Elon Musk and Using the Left's Outrage to Garner Publicity

Elon Musk is no stranger to controversy. The billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX has raised the ire of many over the past few years by speaking his mind more openly and freely than most other people of his caliber; and in doing so, he has drawn attention to his visionary projects that promise to change the world. 

Climate change, pollution, and the increased demand for energy are issues everyone has to deal with - but both the left and right go about it differently. While the right ignores these problems and responds to the energy shortage by opening more drilling sites, the left refuses to address increasing energy demands by closing pipelines. 

From making electric cars to sending people to Mars, Musk, who is apolitical, takes a distinctly right-wing approach to left-wing problems. Instead of burying his head in the sand to these issues, or supporting a Malthusian response to resource scarcity as environmentalists have proposed for decades, which calls for population control, Musk instead offers alternatives in dealing with resource scarcity. He promotes renewable energy and electric vehicles. His solution to the issue of overpopulation is to populate other planets and expand humanity’s reach towards the stars.

Musk’s greatest sin was refusing to buy into the pro-lockdown narrative, rejecting the politics of fear as nothing short of “fascist.” 

In the weeks after the lockdowns started to take their toll on regular everyday Americans, Musk spoke out in opposition to the very premise of these health orders. 

"I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights - that's my opinion,” said Musk in an investor call last April. 

“It’s breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country,” he said. “If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great, they should be allowed to stay in their house, they should not be compelled to leave, but to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist.” 

“This is not Democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom,” he said. 

These remarks, and others, were not well received on the pro-lockdown political left, which has embraced mask-wearing as a virtue signal and being forced to stay locked down as a shared identity. 

Despite Musk’s refusal to ally with either the Republicans or Democrats, the left view him as they do any conservative: if you’re not on the left, you might as well have a swastika tattooed on your forehead. 

Musk’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live reignited the left’s anger towards him. His support and use of cryptocurrency like Dogecoin is a massive concern among left-wing activists over the impact of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the environment. The eccentric billionaire used his appearance to promote Dogecoin as a pretext to his announcement that he was planning to launch a satellite to the moon fully funded by Doge.

If successful, the DOGE-1 mission will demonstrate the application of cryptocurrency beyond its earthly confines and become a foundation for interplanetary commerce well beyond the US dollar ever could. 

In an SNL skit where Musk appeared as an expert on cryptocurrency who explained it as a “hustle,” Musk made no small effort to promote Dogecoin to the show’s impressive 7.3 million live viewers. Reuters claimed that his description of Dogecoin as a “hustle” sent the token tumbling, but a closer look at the market shows that, as with anything else in the crypto game, people had simply bought on the rumor and sold on the news. The numbers were already going down even while Musk was delivering his monologue early on in the show. 

Musk may be able to move markets, but he’s also getting credit for market forces well beyond his control - and it works in his favor.

While Musk may have a large influence on those of us who care about technology, the economy, and so forth, Musk knew that he was catering to a largely mainstream audience -- and one indoctrinated by leftist views programmed to identify “White supremacist” dog whistles. The audience is made up of people who otherwise couldn’t care less about Musk’s ideas and innovations, and one way to draw their attention is by throwing them a bone that’s innocuous enough to be understood by others as a joke, or as a throwaway gesture as it has always been: the OK sign. 

In his appearance as the cryptocurrency expert, Musk flashed the OK sign with both hands. It was brief, but it was enough to provoke outrage on social media where he branded a white supremacist. There were even calls for his death. 

“Definitely never thought Saturday Night Live would send me into a tornado of existential despair. But here we are,” wrote one particularly irate verified user. “I almost don’t have words but I will say I hope his Tesla catches on fire and he dies.”

Musk followed up his SNL appearance with an announcement on Wednesday that his company, Tesla, would stop accepting Bitcoin out of concerns for the environment. 

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” wrote Musk. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment.” 

“Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy,” he added. “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use [less than one percent] of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.” 

While Musk might have temporarily tanked Bitcoin for the entertainment of it, as Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy claims, what’s more likely is that he intends to drive awareness for the energy usage linked to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and create an incentive to use cleaner energy - and to adopt sustainable alternatives.

It’s unlikely that Musk, who is without a doubt an expert cryptocurrency investor, would be so ignorant of its impacts on the environment prior to investing in it in the first place. Love it or hate it, Bitcoin was the first - and it was the only known name on the market. Thanks to Musk’s initial adoption of Bitcoin, he was able to draw the public’s attention to more environmentally friendly and sustainable alternatives to Bitcoin, such as Cardano (ADA), Stellar (XLM), NANO, EOSIO (EOS), and TRON (TRX).

And now that he has the public’s attention, he’s able to do exactly what he set out to do: adopt a sustainable cryptocurrency and shed the demanding shackles of Bitcoin. 

If anything, Musk is driving the adoption of renewable energy harder than ever before, and he has some of the technology to facilitate that. Musk’s Tesla is the leading producer of electric cars - so it should come as no surprise that he opposes obsolescent coal power and encourage the adoption of cleaner, greener energy. 

If cryptocurrency is going to power his technologies, then the public’s outrage powers his publicity - and Musk is cashing in on it. 

You can follow Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter @stillgray.