaceX celebrates fireballs. (“Think of all the valuable data we collected!”)

Of course, if you insist on calling everything a success, then nothing is. Products, announcements, and reviews become exercises in mandatory clapping. Which is the position Tesla’s fan community finds itself in, as hardliners push back against even silk-soft criticism, lest critics weaponize negative comments against them.

Tesla’s fans and well-wishers might be forgiven for not ordering better corporate governance in light of the SolarCity safety / Amphenol whistleblower -- who has time to go through court filings? -- but their silence about the company’s open descent into chiseling is remarkable. It’s almost like a learned helplessness; they’ve forgotten they have the right to be delighted by Back-of-the-Cabinet premium goods, and not belittled by the hundred inconveniences, indignities and cut corners of apathetic product design, planning and production.

Steve Jobs didn’t tolerate inferiority from Apple. Apple wouldn’t tolerate it from Tesla. But Elon Musk does. It’s a fundamental deal-breaker, a perfect incompatibility. And that’s why Apple and Tesla are never, ever getting together.

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PS - What would Jobs think of Musk, who once described Apple engineers as Tesla rejects who couldn’t cut it at the electric car maker? We already know. Years ago Jobs said his problem with a very rich man was that his company just made really third-rate products. That man is the fellow Elon Musk is feuding with. Elon isn’t the next Steve Jobs, he’s the latest in a long line of “Bill Gates”es.

PPS - A couple other cases of “pee on the tree and leave” (I’ll append others as time avails) include:

1. Tesla unveiled beautiful solar roof shingles for its SolarCity merger in 2016. Shingles that were non-functional. Which is to say, vaporware. (“Pee on the tree”) 

Deployments did not follow (“and leave”) though promises did. And when Tesa finally began performing  some installations for customers whose reservations it didn’t cancel, cleantech journalist Eric Wesoff noted the shingles were shipped from China. A skeptic might think Tesla announced a technology, then waited for someone else to invent it, a technique Musk used with the hyperloop concept. 

In fairness, Tesla does spend less on R&D than well-known powerhouse Jaguar Land Rover. (h/t @DowneastCapital) 

2. The three-row, 7-seat Model Y -- hoped for by many fans, and a potentially excellent product if executed well -- was very much the bait and switch critics expected. 

Fans got “catfished”.

With an afterthought third row too short and small for safe or comfortable adult travel, this car epitomizes how Musk’s Tesla is a headlines-focused company (“pee on the tree”) and not a customer-focused one (“and leave”). 

The uneven levels between the trunk and folded-down rear seats would also have maddened Steve Jobs, whose aesthetics would never have allowed it. (Sources: Twitter, YouTube and InsideEVs.)

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Happy New Year, EV Farmers, and welcome to 2021. May this year bring safety, health and happiness to you, family, friends and colleagues. Rivals and enemies too, if you’re up for it.

Before moving forward in the arc of darkness, a bit of backfill. In “Anywhere else, man, this guy would go to jail” we saw Tesla tell OSHA managers to keep their inspectors away from its Nevada factory, then defy a judge’s warrant to allow inspectors in. 

Tesla then called OSHA’s boss -- Michael Brown, the Director of Nevada’s Department of Business and Industry -- who negotiated a sweetheart deal. Not only would Tesla not face consequences for defying a judge’s warrant, but OSHA inspectors still wouldn’t be allowed to inspect the entire facility. 

But did Tesla call OSHA’s boss’s boss? 

The Governor of Nevada promoted Brown to Executive Director of the Nevada Governor’s Office for Economic Development a few months later. 

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Brown’s promotion recalls when Tesla received county approval to reopen its Fremont (Alameda County) factory in mid-May 2020, mid-pandemic. California Governor Newsom promoted then-Alameda County health officer Dr. Erica Pan -- whom Musk abused on social media -- to State Epidemiologist in July 2020. 

A simplified timeline begins in mid-March, when Alameda County imposed shelter-in-place orders. Instead of first consulting with Alameda County whether luxury vehicles qualified as National Critical Infrastructure, Tesla announced it would keep its factory open.

Alameda County disagreed, declaring that -- unlike food distribution -- the manufacture of automobiles was not an essential service. Around March 19, Tesla eventually agreed to stop manufacturing vehicles on March 23. On March 26, speaking to an employee who feared retribution, The Verge reported that Tesla workers were still manufacturing vehicles. 

Jumping to late April, Musk called California’s shelter-in-place orders fascist on Tesla’s quarterly conference call. ESG / ethical investing funds stayed quiet during the Vern Unsworth pedophile slander, so it’s not a surprise none spoke up here. Musk could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and not lose fan support. That kind of power served Trump’s interests. The public interest, not so much.

Just as Animal Farm’s pigs were worse masters than the men they overthrew, Musk is worse than established auto company executives on every dimension. (Newer readers, that’s where this substack’s title “EV Farm” comes from.)

On Thursday May 7, California lifted state-level restrictions on manufacturing, emphasizing that these changes did not override County decisions. Tesla announced it would resume manufacturing anyway. Then sued the County. It reopened its factory on Monday, to the surprise of California’s Governor and a rebuke from Alameda County.

Summoning the courage of Ted Cruz, Governor Newsom stammered that Musk’s fight was with County officials, not the state -- and stayed silent when Musk denigrated the professionalism and competence of Alameda County’s Health Officer. 

In Newsom’s defense, ESG funds did so too. Calling democratic governments fascist may be MAGA-adjacent, but remains on-side by most Environmental, Social and Governance investment standards. Tomorrow’s tycoons have taken note.

Having strong-armed California’s governments, Tesla dropped its lawsuit a few days later.

And in July 2020, a few months after she stayed silent in the face of Musk’s abuse -- and no doubt harassment from Musk’s twitter mob -- Governor Newsom promoted Alameda County Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan to California State Epidemiologist.

Dr. Pan joins Mr. Brown in the roster of professionals abandoned to Tesla’s law-optional M.O. by their political masters. We can only imagine the anger they felt at the betrayal.

From afar, their shortly-subsequent promotions come across as redress for putting up with Musk’s abuse and stan-amplified indignities. The career-advancement version of “hush money” for keeping their silence, by political leaders bullied by Tesla themselves. A fuller graphical timeline is below.

For sure there have been, are, and will be others. As we find them EV Farm will chronicle them here.

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Maybe because I’m an atheist* but probably because I’m Japanese, this is my all-time favourite painting of Jesus. It comes from the Jingjiao Documents (also known by the catchier name of the “Jesus Sutras”) which were rediscovered about a hundred years ago in a cave along the old Silk Road. They date somewhere between the years 600 to 1000, an era when Nestorian Christianity spanned the landmass of Asia (with outposts from Jerusalem to Beijing, including India and Tibet) while Orthodox and Catholic Christianity played in the sandbox of Europe. First mover advantage doesn’t always work out...

*I may be an atheist, but I’m faith-friendly and well-read enough to know that Christians have abbreviated Christmas as Xmas for centuries, X (“chi”) being the first letter of “Christ/Christos” in Greek.

