What Elon Musk Must Do to Improve His Image

Elon Musk has delighted many conservatives this year. Winning Time's Person of the Year, then going on The Babylon Bee to talk about it. Promising to buy Twitter, then making its  board of directors dance. Moving his Tesla offices from California to Texas. Laying off the head of Tesla's diversity thought police!

So, it may have shocked many of these same conservatives when Donald Trump and Musk threw some punches recently, with the former president calling the South African entrepreneur a "BS artist." Seems like an odd thing to do after Musk gave a blanket endorsement of Republicans this fall.

While there certainly is a lot to appreciate about Musk, there are some problems once you get below the surface — problems that he needs to address if he wants the high ground against Trump. Musk does have a record of broken promises to taxpayers and the government and a troubling history of leftist politics.

Anything but praise for Musk may seem odd coming from this columnist, who named him the Iron Man of his Anti-Woke Avengers earlier this year.

See, it fits though because we need to remember that before Tony Stark became Iron Man, he was a billionaire who got rich off lucrative government contracts, rather than the private sector. The Los Angeles Times determined that Musk's empire had been built on almost $5 billion in government subsidies, including $1.3 billion in incentives from Nevada for a factory near Reno and a $750 million incentive from New York State to build a solar panel factor in Buffalo.

Having made this much off the government, maybe it's time to give something back.

Now many believe that his SpaceX venture will do just that for the human race, taking us to Mars. But SpaceX is not without its problems!

In February of last year, a test flight of SpaceX's next-generation Starship exploded – proving SpaceX has a long way to go before it can go where no one has gone before, despite Musk tweeting that the company would be on Mars "well before" 2030. In 2018, he said that by 2022, SpaceX would have cargo ships on the way to Mars to be waiting for humans who landed there in 2024.

Virtually every Falcon Heavy payload has missed its original launch target. Within the last few weeks, USSF-44 was "delayed indefinitely" — despite its launch target of June 2022. The Jupiter-3 communications satellite slipped from an original launch date of 2021 to early 2023.

SpaceX seems less like Star Industries and more like one of his flagging competitors.

And Tesla might be responsible for (inadvertently) starting World War III.

Musk, who can be described as a media darling, purportedly made a notorious and legally consequential claim in 2018 that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which wasn't true and got him in trouble with the SEC. Since then there have also been rampant delays and recalls that have plagued an appreciable number of Tesla models on the road.

California is experiencing rolling blackouts because people are using more electricity than the state's grid can handle. Yes, that's cool to have cars like George Jetson, but not if it short-circuits the western United States.

There's even a moment in Musk's cameo in "Iron Man 2" where he says he has an idea for an electric jet, and Tony Stark says, "You do? That won't make it work."

Furthermore, the very existence of Tesla gives a false hope of automobiles transitioning away from fossil fuels. In an example of running before you can walk, Tesla and other electric-vehicle companies have convinced the entire Democrat Party that we can sabotage our energy independence.

If everyone in the U.S. still had faith in fossil fuels, people would be buying our oil instead of Vladimir Putin's, leaving the Ukraine uninvaded. History may judge that Ukraine is where WWIII started.

These are the things Musk needs to take action on: an outrageous government largesse, a dysfunctional space company, and a reckless car company.

So Musk really is like Tony Stark — notwithstanding that director Jon Favreau said he modeled the character after Musk. But he's Tony at the beginning of the first "Iron Man," where he still had some issues to work on. Conservatives can rightly appreciate when Musk is on the right side, but he has a lot of work to become a hero.

Jared Whitley is a long-time politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. Read Jared Whitley's reports — More Here.