Ravi Speaks:-
In continuation of the series of articles reproduced here on “Elon Musk”-today it is going to be the final PART-VI of the same. This complete series is written by Molly, Jefferey, and Alejandro of Times.
“PART-VI”-
PERSON OF THE YEAR-2021 ELON MUSK.
In the future, Musk envisions that no one tells you what to do. Robots perform all the labor, and goods and services are abundant, so people only work because they want to. “There’s, like, plenty for everyone,” he says. “There’s not necessarily anyone who’s the boss of you. I don’t mean to suggest chaos, but rather that you’re not under anyone’s thumb. So you have the freedom to do whatever you’d like to do, provided it does not cause harm to others.”
Musk has disavowed terrestrial political affiliations and maintained good relations with politicians of both parties, including Presidents Obama and Trump, though he quit the latter’s business council after only a few months over the decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. Of President Joe Biden, he says, “I don’t think he’s doing an amazing job, but I don’t know—it’s hard to tell.” He has an ardent following in some of the nastier precincts of the far-right, but Musk claims that when he tweeted “Take the red pill” last year, he did not know that “red-pilling” was a right-wing dog whistle: “I was just referring to The Matrix,” the movie from which the meme derives.
Unlike some techno-libertarians, Musk doesn’t expect a grim future of competition for resources in which only the naturally gifted prevail. But he rejects the idea that the size of his fortune makes up a policy problem or that he is morally obligated to pay some share of it in taxes. A recent ProPublica investigation found that Musk and many others in his tax bracket paid no individual federal taxes as recently as 2018 because they had no income, only assets. In October, Senate Democrats considered imposing a “billionaires’ tax” on wealth. When Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted to support it, Musk responded with a vulgar insult of Wyden’s appearance in his profile photo.
When the government comes up in TIME’s interview, Musk briefly amuses himself by humming rapper Warren G’s ’90s hip-hop hit “Regulate.” “They’re basically saying they want control of the assets,” he says. “This does not result in the good of the people. You want those who are managing capital to be good stewards of capital. And I think the government is inherently not a good steward of capital.”
In an interview, Wyden agreed with Musk’s interpretation of his position: the purpose of such a tax is to take assets out of private hands for public use. Government, he argues, is inherently a more public-spirited and accountable steward of resources than any individual, and is empowered to ensure all the society benefits from the profits a dynamic economy generates. “, I think there is a consensus that we ought to pay for the priorities we really care about, and everyone ought to pay their fair share,” Wyden says.
James Pethokoukis, an economic analyst with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, thinks Musk has a coherent politics, whether he articulates it. “The reason it’s confusing is it’s not on the traditional left-right spectrum,” he says. “It is a politics of progress.” When segments of the right and left alike champion protectionist populism—from Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s hostility to free trade to Bernie Sanders’ redistributionist—this puts Musk at odds with both. “It is a view that says the solution to man’s problems is growth and technological progress and maximizing human potential,” Pethokoukis says. “It’s not a view fully represented by either side.”
Musk at an event for The Boring Company, his high-speed tunnel ventureJoshua Lott—Getty Images
Musk’s belief in progress is not absolute. He has been outspoken about confronting what he sees as the dangers of out-of-control artificial intelligence and confounded the AI companies Neuralink and Open AI to advance that goal. He finds cryptocurrency interesting and can talk endlessly about the conception of money as “an information system for resource allocation.” But he doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency and disavows responsibility for the way his tweets have sent markets into a tizzy. “Markets move all the time,” he says, “based on nothing as far as I can tell. So the statements that I make, are they materially different from random movements of the stock that might happen, anyway? I don’t think so.”
Zubrin, of the Mars Society, believes three qualities could fall to Musk: his workaholism, his recklessness, or a sort of earned hubris. “Prominent leaders become incapable of hearing criticism,” he says. “Why did Napoleon fail in Russia? Because every time before, he had succeeded. Plenty of French generals were saying, ‘Why don’t we just take Poland and be good?’ But every time in the past, the people who urged caution had been wrong.”
Zubrin would not bet against his old friend. “Genius is a word that is frequently associated with Musk; wisdom is not,” he says wryly. “But there is one sense in which Musk is intelligent, which is that he understands he doesn’t have forever.”
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