The painting underscores Xenophanes’ saying that “if horses had gods and could draw, they would draw their gods as horses”. The ancient Greek philosopher’s point was that ethnic groups always depict their gods as being members of their ethnic group. The Chinese Jesus above is no more arbitrary than the Germanic Jesus who dominates western culture. 

Generalizing a bit, we’d say that gods don’t create men in their image; rather men create gods in their (the men’s) image. 

Which brings us to Elon Musk.

Politically-liberal, environmentally-idealistic fans want to believe he shares their values and ideals; that he’s just like them. I certainly did.

Of course, he’s not.

Musk is as different from his fans as televangelists are from their followers, whether their evangelism happens to be religious (too many to mention), secular (Bill O’Reilly? Alex Jones?), or political (Donald Trump).

These leaders use their community’s intense in-group identification and “Othering” of outsiders to violate the norms and codes they say they stand for, without consequence. They’re able to do this precisely because the community fervently wants to believe their leader / idol / god-figure is just like them.

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The greater the trust, the worse the violation

As the Catholic church reeled from its horrific sex abuse scandal, the Catholic League prepared a report on sexual abuse by faith groups and secular professionals. One of those “if I go down, we all go down” situations. It’s terrifying.

Several studies have found roughly one-third of Protestant clergy admitting sexual misconduct with church members. This ratio probably holds for rabbis, and is surely similar for other religious groups too. To think otherwise would be Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or fill-in-the-blank exceptionalism.

The reported figure is 3 to 12 percent for psychologists, with an estimate of “less than 5 percent” for school teachers. So sexual misconduct from these secular authority figures happens at maybe one-fifth or one-tenth the rate of religious authority figures.

The simplest explanation is that the greater the trust, the worse the violation. 

And what CEO is more trusted by their fanbase than Elon Musk? Most don’t even have a fanbase to begin with.

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True Power 

Power isn’t the ability to gain the support of people who share your values, though. That’s popularity. 

Power -- true power -- is the ability to keep the support of people as you violate their values. Power is convincing people their loyalty to you overrides their loyalty to themselves.

The neighbourhood Christian church leader who shares the values of their parishioners has popularity in their community. The Christian televangelist with a mansion, private jet and/or media empire has power over theirs, because the televangelist enjoys support even as their hedonism inverts the values their community claims to stand for.

Akio Toyoda (CEO of Toyota) doesn’t have power. Toyota’s hybrid technology won it popularity, but its ongoing dismissal of battery electric vehicles has cost them enormous goodwill among one-time supporters.

Elon Musk does have power. In the year 2020, and in the United States of America no less, the second-richest man in the world denigrated transgender people -- 40% of whom contemplate suicide -- without backlash from LGBTQ-friendly fans who had probably condemned Donald Trump’s comments about Mexicans. Given the acute vulnerability of our transgender siblings, Musk outdid Trump at punching down. And his fanbase outdid Trump’s, in ignoring it.

I’d like to think that if I’d still been a fan, this incident would have caused me to “hit rock bottom” and decide I needed to make drastic changes. But if I’d made it this far, maybe I’d turn a blind eye and wait for Musk to do or say something even worse, before reclaiming my moral loyalties.

That’s unfortunately what happens when people truly want to believe their idols are just like them.

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(Creative Commons image by Suzy Hazelwood)

In part one of our review of safety at Tesla, we learned how it chose to reduce its reported injury rate by focusing on the “reported” instead of the “rate”. We also saw how Tesla forgot to report numerous serious incidents -- including an amputation -- and dragged its feet on disclosing others, so the statute of limitations on OSHA penalties would kick in.

With feel-good stories the heart wants to say one good turn deserves another. So much greater the disappointment then, when the eyes see that anything Tesla can do wrong, they will do wrong.

In all this, the astonishing thing is that it’s easy being mediocre. It’s statistically inevitable for most of us, in most of what we do. It takes true commitment to become really, really good at something. 

But being really, really bad at something takes a lot of commitment too. You need to commit to really not caring. That’s different from “not really caring”. Not really caring keeps you mediocre. Really not caring gets you to worst-in-class. And not just in worker safety; in quality and customer service too.

Which brings us to the table below (via Alan Ohnsman in Forbes).

It didn’t have to be this way. And it shouldn’t be this way. But it is this way. 

And it is this way because of Tesla’s Medusa-like effect: stare into the seductive narrative, and your heart turns to stone. (Medusa is sometimes depicted as beautiful-but-deadly, an early iteration of a femme fatale.) 

Mortals survived Medusa by averting their eyes. My morals survived Tesla by avoiding the stock. That’s the simplest reason I can see for people like me laughing off Musk’s antics and Tesla’s actions as nonchalantly as high society tolerated Jeffrey Epstein’s “foibles”. 

Back to worker safety, the root causes leading to those OSHA violations could’ve been addressed in 2014, or in 2015, or in 2016, or in 2017. In Part One we saw the allegation -- and documentation -- that Tesla was already undercounting / slow-reporting injuries by 2017, if not before. And that Will Evans and Reveal’s investigative journalists in 2018 were able to find not one, not two, not three, not four, but five (5) clinic workers who claimed the in-house clinic’s practices were unsafe and unethical. 

I can’t not be skeptical about company-published data for 2019 and 2020. 

Borrowing Big Coal’s Playbook

Somewhere along the way -- maybe from the beginning -- Tesla chose the coal baron playbook of, well, we’re going to challenge everything. 

Even judge’s warrants.

Anjeanette Damon of the Reno Gazette Journal relayed the following timeline, the first item of which was noted in Part One. 

Mar 2018: two women suffer finger injuries (one an amputation!) on the same shift in Nevada. Tesla settles and promises an outside consultant’s report on the equipment by Feb 2019.

Feb 2019: no report. 

Mar 2019: Nevada OSHA hears about an employee who lost consciousness near barrels of adhesive and decides to do a full inspection.

Tesla allows the inspectors on a partial tour. After the inspectors inspected and identified hazards -- i.e. did their job -- Tesla pulled a “Karen” and talked to OSHA management, demanding they keep their inspectors out of the facility. (It’s ridiculous that the pejorative for an angry, obnoxious, entitled white person is a woman instead of a man; I’ll use “Elon” going forward.)

There’s a parallel with this 2010 NPR story about Massey Coal, where the injury rate was higher than the rest of the coal industry, and whose PR organ mischaracterized how many violations workplace safety inspectors found. (Not unlike Tesla gaming the statute of limitations, then high-fiving itself for only receiving one $400 violation in a 2018 California OSHA review, covered in Part One.) 

The coal industry vigorously contests health and safety sanctions, like Tesla, and the article ends with a “Circle of Life” flourish, commenting that S&P Equity Research “then advised that Massey Energy is again a good buy for investors”. 

May 2019: Tesla refuses entry to OSHA inspectors who had arrived with a judge’s warrant and with Storey County Deputy Mitchell Hammond, source of the “anywhere else, man, he’d go to jail” quote.

