Review: In 'Ludicrous,' Elon Musk is a hoaxer for the 21st century

Review: In 'Ludicrous,' Elon Musk is a hoaxer for the 21st century

Patrick McGinty

Oct 15, 2019

9:00 PM

He blames the me­dia. Hos­tile Tweet­ing is his pre­ferred form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, un­less you count non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments. He re­quires no ad­ver­tis­ing bud­get, not when his army of on­line evan­ge­liz­ers will at­tack any­one who doubts his vi­sion.

Elon Musk is a hu­man bingo card of “Th­ings I Dis­like About the 21st Cen­tury.”

Musk’s feints and fibs are cat­a­loged in Edward Nie­der­meyer’s ex­cep­tional “Lu­di­crous: The Un­var­nished Story of Te­sla Mo­tors.” For car peo­ple, Nie­der­meyer’s book serves as a fair and well-re­ported look at Te­sla’s at­tempt to merge Sili­con Val­ley ar­ro­gance with au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try stan­dards.

“LUDICROUS: THE UNVARNISHED STORY OF TESLA MOTORS”

By Edward Niedermeyer

BenBella Books ($27.95)

The book will res­o­nate even more deeply with those who worry about the sym­bi­o­sis be­tween bom­bas­tic fig­ure­heads and their on­line fans. In this re­gard, “Lu­di­crous” is an es­sen­tial case study of how a brash vi­sion­ary can suck ev­ery last speck of ox­y­gen and ra­tio­nal­ism from an in­dus­try, so much so that it reads like a nec­es­sary com­pan­ion to Kevin Young’s ex­cel­lent “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Hum­bug, Pla­gia­rists, Pho­nies, Post-Facts and Fake News.”

Musk would be the hoaxer in ques­tion. His ini­tial goal at Te­sla Mo­tors was to man­u­fac­ture elec­tric ve­hi­cles. Nie­der­meyer opens with an over­view of the com­pany’s early strug­gles: Te­sla’s “turn­over was high, its man­u­fac­tur­ing qual­ity was poor and its in­creas­ingly im­plau­si­ble prom­ises were erod­ing its cred­i­bil­ity.”

It’s tell­ing that these is­sues are not what wor­ried Musk early on. He was less in­ter­ested in the in­dus­try’s tra­di­tional ‘zero-de­fect’ ap­proach and more in­ter­ested in … him­self. He com­plains in an email that “the por­trayal of my role to date has been in­cred­i­bly in­sult­ing.… We need to make a se­ri­ous ef­fort to cor­rect this per­cep­tion.”

The key word is “per­cep­tion.” Nie­der­meyer ex­plores how Musk, in the tra­di­tion of the Amer­i­can hoaxer, re­al­ized he was not in the car busi­ness but in the per­cep­tion busi­ness, where “his vi­sions for the fu­ture were his most mar­ket­able prod­uct.”

A good hoax re­quires a will­ing pub­lic, and for Musk, Te­sla’s in­fancy co­in­cided with a timely so­cial cli­mate. Nie­der­meyer sug­gests that the Oc­cupy Wall Street and Tea Party move­ments gave Musk the play­book for how to cap­i­tal­ize on the pub­lic’s dis­trust of in­sti­tu­tions in the wake of the fi­nan­cial cri­sis, and he soon adopted the at­ti­tude that he alone could solve the car in­dus­try. As part of his per­sona, he kept a sleep­ing bag at the Te­sla fac­tory; Nie­der­meyer is cor­rect to note that “any car com­pany that must rely on the phys­i­cal pres­ence of its CEO … is es­sen­tially ad­mit­ting that its cul­ture isn’t com­mit­ted to qual­ity.”

Some of Nie­der­meyer’s most riv­et­ing chap­ters con­cern how Te­sla coped with qual­ity is­sues, mainly via non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments that of­fered “good­will re­pairs” on cus­tom­ers’ bro­ken mod­els in ex­change for si­lence. Nie­der­meyer de­tails his frus­trat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence of re­port­ing on the agreements, prompting Te­sla to slan­der him in a com­pany blog post.

The ac­cu­sa­tions from the com­pany pale in com­par­i­son to those Nie­der­meyer re­ceives from Te­sla’s fans. I have spent sev­eral months read­ing his work on “The Drive” web­site and lis­ten­ing to his two mo­bil­ity-cen­tric pod­casts, “The Au­tono­cast” and “The Merge.” I can con­firm that if you pe­ruse the com­men­tary around a Nie­der­meyer com­mu­ni­que, you will find a highly mo­ti­vated fan base that seems more in­ter­ested in pro­tect­ing Te­sla’s stock val­u­a­tion than read­ing past the head­line on sto­ries about the many half-truths Te­sla has told about its en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact, its full self-driv­ing up­grade and other mat­ters.

To some, these strat­e­gies might seem like log­i­cal if ex­treme ex­ten­sions of proven busi­ness for­mu­las, i.e. Te­sla has built a strong brand with a loyal con­sumer base. A Te­sla owner would likely note that their Te­sla au­to­pi­lot sys­tem can “lane switch” on its own, which, at pres­ent, is more than Pitts­burgh’s lav­ishly funded au­ton­o­mous ve­hi­cle com­pa­nies can pro­vide con­sum­ers. Te­sla has abided by the Sili­con Val­ley par­lance first es­poused by Face­book founder Mark Zuck­er­berg: “Move fast and break things.” Per­haps the au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try was bro­ken and de­served to be sped past.

But the things Zuck­er­berg thinks he’s break­ing amount to Sony Walk­mans and cas­settes. The things that get bro­ken in the car busi­ness are bod­ies and skulls.

That’s the dan­ger­ous thing about hoax­ing: In or­der to re­tain the crowd’s at­ten­tion, the stakes have to mul­ti­ply. The old prom­ises won’t do. It’s why Te­sla’s full self-driv­ing up­grade is on the way, any mo­ment. It’s why the wall is go­ing to be big and beau­ti­ful, just you wait. The sub­text is of course: eyes on me.

Patrick McGinty teaches in the English depart­ment at Slip­pery Rock Univer­sity. He can be reached at Patrick.mc­ginty@sru.edu and on Twit­ter at @PatrickMMcGinty.

First Published October 15, 2019, 9:00pm