Elon Musk Does Not Deliver Value

But we keep throwing money at him anyway.

Him again.

Earlier this month a Delaware judge concluded, for the second time, that Tesla’s board is trying to pay its chief executive Elon Musk much more than he’s worth for what is, in practice, a part-time job. Based on a 2017 estimate by Musk’s lawyers of how the great man allocates his time, the board is trying to pay Musk at the rate of $437.5 million per hour. That means (assuming five-minute bathroom breaks) that Tesla would have to pay Musk $36 million every time he takes a piss. They’d be better off making him wear a diaper.

Let me add that all these calculations are too low because since 2017 Musk has taken on the additional responsibilities of running Twitter into the ground (at an estimated cumulative cost of $25 billion since he bought it in 2022) and becoming Donald Trump’s co-director of the Department of Government Waste, which isn’t a department at all but rather a White House panel-in-waiting that nonetheless seems lately to be occupying most of Musk’s time. Musk isn’t paid for this labor, but taxpayers have lavished at least $5 billion in subsidies on the various companies to which Musk donates only a fraction of his time, plus hundreds of billions in government contracts. In return, Musk is on the verge of shutting down the government until Trump’s inauguration, which (extrapolating from previous experience) would cost taxpayers $3 billion. The gist of my latest New Republic piece is that Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world even if he never receives his Tesla payday, does not pass even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis. You can read the piece here.

You might also want to read, if you somehow missed it when I posted it a year ago, my piece explaining how Elon Musk is what we get when the business world overvalues “creativity” at the expense of everything else. That essay drew liberally on Samuel W. Franklin’s fine 2023 book The Cult of Creativity, a marvelous cultural history that, though well-reviewed, didn’t get as much acclaim as it deserved. My piece didn’t get the acclaim it deserved, either, because nothing does that runs the last two weeks of December. Stay tuned for an excellent year-ender I wrote for The New Republic that will also fail to get the acclaim it deserves (I never seem to learn), about democracy’s weakness for oligarchs and the wisdom on this subject bequeathed by the Founders.