Before OSHA and the Storey County District Attorney could escalate the situation, Tesla went all “Elon” and called OSHA’s boss. That is to say, Michael Brown, the Director of Nevada Department of Business and Industry, which oversees OSHA.

Damon reported that Tesla and OSHA higher-ups negotiated the details, over the objections of OSHA’s on-the-ground safety officers. 

Late May 2019: Nevada OSHA inspectors get to inspect part of the Nevada factory over a five-day period. They find numerous violations but recommend only one be cited. Hmm.

Oct 2019: a few months after this dust-up, Michael Brown becomes the Executive Director of the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development. 

Did this promotion evolve by accident, or was there “intelligent design”?

Mar 2020: Damon reports that Tesla still hadn’t turned over its Nevada factory injury logs and other safety planning documents from ten months previous. The delay is long enough to conceive, gestate, and birth a baby. (Musk and Grimes’ baby wasn’t born until May 2020, though.)

After Tesla claimed it intended to sign up for the state’s voluntary protection program, to make OHSA expertise available to help improve worker safety, the company had not done so by Feb 2020. Unless things changed -- highly doubtful -- OSHA still hasn’t been able to inspect the full factory; it’s as off-limits as Michael Jackson’s Neverland.

Tesla’s “Astonishingly Excellent” Health Record

Remember Donald Trump’s doctor’s note from 2015 claiming that he was in “astonishingly excellent” health, and that he’d be the “healthiest individual ever elected President”?

You know, the one Donald Trump dictated himself. (To the doctor, that is.)

Let’s suppose, just suppose, that Tesla hired a couple of safety consultants to scope things out in Fremont, the factory where it had exerted an “alarming amount of pressure” on the clinic owner to bring down reported injury rates. 

Let’s further suppose the safety consultants neither visited the on-site medical clinic nor conducted a full audit of medical records. Rather, they did a sniff test and got “a good feeling from Tesla”. They did “walkthroughs and limited assessments because [they] didn’t have a lot of time”. 

In their about-a-week long visit.

During which they also relied on Tesla’s word that there was no prohibition on calling 911, instead of investigating this for themselves. (The claim was flatly contradicted by former clinic employees.)

Now let’s suppose one of them sent an email to journalists that:

“What they have accomplished is phenomenal … I really think you should be writing a piece describing their improvement from where they were to where they are at now.” 

What are the odds Tesla dictated that themselves, a la Trump? 

And if I were to crowdfund and hire them, could I get them to say that “what Matthew Klippenstein has accomplished is phenomenal, I really think People should be writing a piece describing him as one of the Sexiest Men Alive”?

A thorough third-party assessment by independent consultants would have set this issue to rest. Tesla opted for a “sniff test” instead. 

Addendum: The Cruelty is the Point

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny reported this weekend that during a Model S/X production line shutdown, the second wealthiest man alive asked manufacturing line workers at his company -- which raised $12 billion dollars in calendar 2020 -- to take unpaid time off during the holidays, and if they were up to it, volunteer to help deliver cars.

How easy would it be for Tesla to use their lowest-paid employees’ willingness to volunteer their labour instead of spending time with their families, as a commitment test? Not only could Tesla create pretenses for firing employees whose stock options are about to mature, but they could conveniently put demerits in non-participants’ files for “not being a team player” or “not a cultural fit”. 

But perhaps we’re being too cynical. How plausible is that? 

When Musk promised employees in March 2020 that they could stay home during Covid if they were worried, employees told Kolodny they:

“...feared taking time off would impact their performance reviews and lead to their being fired later”.

As noted in Part One, ease of abuse equals abuse.

- - - - - - - -

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer popularized the phrase “the cruelty is the point” a couple years ago. It applies to Tesla. Consider this passage in light of Tesla’s worker safety record:

Only ((Elon Musk)) and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it.

Think of Musk’s broader behaviour; taunting the SEC with a tweet reading “three letter acronym, middle word Elon’s”; tweeting that his $20 million fine was “worth it”; attacking cave rescue leader and hero, spelunker Vern Unsworth; demeaning Ed Niedermeyer’s reporting on Tesla suspension breakage (now the topic of a NHTSA probe) and its unprecedented use of NDAs; harassing and swatting whistleblowers; rifling through journalist Linette Lopez’ Facebook profile; calling shelter-in-place orders fascist, then demanding and suing to reopen his factory mid-pandemic; dissing California as a pretext for shielding himself from taxes by moving to Texas; insulting women workers after firing them; abandoning owners with terrible service at the owners’ expense; “suggesting” unpaid low-level employees volunteer to make vehicle deliveries; going “hardcore” on cost-cutting (the Fremont factory ran out of toilet paper). There’s much more. His public vulgarity is a whole other iceberg, but rides on the same principle of violating laws and norms.

Few of us would do any of these things. None of us would do all of these things. Musk does, because for him and many fans the cruelty is the point. 

It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear … It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

The only question is what fans, EV advocates, climate hawks and bystanders will let it cost them. Will we realize that Musk has preyed on our ends to justify his means? And if we do, will we choose to really not care? 

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Tesla’s attitude towards workplace injuries is “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

Strong words. But we do know of an unreported amputation (Lane Dhillon, male, fingertip, Nevada factory, 2017). 

We don’t know if this was the same equipment or process that severely injured two female workers -- including a second fingertip amputation -- hours apart in 2018. These appear to have gone into the books. Tesla was levied a $7,000 fine. That was rescinded when the company promised to submit an outside consultant’s safety evaluation. The deadline passed. Tesla didn’t file.

Sticking to the fingertip amputations (!) we have a third case in the media record (male, fingertip, Fremont factory). Whether or not this went into the books, there’s a chilling detail in Reveal’s reporting: the victim was transported to hospital not by ambulance or by Lyft, but by the factory supervisor who drove them to the hospital in their personal vehicle -- as they did with other injured workers.

That’s unforgivably suspicious. Of all the ways to get an injured employee to the hospital, Tesla ruled out third-party transport (ambulances, Lyft) and then had the employee get a ride from the factory supervisor: someone who had the power to fire them -- or raise their employee ratings. Even if you thought Tesla and its factory management were Robespierrean Incorruptibles, it’s textbook “isolation to facilitate abuse”.

Maybe that workplace injury was actually a personal injury, so it wouldn’t count on Tesla’s books? Maybe there are some favours the company could do, definitely not a hush-money quid pro quo, but to, ah, recognize all the hard work the injured employee had put in? 

Most of us know the software expression “ease-of-use equals use”. 

Well, “ease-of-abuse equals abuse” too. 

For days at a time the animals had nothing to eat but chaff and mangels. Starvation seemed to stare them in the face.

It was vitally necessary to conceal this fact from the outside world…  Napoleon ordered the almost empty bins in the store-shed to be filled nearly to the brim with sand, which was then covered up with what remained of the grain and meal. On some suitable pretext Whymper [a human] was led through the store-shed and allowed to catch a glimpse of the bins. He was deceived, and continued to report to the outside world that there was no food shortage on Animal Farm. 

