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| Ravi Speaks:- |
PERSON OF THE YEAR-2021 ELON MUSK.
Electric cars, like homemade rockets, were a graveyard of well-intentioned investment before Musk barreled into an industry in which he had no academic training. For decades, legacy automakers had stymied the development of electric vehicles, lobbying against fuel-efficiency standards and filing lawsuits against state mandates to develop the cars. Tesla’s business was sustained in part by generous support from the federal government, though the company got off the ground before it became available. A $465 million federal loan in 2010 helped prop up Tesla at a crucial juncture, and its customers have benefitted from hefty tax incentives.
Musk believed from the start that advances in lithium-ion battery technology made long-range electric vehicles possible. In practice, it wasn’t that easy. Tesla’s first decade was plagued by unmet deadlines, technical snafus and cost overruns. During the 2008 financial crisis, cash was so tight the company came within days of missing payroll. With a dwindling fortune, Musk borrowed $20 million from SpaceX to loan the company, cajoled another $20 million out of investors and raised the price of the company’s debut sports car to survive.
Tesla went public in 2010, but for years it remained in crisis mode. With production behind schedule, and the company at risk of running out of money, Musk spent much of April 2018 sleeping on the factory floor as he tried to iron out assembly-line issues. “He would wake up, look at the monitors on the wall and go chase the constraint,” says Musk’s adviser Omead Afshar, who slept on a cot. “He would be in there reviewing the system, redoing the code himself, solving problems, bouncing from station to station. He will endure the most pain to lead by example, and all of us around him really can’t complain when we’re not working that hard.” For Musk’s 47th birthday that June, he briefly paused for a bite of grocery-store cake, then went back to the paint-shop tunnel.
The cars finally rolled off the line, but soon enough, Musk shot himself in the foot. In August 2018, he tweeted that he had funding to take the company private for $420 a share. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued him, alleging he had committed securities fraud. The resulting settlement cost him his perch as Tesla’s board chair, though he was able to retain the title of CEO. The adult supervision extends only to a point. Three months later, Tesla sent a software update that enabled the car to make farting noises on command. (“Please put ‘invented car fart’ on my gravestone,” Musk tweeted.) But for all the immaturity, his public profile has an upside as well. “We don’t spend any money on advertising,” notes Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm. “His ability to communicate with a very wide range of people globally through social media, I think, has been a huge asset to the company—you know, by and large.” His longtime friend Bill Lee, who finds his memes and trolling “charming,” says he was the one who persuaded Musk to join Twitter. “I remember when he had zero followers,” Lee recalls. “He’s probably the most viral social influencer ever.”
Today, thanks in large part to Musk’s pace-setting, auto companies from VW to Nissan are jostling to invest billions in electric vehicles. Their about-face is driven less by altruism than by a dawning realization that Musk is eating their lunch. “Musk and Tesla forced the change,” says Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Cox Automotive. “He proved that there was a market for EVs.”
That has made Musk arguably the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change. Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. But EVs may ultimately be less important to the climate fight than the central innovation that made them possible: batteries. Tesla has repurposed the lightweight, energy-dense cells that power its cars for huge grid-scale batteries that provide essential backup for renewables. Demand for Tesla’s smaller home-based Powerwall, which can store electricity from rooftop solar systems, has spiked as consumers look for alternatives to the grid, driven by everything from February’s Texas power shortage to the fire risk in California that has led to power shutoffs. In some areas, software enables utilities to tap into home-energy reserves when the grid is strained, instead of turning on high-polluting standby generators. Gerry Hawkes, a 72-year-old forester from Woodstock, Vt., has been participating in one such program since 2017, allowing his local utility to draw power from a pair of Tesla backup batteries in his basement. “It makes sense for power backup, and it makes sense for climate change,” Hawkes says.
Some of Musk’s initiatives have generated more controversy. His effort to produce and sell solar roof tiles has stumbled. The Boring Co., which Musk started in 2016, put forward a plan to alleviate urban congestion by building miles of underground tunnels to whisk cars along at more than 100 m.p.h., but critics say plain old subways would be more efficient and equitable. Musk’s move to accept Bitcoin as payment for Teslas this spring prompted accusations of hypocrisy; the cryptocurrency’s computational “mining” operations are a climate disaster, drawing gargantuan amounts of electricity to process transactions. Musk subsequently shelved the plan.
Musk’s January announcement of a $100 million climate prize rankled some environmentalists because of its inclusion of proposals for direct-air carbon capture—giant machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. While some experts say researching that technology is necessary, others see it as a costly distraction. “Direct-air capture is a boondoggle,” says Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford’s Atmosphere/Energy program. “We can’t waste our time and money on things that just don’t work very well.”
Tesla’s hard-charging approach has also raised concerns. In May 2020, Musk reopened his Fremont, Calif., factory against local public-health orders. “It makes you wonder if your life is worth $20 an hour,” an anonymous Tesla worker told SF Weekly. Musk says the regulators were wrong. In March, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a 2018 Musk tweet had broken labor laws, as did the company’s firing of a union activist. Tesla is appealing the ruling.
This summer, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into Tesla’s Autopilot system, which has been involved in 11 crashes with parked emergency vehicles since 2018, leaving 17 people injured and one dead. Musk has been accused of overstating and misrepresenting the system’s abilities, starting with the name: despite the promises of an imminent driverless future, Tesla drivers still have to keep their hands on the wheel. “We still obviously have a lot of work to do,” Musk says of truly autonomous vehicles, though he insists the current software is safe. Tesla’s newest autonomous beta software has already been blamed for at least one crash since its broad release in September, and videos showing the cars making dangerous errors have circulated online. A former high-level employee in Tesla’s autonomous-development program tells TIME that the new system’s name, “Full Self-Driving,” is irresponsible.
In 2018, the Chinese government repealed a law against foreign ownership to allow Musk to build a factory in Shanghai. Now Tesla appears to make about half of its cars in China, but it risks losing its hold on the world’s largest car market as the one-party state turns to favor homegrown rivals like NIO and BYD. Musk has faced criticism for pandering to America’s increasingly assertive authoritarian rival. “Overall, Tesla has a good relationship with China,” Musk told a business conference on Dec. 6. “I don’t mean to endorse everything China does.”
Despite supply-chain shortages, Tesla delivered 241,300 vehicles in the most recent quarter, a record for the carmaker. Ford and GM’s combined market cap is less than a fifth of Tesla’s, even though they together sold three and a half times as many vehicles. The Tesla Model 3 became the best-selling vehicle in Europe in September, and the company is swamped by new orders. With demand soaring, Musk is expanding production, preparing to double its output with new factories in Germany and Texas.
Tesla’s gains have inspired investors to pour billions of dollars into EV startups like Rivian and Fisker. One rival, Lucid Motors, is run by a former Tesla engineer who helped create the Model S. The Lucid Air sedan was recently named the MotorTrend Car of the Year. Ford and GM have pumped money into thwarting Tesla’s expansion into pickup trucks, the most profitable segment of the domestic market. But Musk says he isn’t worried about being out-competed. “If somebody makes better cars than we do, and they then sell more cars than we do, I think that’s totally fine,” he says. “Our intent with Tesla was always that we would serve as an example to the car industry and hope that they also make electric cars, so that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable technology.”
{To be continued with part IV.—-}