It continues to sadden me that most people are so gullible they think Musk is a "genius" when in reality his real - and only - talent is as a charlatan. He's learned that a great many people (venture and private equity investors, traders, analysts, and especially journalists) are astonishingly easy to dupe and he leverages that insight to the max. In fact, Musk has no imagination and his grandiose claims are risible. Building a pointless and non-sustainable billionaire's panic room on Mars is not "saving humanity" and swapping EVs (which in most places get their electricity from power stations burning copious quantities of fossil fuels) for conventionally-powered cars just makes traffic jams slightly quieter but no less wasteful and harmful.

Musk is the classic spoiled little rich boy, a flabby conceited oaf surrounded by babbling sycophants. We've seen this so many times before, but usually the idolization is of people who to some degree really did do something themselves (Henry Ford, Jack Welsh, Steve Jobs) whereas Musk has merely taken credit for other people's hard work. Which, as the beneficiary of an emerald mine run on de facto slave labor, is hardly surprising. No wonder he runs his companies on lines even Victorians would consider to be stupid, self-defeating, and pointlessly harsh. In the coming recession, when companies will become more valued for real-world profits than for hype and creative accounting, we can expect to see most of Musk's paper fortune evaporate and his reputation for supposedly being a "genius" take a well-deserved beating. The only real differences between preening Musk and the imbecile creature Trump is that Musk is somewhat more articulate and rather less orange.