(From “Animal Farm” by George Orwell)

Cutting the Corner on Safety

Reveal, a project of the Center for Investigative Journalism, recently published an investigation of Amazon’s record of underreporting injury rates. Not among its white-collar workers, for whom everything north of a paper cut probably merits recording, but among its warehouse workers.

Reveal has to date filed twelve - that’s 12 - stories on Tesla doing the same. Shortly after one of them, “someone” called California child services claiming the whistleblower who spoke with Reveal posed a danger to their children, and that the kids would be safer in state custody. Wonder if it was the same “someone” who tried to have Martin Trip swatted.

It would be nice to believe Tesla has made great progress reducing its injury rates, as it has taken to trumpeting, but the stats are as believable as Lysenkoist production reports from the Soviet Union.

Adapting a more-detailed timeline from this Reveal article:

June 2017: a Tesla Director of Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability is fired. In a subsequent lawsuit he claims the company misclassified work injuries to avoid reporting them as required by law.

Feb 04 2018: Buzzfeed reports on injuries at Tesla, spotlighting the company’s reckless indifference of not rotating manufacturing workers between stations over the course of a day. Who pioneered the rotation of workers between stations during the day? Quite possibly Toyota. Who does Musk hold an eternal grudge against? Why, Toyota.  

Feb 04 2018: Tesla reports that its injury rate is at industry average during the time period in which the former Director of EHSS claimed Tesla avoided reporting work injuries. 🤔

Presumably the Tesla blog post was prepared after Buzzfeed asked them to comment on its planned story. Not mentioned: serious injury rates were 30% above industry average. Serious injury rates literally weren’t important enough to warrant a mention, and they came in high even after an undercounting fudge factor! 

April 16 2018: Reveal catches Tesla yellow-handed underreporting safety data. Which corroborates the Director of EHSS’s claims, and confirms that the stat about being at industry average undercounts the actual injury rate at Tesla. 

May 2018: Tesla adds 13 injuries to its 2017 injuries list. Reveal has receipts to show the list is still incomplete. The injuries Tesla “innocently” missed reporting include lacerations causing a 100 missed days of work and a dislocated knee from which the employee had not returned, as of May 2018. Which means the knee injury had caused a minimum of 17 weeks of missed work. 

A prosecutor might get the impression that the injuries Tesla “innocently” forgot to report were the most serious ones. A former Cal/OSHA officer suggests Tesla’s disclosures are consistent with a pattern of minimizing injuries, and only acknowledging others when under pressure.

June 2018: Access Omnicare begins managing the Fremont health center, explaining how it can reduce Tesla’s injury rate. Goodheart’s Law (technically Strathern’s corollary) absolutely applies: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 

August 2018: Cal/OSHA fines Tesla $400. It is hamstrung by a statute of limitations that it can’t cite employers for unreported incidents which happened more than six months previous. So an unethical employer could run out the clock to escape punishment by, say, reporting 13 calendar-2017 injuries in May 2018, five months into the new year. (Ease of abuse equals abuse.) Tesla calls this a vindication -- as do, one imagines, its unsuspecting fans.

Nov 2018: Reveal reports the concerns of a whistleblower from Access Omnicare that theirs is -- I’ll use Reveal’s titular phrasing -- a medical clinic designed to ignore injured workers. What would this accomplish? It would artificially depress Tesla’s reportable injury rates, allowing Tesla to announce great progress on safety when no such objective improvements occurred. Kind of like how AutoPilot / “Full Self Driving” hallucinates objects that aren’t there.

Not one, not two, not three, not four, but five (5) former clinic employees said its practices were unsafe and unethical. Not exactly what one would expect from an ESG darling company; nor do I recall shareholder resolutions along these lines. 

Again for emphasis: Reveal found *five* former clinic employees who condemned Tesla’s onsite medical clinic as unsafe and unethical. A necessarily anonymous high-ranking former Access Omnicare employee explained that Tesla exerted an “alarming amount of pressure” (Reveal’s words) on the clinic owner, who then bullied and pressured employees not to report injuries. 

This included one whistleblower’s claim that a Tesla lawyer and company safety official told staff to stop prescribing exercises to workers -- even stretches! -- so the injuries that caused the exercise prescriptions wouldn’t have to be counted.

In the three weeks that she was present, the whistleblower estimated that there should have been more than twice as many injuries should have been reported. Shortly after turning whistleblower, an anonymous caller suggested California child services pay them a visit. A remarkable coincidence.

Has safety improved at Tesla since 2018? It could hardly have gotten worse, the above are coal baron tactics. Are Tesla’s published statistics credible? Not with the company’s documented track record — and that’s just the small subset of undercounted incidents we know about.

All Their Sons

If Tesla put half as much effort into manufacturing vehicles as it put into manufacturing safety statistics, it’d be a respected automaker. It chooses not to, and fans let the company get away with it. Ease-of-abuse equals abuse.

Many years and even more pounds ago, I wondered how 19th-century Europeans could have been so idealistic, jingoistic and willingly blind to what carving-up Africa actually involved. Thanks to Tesla I now know: the idealism, jingoism, and willing blindness are all here. The conceit-leavening Great Mission has simply shifted from “civilizing Africa” to “saving the world”. Time is a flat circle.

But while King of Belgium satisfied himself with the Congo Free State, Elon Musk has tried to make the world his playpen; to his Leopold II, we’re no more than the Congolese: bendable, offendable, expendable.

The Heart of Darkness that shifts public opinion has yet to be written. Until it is, Tesla won’t have a safety culture but a safety cover-up culture.

To forgive, forget or forfend attention from Tesla’s years-long, multiply-attested, receipts-in-hand commitment to faking worker safety stats -- at two factories! -- is to have never watched Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. (In the story, Joe, the officially exonerated but very, very guilty co-owner of a factory which made defective fighter plane parts causing 21 pilot deaths, realizes he should’ve acted as if the pilots in the planes destined to get those defective parts were “all my sons”.)

The broader tragedy is that until fans demand better of Tesla, they are complicit in their silence. The closer tragedy is that Tesla’s tactics will inspire more messianic imitators, until one day the workers unprotected and injured, amputations unreported, will be their sons.

Ease-of-abuse equals abuse.

Enjoying EV Farm? Forward it on to friends (and fans whose fandom is fracturing) — and challenge them to get through the obscure references without Wikipedia! And if you *are* one of those lucky friends, sign up to follow along as we explore Tesla’s arc of darkness. You can also follow me on the Twitter.

Thank you for your patience, readers! 

It’s been an eventful few weeks, one highlight of which was guesting on episode 47 of the ChartCast with TC & Georgia. Big thanks to the whole team, which includes intro/outro virtuoso Tesla Polls and Evac Boy, who autotuned me into sounding human. (They’re the less-heralded George Harrison and Ringo Starr of the quartet.)

