Elon Musk Loves to Solve Other People’s Problems … Not His Own

Imagine a devoted Christian wife and mother who was so preoccupied with distant philanthropic projects that she did nothing for the poor who were her neighbors, and in fact neglected her own family — driving her husband and children into misery and despair. Actually, you don’t have to imagine such a character, since Charles Dickens did that for us in the form of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. As Jim Forest wrote at Touchstone, Jellyby

resolutely devotes every waking hour to the “Borrioboola-Gha venture” [which] involves the settlement of impoverished Britons among African natives with the goal of supporting themselves through coffee growing.

Mrs. Jellyby is convinced that no other undertaking in life is so worthwhile, or would solve so many problems at a stroke. … [She] is so wedded to her work that she has no time for her several children, with the exception of Caddy, a daughter she has conscripted as her secretary. Ink-spattered Caddy puts in nearly as many hours as her mother in the daily task of answering letters and sending out literature about Borrioboola-Gha.

Caddy, however, has come to hate the very word “Africa” or any word that has the remotest suggestion of causes. For her, causes simply mean the ruin of family life. Mrs. Jellyby’s husband eventually becomes suicidal and, though surviving despair, is last seen in the book with his head resting despondently on a wall.

In the book’s postscript, we discover that the Borrioboola-Gha project failed after the local king sold the project’s volunteers into slavery in order to buy rum.

Or you could just follow the public life of Elon Musk. On several important issues, Musk has become a folk hero to conservatives — just not on any issues where he’d have to make any sacrifices or inconvenience himself. Instead, Musk weighs in on subjects distant from his interests, where the price of improving things will be paid by somebody else. And he’s often right.

Musk Can Seem Like a Hero

Musk was right to support Donald Trump over the babbling nonentity Kamala Harris — or whoever was actually going to run the country had she won the election. (Probably the same Obama-appointed Deep State hacks who have been running it the past four years in the name of Joe Biden.) And he’s right that our government is massively wasteful, definitely in need of a penny-pinching overhaul such as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk has offered to help run.

But advising Trump to cut funding to government programs won’t cost Musk anything — and in fact would grant him almost unprecedented power as a private citizen who didn’t face confirmation by the Senate. Government contractors right now have every reason to try to get on Elon Musk’s good side.

Musk was right that Twitter (now X) had become a tightly censored, politically suffocating echo chamber thanks to the mass-banning of conservatives and Christians. His purchase of Twitter was risky, or seemed so at the time. People claimed that he was crazy. But in fact, buying Twitter has given Musk astonishing global influence — and will amply repay his purchase price with all the data he scrapes from it to fuel his own AI enterprise, Grok. So, not really a sacrifice on his part.

Elon’s Social Credit Scores

Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that Musk really believes in free speech after all. Conservative Treehouse has an article revealing the political bias that Musk and his engineers are building into X and Grok. It isn’t pretty; in fact, it sounds a lot like the “social credit” scoring system used by the Chinese Communist Party — a longtime Musk business partner:

Elon Musk and his Twitter (X platform) engineers have an Artificial Intelligence (AI) user engagement and information system known as Grok. Essentially, you can ask AI Grok questions, and it provides responses based on the coded values of the engineers who built it.

Some users asked Grok to evaluate their X posts, and got answers such as this one:

“These posts might be subject to reduced reach because they could be perceived as promoting skepticism, conspiracy, or negativity towards individuals, institutions, or the media. …”

“Don’t criticize your government, don’t criticize foreign governments, don’t talk about conspiracy theories … and don’t accuse government officials or members of the media of malfeasance or dishonesty.”

These are the parameters built by Elon Musk and his Twitter engineers. …

These same coded values are being created by the same tech engineers who are currently building out the surveillance state technological interface with government. This same perspective, what Palantir CEO Alex Karp described as “coded values,” is being written into the code within Palantir facial recognition and targeting software. The U.S. Government has already signed billions in contracts with Palantir (Peter Thiel) for these AI products.

So, maybe Musk isn’t exactly a free-speech hero — just someone who aspires to take Big Brother’s place.

Does Musk Care About Protecting Young People?

Musk is fighting hard against the authoritarian leftist government in Britain over the epidemic of rapes committed by Pakistani men against young British women. He’s exposing a decades-old coverup by police and the British government, who refused to protect these young women or prosecute their assailants for fear of stoking “racism.” Bravo, so far. Again, on this issue that poses no risk to Musk’s personal interests or businesses, he’s taking a worthy stand.

But when it comes to the impact of immigration on society, Musk isn’t always consistent. He threatened to “go to war” over the issue of expanding H1B visas that tech companies use to extract cheap labor from indentured foreign workers. And here Musk profits directly. According to the National Memo and Electrek magazine:

“Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year,” according to a story by its editor-in-chief, Fred Lambert, that led the website on December 30.

Last April, Electrek reported that Tesla dismissed about 15,000 US employees, mostly in Texas and California – but then the company moved to fill those same jobs with imported labor at lower cost.

Now it makes more sense why Musk might want to focus discussions of immigration on faraway horrors in working-class British neighborhoods instead of laid-off Americans at his factory in Texas.

It’s admirable that Musk wants to protect young British women by writing Tweets that cost him nothing. But if he’s so concerned about young people, you might expect him to care about the child laborers in Africa who get sick and die from mining the cobalt required for electric cars’ batteries. As I’ve said here before:

The rare earth minerals (such as cobalt) used for the manufacture of EV batteries are excavated and processed in a pollution-intensive way, poisoning the environment surrounding those plants and impacting hundreds of communities. …

Tesla purchases raw materials from the natural resources-mining giants, despite those companies’ documented human rights abuses in desperately poor countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Kamoto Copper Co. is Tesla’s primary supplier of cobalt, and while it runs a large mechanized mine, it also buys additional cobalt from area “artisanal” mines, which almost certainly employ child labor, and in some cases forced labor. … Critics charge that more than 40,000 child slaves in DRC are forced to work in cobalt mines so that companies like Tesla can produce their electric cars.

So which is it, Elon? Do you want to protect helpless children from exploitation or not? Maybe not when it might cost you tens of millions of dollars to purchase ethically sourced raw materials.

Musk really needs to decide whether he wants to be a freedom fighter or a censor, an immigration reformer or a sweatshop owner, a protector of children or a child-labor tycoon. Let’s pray he chooses well.