The other major highlight was InsideEVs.com running my op-ed on Tesla being Animal Farm. It was immediately followed by the lowlight that many readers didn’t register the ironic tone. If you haven’t seen it yet, imagine it being spoken by, oh, Gore Vidal.

The Animal Farm op-ed noted that Elon Musk was at best the “third man in” at Tesla, and offered the blithe comfort that Caligula proved that the “third man in” could still dent the universe. He’s indisputably more famous, and looms larger in the public imagination, than Augustus -- who has a month of the year named after him -- and Tiberius, during whose reign Jesus was crucified.

Anyone can name-drop Caligula, so before proceeding to Tesla, let me flex erudition and argue $TSLAQ itself is like the “third man in” from the Flavian dynasty.

The Emperor Domitian reigned from 81 to 96. Generally popular with the people and the troops, he was hated by the Roman Senate -- whose friends wrote the history books. That’s how we get stories about Domitian spending his days in the palace stabbing flies. He would have probably been accused of incest, but his only sister died when he was young. (Romans shrieked “incest” about their enemies as indiscriminately as Tesla fans cry “short-seller” in the face of legitimate criticism. Caligula was probably marginally less of a monster than most people think. Marginally.)

Most of what was written about Domitian was unrelentingly hostile, but scholars have recently vindicated him as a competent Emperor and efficient autocrat -- the Lee Kuan Yew of his day. Domitian had the revolutionary ideas of promoting men based on merit and attacking corruption. This enraged Senators, for whom nepotism and graft were sacrosanct. 

Two things then happened. One, Domitian’s reputation was buried for about 19 centuries. Two, merit-based promotion led to competent bureaucracy across the Roman Empire, which reached its zenith with the next five emperors. No Domitian, no Golden Age of the Antonines: it’s that stark.

(Sound money fans: Domitian even increased the silver content of Roman coins. What’s not to love? Well, apart from the terrifying violence of an absolute monarch who’d survived a coup attempt and expected others.)

$TSLAQ resembles Domitian in that it faces full-spectrum hostility for demanding higher standards. Many earnest people shrug off Tesla’s abuses -- documented, ongoing abuses -- on the basis that it’s one of the “good guys”. This is no different from Senators, ancient or contemporary, winking away incompetence and corruption because those involved were family or friends.

It won’t take 1900 years to vindicate $TSLAQ, but whenever it is that standards get raised -- for financial disclosures, product claims, Board independence, enforcement of laws and regulations, and other dimensions of business -- it will usher in a new Golden Age for markets. Even as a leftist, I’ve got to believe it’s easier to efficiently allocate capital when there’s market transparency and laws are predictably applied. Investors shouldn’t have to calculate DTF (Discounted Truth Flow) when preparing financial models.

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Today’s EV Farm update relates to customer service, because a week after the aforementioned “Tesla as Animal Farm” op-ed in InsideEVs.com, Tesla shared its intent to open a service center per week in 2021. 

Fans with goldfish memories probably rejoiced. A little learning is a dangerous thing.

But the elephants among us know the ritual. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

Opening 50 service centers in 2021 sounds impressive, unless you know Tesla opened 25 service centers in Q2 2019. That’s a rate of 100 service centers per year. So Tesla’s response to terrible customer service was to announce rollout slower than they’d executed before -- and trust that the goldfish wouldn’t notice. 

To appreciate how customers are sashimi on the altar to Elon’s enrichment, we need to drive down memory lane. I’ve skipped more stories than “Full Self Driving” has missed stopped objects, so as you come across interesting others, I’ll gladly fold them in with credit.

2012 10 22 - Elon Musk closes the penultimate paragraph of a Tesla blog post declaring that “Service is a top priority at Tesla and always will be.” Uh huh.

2015 11 10 - David Noland, a Tesla-owning contributor to GreenCarReports, notes that Tesla’s service Nirvana is gone. Utopias are elusive, and this one disappeared somewhere in 2014 or 2015, at a time when there were about 600 Teslas per service centre. Early Christians used “Gehenna” to describe a punitive hell, and the word kind of rhymes with Nirvana, so I slotted it in today’s newsletter title.

2016 12 - update from David Noland. Service -- which is a top priority at Tesla and always will be -- has gotten worse. Tesla is refusing to increase service spending commensurate with sales.

2017 07 - Tesla announces it’ll build 100 new service centers to triple service capacity! We meet, maybe for the first time, the evergreen talking point that Tesla is rethinking service to be more efficient -- a fancy way of conditioning victims to expect Tesla spending on service would only increase a little, while promising that service would actually improve a lot. 🤨

Since then, Tesla’s thousands of service employees have doubled as human shields protecting Elon from the abuse of understandably-irate customers. You never want to call a game early, but Musk’s Quick Seamless Service has been a triomphe nonpareil on par with Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

2018 09 - Musk blames third-party repair shops (and not first-party indifference) for repair delays, tweeting that Tesla is bringing collision repairs in-house. Perhaps he got around to reading Mr. Noland’s piece from 21 months before? Or the one from 13 months before that?

2018 10 - in an announcement befitting Renaldus Columbus -- look it up, but not from your work computer -- Musk says he’s discovered gaps in Tesla’s service. Service, which had been a top priority at Tesla in 2012, and always would be. Mm hmm.

2019 01 - Tesla promised that improving customer service was now a top priority. Again. They were going to increase their 378 service centers, and they meant it this time! Why, if they added one per week over the next 21 months there would be about 378 + 52 + 39 = 469 service centers by the 29th of October 2020.

Tesla gamely suggested that they could promise much better service without much more spending, by moving certain garages to two-shift operations. As if any company could insist service was a top priority and always would be -- while keeping banker’s hours. Many fans no doubt believed this, not wanting to think the company cared much less about them, than their prior automotive OEM. There’s a victim born every minute…

2019 03 - Tesla announces it’s eliminating annual maintenance visits. Given the timing, it’s a laughably-transparent effort to reduce its service backlog without actually spending more money on customers. Like Musk’s waiving of a safety-critical brake test for new Model 3’s in mid-2018, at exactly the moment Tesla was struggling to scale up [checks notes] … Model 3 production. Tesla stans went through writer Linette Lopez’ Facebook account after that story.

2019 09 - Electrek reports that Tesla is now expanding service “at max speed”. It sounds as if the company has opened about 30 service centers in Q2, pulling Q3 costs forward. Almost as if there was some sort of … financial milestone Tesla was trying to reach in Q3 2019 that caused it to prioritize the stock price (and thus Elon Musk’s net worth) over customer service. Which, as we all know, has been a top priority since 2012, and always would be.

2020 10 - on the 29th of October 2020, Electrek premasticated some Tesla talking points to its readership about the company’s renewed focus on customer service. It would add to its 466 service centers by opening about 50 service centers in 2021, one per week. You know, the same pace as the past two years, and not one service center more.

Here’s a highly abbreviated vehicles-per-service center table, courtesy of Wikipedia and especially @TroyTeslike (via Electrek) for some early vehicle / service center ratios.

Basically, Tesla deceived Electrek into spinning the continuation of its one-a-week service center policy ... as a renewed commitment to service. [chef’s kiss emoji]  Regulatory capture often comes up in conversations about Tesla, but customer capture is equally important.

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Commercial break: forward this newsletter to your friends, and challenge them to read it through without a dictionary! And if you *are* one of those lucky friends, sign up to follow along as we explore Tesla’s arc of darkness. You can also follow me on the Twitter. 

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The best Animal Farm parallel to the above is how the pigs warn Boxer -- the hard-working horse -- that farmer Jones will boil him down when he’s no longer needed. Which is what they wind up doing, buying whisky with the money. (Tesla Tequila anyone?)

The lower animals lapped up the lie that Boxer had been picked up by a veterinarian who’d bought a knacker’s van but hadn’t yet had the time to paint over the “Horse Slaughterer” lettering. Sort of like how Musk insists his Marie Antoinette-scale bonus payouts aren’t actually for himself, but for Mars.

“You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds.”

The story of Electric Vehicle Farm kicks off with Elon Musk condemning the mistreatment of car owners by the old order of franchised dealerships and independent garages, whose financial interests diverge from customers’. Tesla would treat its customers better, because reasons, and things started off magnificently. 

But honeymoons never last, and Musk’s financial interests now diverge 180 degrees from customers’: billions of dollars in shareholder-diluting ego money now depend on limiting service spending so Tesla hits EBITDA targets and Musk collects cheques.

This even extends to safety. If Tesla needs to blame customers to avoid performing a recall: it will, it does, and it repeatedly has.

Remember how, when China ordered Tesla to replace 48,442 potentially faulty and and unsafe rear and front suspensions in Model S and X vehicles, it blamed Chinese drivers? (Emphasis mine.)

“driver usage and expectation for damageability is uniquely severe in the China market. If the customer inputs an abuse load (e.g., curb impact, severe pothole strike, etc.), then the parts may be damaged, leading either to immediate failure or delayed failure from the compounding effects of the initial abuse and subsequent load input.

When a US customer had reported a suspension problem in April 2016, Tesla blamed him too. (Emphasis mine again.)

In its statement, Tesla said the car’s suspension ball joint showed “very abnormal rust” and it had not seen such wear on any other Tesla. The company added that “its owner lives down such a long dirt road that it required two tow trucks to retrieve the car.”

But Cordaro lives on a paved road, in an established suburban neighborhood in Connellsville, Pa. Online property records confirmed his home address. Cordaro said he never abused the car or drove more than a total of a 100 miles on unpaved roads. “Why didn’t they Google-Earth me?” he said. “They have my address.”

Tesla watchers know this as the incident that led to Ed Niedermeyer’s discovery that Tesla had arranged for select customers to sign NDA’s after receiving suspension repairs, which led to Musk personally slandering Niedermeyer in a blog post with innuendo as inaccurate as the deliberate-lie-or-inexcusable-falsehood about their own customer Cardero’s place of living. When you’re rich and powerful, quid est veritas?

- - - - - - -

The next instalment of EV Farm should be out in a couple weeks’ time, with a regular cadence going forward. Until then just remember Animal Farm’s porcine parallel in Elon Musk’s willingness to send customers to the glue factory, when it comes service specifically, or responsibility generally.

Of course, most of the world works by The Pro-Asshole Rule. 

As long as someone’s on “our side” we’ll overlook almost anything. Yes, it’s an “ends justify the means” logic, but most of the time it’s only a minor moral shortcut. 

And then there’s Tesla. 

Figure 3A is a timeline of how Tesla treated some of its female employees.

In a just world Tesla fans could print it up, show it to their partners, daughters, nieces, and female friends, and decide if they want to proclaim, “I’m proud to Stan for this standard. If this had happened to you, I’d still support Tesla all the way.”

And then do it all over again with the allegations of systemic racism, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and other behaviors clay-fired into Tesla’s corporate culture, once I get the next Figures finished.

To be fair, harassment and mistreatment probably do happen at all large companies (but hopefully only very, very infrequently). Some bad apples will make it through. We wouldn’t condemn all of Weyland-Yutani Corporation if a rogue middle manager kept sending ships to find Alien Xenomorphs on the sly.

But these cases are different. They’re different because Elon Musk is personally involved in each of them, and for all purposes he is Tesla. It was Elon Musk who chose to go after the female engineer, in writing, after she was terminated. It was immediately after the victim of alleged sexual assault contacted Elon Musk, that she was fired. And after Steve Jurvetson was thrown out of his own company for sexual misconduct, it would’ve been Elon Musk who made the call to make Jurvetson feel right at home.

The “few bad apples” argument doesn’t work here, because the Big Apple himself is the problem. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor. I’m sure New York City is lovely.)

And remember, there are probably more cases we don’t know about.

Not that you’d know this in the Teslasphere. I’m guessing there’s a Yezhov-shaped hole in fan community coverage on these issues. Nor would you have noticed this as a casual or industry observer. You don’t realize there’s a bigger pattern, until you realize there’s a bigger pattern. 

Tesla’s Temptation

Wikipedia says trading morals for power was the last temptation of Christ. It’s the first temptation of the Tesla fan and goes something like this:

“You can save the climate! You can be a leader, a part of the vanguard. And all it’ll cost is hurt feelings from a few people who neither look nor think like you. People you’ll never meet, you’ll never need to see, about whom you’ll never need to read.” 

The temptation is that since you care about the climate, you’ll let it slide. You’ll keep quiet, or gloss it over. Not everyone can be “hardcore”, not everyone can be elite. The people who couldn’t make the cut might be whiners; complainers. Dead-enders trying to squeeze a greedy settlement. They were never really part of the team.

And hey, why make the perfect the enemy of the good? All of these separate and isolated cases of mistreatment of women, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, and others, can be fixed later. But the climate can’t afford to wait!

Besides, who’s digging up all this dirt? A bunch of Protestants and Jews with an axe to gri — sorry, that was the Catholic playbook. A bunch of haters and short-sellers. Dumdums who don’t understand The Mission.

It’s seductive. Temptations always are, for the desperate -- and the climate crisis has created a huge pool of liberals (like me!) desperate for climate solutions. Some seek heroes, and it’s a good thing hero-worship never attracts villains. Others search for a crusade, and those always end well.

The problem is, if you put climate justice first, you’ll postpone social justice forever. It’ll be a decades-long process to decarbonize the economy. That’s a long time to ask others to wait, and  who knows what new crises will have erupted by then. There’s a reason Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t talk about the “fierce urgency of later”. Dignity shouldn’t have to wait. 

To dismiss the clearly-real moral warts that infect Tesla -- to airbrush them away -- is to invoke the Pro-Asshole Rule. Fans, supporters, employees, customers, and we the public all deserve better. 

If this information and Figure could be of value to friends, please forward it along. Without public pressure there won’t be change -- and without change, things only ever get worse. And silence implies the situation’s okay; that’s it’s not a big enough deal to make a fuss about.

If you haven’t done so yet, sign up to EV Farm to explore Tesla’s arc of darkness. You can also follow me on the Twitter. 

Next up, for real this time, will be “The Three Strikes Rule”.

“It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune.”

As we move on from Elon Musk’s Tinker Bell Complex, ask yourself if the passages below fit Musk or any of a dozen other Silicon Valley “Sun Kings”. 

They see themselves as "very special" people, deserving of admiration and, consequently, have difficulty empathizing with the feelings and needs of others … Not only do [they] commonly show a "pervasive pattern of grandiosity," they also tend to behave with a vindictiveness often observed in narcissistic personality disorder.

These individuals are "preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success" and "power." They believe they are unique and can only be associated with others of equally high status. Furthermore, they require excessive admiration to remain happy, possess an extreme sense of entitlement, exploit others, and are often envious of others. 

They come from an article titled, The Psychology of Dictators: Power, Fear, and Anxiety, by two university researchers.

We don’t usually apply the term “dictator” to the private sector, but silicon strongmen fits as a label, not least because when critiqued with heat, they often turn to glass and shatter. (Elizabeth Holmes would be a silicon strongwoman, I guess.)

Moral Lensing

Power bends judgment the way that gravity bends light -- we call the latter “gravitational lensing” so could call the former “moral lensing”.

Democracy diffuses individuals’ direct political power, but lobbying, lawlessness, and lobbying to excuse lawlessness, still favour the Sun Kings’ odds. And we live in the dystopias they create in their wake. 

There are many resources for tracking their tactics; I happen to read Matt Stoller’s BIG newsletter. Doing so has convinced me there’s enough Venn diagram overlap for a leftist/libertarian coalition to depose them. As outsiders, both political tribes loathe the status quo -- leftist progressives want to reclaim power from abusive monopolies while libertarians want to rescue capitalism from crony capitalism (of which galactic valuations for loss-harvesting businesses are a symptom).

Consider this GQ article outlining Musk’s “l’état, c’est moi” attitude. It will enrage leftists and libertarians alike, but until anti-strongman coalitions align together on lowest-common-denominator goals such as the rule of law, they will remain divided and conquered.

Not Tony Stark; Vladimir Putin

Now let’s focus on our silicon strongman.

In 2008’s Iron Man, Tony Stark was modeled on Oracle’s Larry Ellison. This is well documented but often overlooked. The Elon Musk push came ahead of Iron Man 2 in 2010.

See, Elon Musk isn’t Tony Stark, he’s an American Putin. 

Musk is a capitalist Putin making desperate efforts to mythologize himself as a real-life Tony Stark. This goes back to his Tinker Bell Complex.

I’ve mixed some of Putin’s “alpha male” and Musk’s “alpha bro” photo-ops below. They’re targeted to different audiences, but serve the same purpose. They display the Leader to rally the fans and perpetuate the mystique, the “brand”.

Putin flexes his physical prowess while Musk tries to pose his mental prowess, but both play by Mr. Burns’ sack race rules.

Credit where it’s due: these men embody Nietzsche’s will to power as doggedly as Rover trying to pee on every tree in a forest.

The biggest difference is that while Putin assassinates his critics, Musk only assassinates their character. (When the yellow king slandered hero diver Vern Unsworth as a pedophile, that was the maturing of his serial habits. He’s denigrated critics for years, which must be the Pretorian noblesse oblige.)

For all this mordant commentary, no one wants fans wigging out. It’d be the baldest lie to disclaim the differences between country dictator and corporate despot when only one of them has ever:

- cultivated a cult of personality

- relied on partisans to intimidate journalists, harass critics, and shout down dissent

- suffered ridicule for some photo-op undersea diving project or other, and

- over-promised on this solution or that solution for Covid-19

While also getting hair plugs.

Next on EV Farm we return to timelines of wrongdoing in: “The Three Strikes Rule”.

[pre-script: The “EV Farm” logo is based on the Tesla and SpaceX logos in red, on a yellow background, an inversion of the yellow-on-red Soviet colour scheme. The Soviet flag was the inspiration for the “hoof-and-horn” Animal Farm flag.]

Elon Musk’s manic self-promotion and mansplaining sprees aren’t signs of strength but of weakness. Musk has a Tinker Bell Complex: when people stop believing in him, he dies (inside).

That’s why he doesn’t stay in his own lane. 

That’s why he tries to swim in every lane, simultaneously.

And that’s why he barges into new fields as desperately as Homer Simpson pushing kids out of the way at an ice cream truck.

Elon Musk shoving past researchers to get to the front of a new field of study - The Simpsons

Musk is afraid someone will disrupt his incumbency as the go-to guru, the “Dr. Oz”, for techies: Twitter, Twitter, on the wall, who’s the Kloutiest one of all?

Alas, everyone loses their clout eventually. Even Klout, which was klosed in 2018 by -- wait for it -- Lithium Technologies.

It may seem unfair to compare a grown man to an insubstantial fairy -- in the 1904 theatre play, Tinker Bell was represented by a darting light -- so let me point out that Tinker Bell is variously described as:

“Ill-tempered, spoiled, jealous, vindictive [...] The extremes in her personality are explained in the story by the fact that a fairy’s size prevents her from holding more than one feeling at a time, so when she is angry she has no counterbalancing compassion.” - Wikipedia

(Clearly, Tinker Bell would have benefited from the secrets of Homer’s “window to weight gain”.)

A Paradigm Detour or Twelve 

Arguing for Musk’s Tinker Bell Complex is a paradigm change. It fits the facts far better than his amplified narrative, but it’s a radically different take.

Dusting off our Bay Area buzzwords, we might call it a disruptive assertation, which creates a new community and meme set, and eventually displaces incumbent perspectives, hitherto-friendly media coverage and fan enthusiasm.

It takes time for paradigm changes to stick, so we’ll camp here briefly, before pushing further into Tesla’s arc of darkness. 

When it comes to paradigm changes, any desiccated, bromidic scrivener could scrawl a cliché about the heliocentric model of the solar system explaining the planets’ motion better than the earth-centered model. 

But I’m no desiccated, bromidic scrivener. 

So here’s a thousand-word picture explaining why many societies count in dozens, when humans have ten fingers. (For further reading: A Universal History of Numbers.) 

There are 12 finger-joints on a hand. Why use both hands to count to 10, when you can use the thumb and fingers of one hand to count to 12?

There will be five fingers on the unused hand. Use each finger to count groups of 12, and you get 5 x 12 = 60, the ancient Sumerians’ favourite number. They counted in base-60, a “sexagesimal” system, still with us in the form of time (60 minutes / hour; 60 seconds / minute), angles and geographic coordinates (the 360 degree circle; 60 minutes per degree; 60 seconds per minute).

Use this counting system and two hands together give a value of 72 (60 from the left hand, 12 on the right hand). 

We might expect 72 to become numerical shorthand for “lots” or “many” in Sumerian-influenced cultures, and 72 does pop up occasionally in Egyptian mythology, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Uses of 72 in eastern religions are most likely derived from different culturally-relevant numbers.)

The “twelve finger-joints on a hand” paradigm fits the facts better than every other “Theory of Dozens” combined. It’s still obscure, but its dominance will come with outreach and time.

So it is with Musk’s Tinker Bell Complex.

And so it is with $TSLAQ. 

Sign up to explore Tesla’s arc of darkness, follow me on the Twitter, and/or tell your friends.

In Animal Farm, Mollie was a sheep who escaped the farm for a better life elsewhere, while Benjamin was the donkey who survived by not getting involved. Both describe me, as a fellow who left my Tesla fandom behind, and who never owned or shorted the stock, except for a one-month period in 2018 when I owned one share to vote for more Board oversight of Musk.]

The first Model S battery pack fire occurred in early October 2013. 

Soon afterwards a reluctant messenger would have been dispatched to Elon. He (it was probably a he) would have had to explain to Elon that a proper battery shield would have prevented the upsetting fire and the still more-upsetting negative publicity. Toyota’s engineers had been right.

Frustrated, humiliated, Musk lashed out. 

Around October 21, he slammed Toyota’s pet technology of fuel cells as bullshit. The angry teenager I once was would’ve done the same, thinking these thoughts:

“Fuck you for being right. Fuck your technology. I hate you. I’m smarter than you. I’m better than you. Fuck you, fuck all of you, fuck everyone around you.”

Every Oedipus mocks his Tiresias’ blindness, and Musk is an usurper like every other -- but that’s a different essay.

The battery shield affair was the first time I caught my eyes being deceived by Tesla's pleasing green veneer. The shadows were as subtle as Red Wedding forewarnings, and guileless Stark that I am, I all but ignored them. But they were there. Even in that March 2014 love letter to safety:

“Not needed for a high level of safety.” 

An odd phrase, and unnecessary. Why an unprompted self-exculpation? Why not a heartfelt affirmation of customer safety?

And the rest of the paragraph: clinical and unfeeling, sterilized of empathy -- the implacable rational ideal. And yet...

And yet that same paragraph was loaded with defensive, even absolutist language. 

These were not the words of a man confident in his competence, dutiful in his diligence. This was the rigid, brittle insistence of an anxious man justifying himself under uncomfortable cross-examination. A man protecting vulnerability by projecting certainty. 

This man who spurned expertise in private still sputtered, grasped, clung to public esteem.

Peter Pan had a Tinker Bell complex.

[Post-script: To misquote the popular musical, I wanna write something that’s gonna outlive me. 

I’m littering these essays with Easter Eggs like “Mollie Benjamin”, hoping to make Electric Vehicle Farm as re-readable as The Simpsons is re-watchable, giving it both informative and ironic value. 

And I use “irony” deliberately, because in ancient Greek tradition, the Eiron is a clever underdog character who triumphs over the Alazon, a boastful imposter character.

And that fits the $TSLAQ - Musk dynamic perfectly.]

[Post-postscript: Seven years on, fuel cells continue to be a tiny niche of the zero emission vehicle space. 

Was this predictable? Absolutely! Fuel cell production capacity has barely crested 10,000 vehicles/year, and there’s still very little infrastructure: the same problems early EVs faced, incidentally. Thinking that Big Oil sabotaged early electric car efforts is on par with thinking Big Electricity is sabotaging fuel cell vehicles today.

That said, the industry is growing exactly along the trajectories of solar and wind in prior decades. Consider the immodestly-titled chart below.

Miss the rise of wind in the 1990s, solar in the 2000s (aughts) and batteries in the 2010s? Fuel cells are your chance for a four-peat!

Whether I was an engineer or a stock analyst, I’d choose fuel cells over wind, solar and batteries, because I’d have a better chance at becoming one of the gurus in the new field, than in trying to climb past all the experts in the established fields. (Disclosure: I’ve spent most of my engineering career in fuel cells, interspersed with renewable energy consulting and EV infrastructure too.)

Are fuel cells less efficient than batteries at turning renewable electricity into forward motion? Yes. Does this matter? No. Wind turbines are far more efficient than photovoltaics, and folks still seem okay with solar. And in a warmer, fuzzier example, tracheal systems are far more efficient than cardiovascular systems. 👇

Think you’ll get erudite, expansive prose like this from a Tesla fan substack? Hell no.

So -- sign up to explore Tesla’s arc of darkness, follow me on the Twitter, and/or tell your friends! 🙏

"Never mind the milk, comrades!" cried Napoleon, placing himself in front of the buckets. "That will be attended to. The harvest is more important. Comrade Snowball will lead the way. I shall follow in a few minutes. Forward, comrades! The hay is waiting."

So the animals trooped down to the hayfield to begin the harvest, and when they came back in the evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.

The fractures in my fandom began in August 2014. Bloomberg reported on the culture clash between Tesla and Toyota in their RAV4 EV collaboration. Among other safety considerations, Toyota insisted on a robust battery shield to provide an abundance of customer safety. To use  another’s words:

Toyota had wanted to bring the risk of a pierced battery pack down to virtually zero. 

And Tesla refused.

Toyota eventually relieved Tesla of its duty and took over the design of the crucial safety feature themselves.

The Model S was Tesla’s first mass production automobile. By incorporating a battery shield such as the one Toyota fought so hard to provide its customers, Tesla could have brought the risk down to virtually zero. 

But Tesla refused.

Instead, with the resolve of a Ford Pinto accountant, Tesla - which is to say Elon Musk - skipped the battery shield. He’d show those Toyota engineers how a white male 👇 Bachelor of Economics would evaluate customer safety.

Musk wasn’t the cure. He was the cause. 

When I and others applauded the battery shield announcement, we weren’t praising the firefighter, but the arsonist. And it worked. If not for that Bloomberg piece, I’d still think battery punctures had been unforeseeable. 

When they had been foreseen. 

By one of Tesla’s automotive partners. 

Before Musk decided he knew better.

Sign up to explore Tesla’s arc of darkness. And tell your friends. 

“The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.”

My love for Tesla peaked in March 2014. 

After two freak incidents in which Model S battery packs got damaged and caught fire, Elon Musk announced Tesla had designed a titanium shield to further protect the battery pack. The shield would be fitted on every new, and retrofitted on every existing, Model S to assure a maximum of passenger safety.

The month before, GM had finally begun its ignition key switch recall -- nine years after it held its first internal meetings about the problem. 

What greater contrast could there be?

GM had put customers’ lives at risk. Tesla, young and uncorrupted, had put customer safety first. They wanted to bring the risk down to virtually zero!

I could get behind that company. I could support that company. Our children would be safe with that company. Why shouldn’t our next car be a Tesla?

August was the cruelest month. 

Sign up to explore Tesla’s arc of darkness. And tell your friends.