Just attack Elon Musk personally?
A couple of weeks back I had a bad leg, bad knee, which gave me a lot of time to sit, read, and watch interviews about Musk, dating back to the early 2000s.
Wi t h o u t a doubt, after reading through his life story, the guy is the sort of entrepreneurial genius who comes along maybe once every 100 years. Maybe 200.
Not only is he a business genius, but he's also a tech guru of the highest order, which is like rolling Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak into one — a marketing-and-tech combo conquering Silicon Valley, making him now the world’s richest man.
When Musk started SpaceX in 2002, the world’s best rocket engineers didn't want anything to do with the startup, and why hire the bad engineers, Musk asked in one interview.
So what did he do? He took over the lead slot as the chief rocket scientist on the fledgling SpaceX project.
By the time Musk was 31, he was already worth approximately $170 million, thanks to his development and sale of PayPal, and he had a bachelor's degree in physics and a bachelor's degree in economics from the U of Pennsylvania.
With money and brains, he started SpaceX and Tesla.
By the way, all of Musk’s detractors who now want to say that he made his money off government handouts, government contracts, they need to read more before talking, thus proving their idiocy.
When Musk and his brother started SpaceX using the millions he made from the sale of PayPal, they had enough money to build, test, and fire 3 rockets. No venture capitalists would give them any money until they proved themselves worthy, and developing, building a rocket that would actually work is a tad more demanding than building a new software app.
All three rockets failed. Elon and his brother, Kimbal, scraped just enough money together to launch one last rocket, the 4th. If that rocket had failed, SpaceX would have gone up in flames. Thankfully, the 4th rocket was a success, and as they say, it was just the start of many great things to come, which included a hefty contract from NASA.
Approximately 22 years later, SpaceX can now bring a launched booster rocket back to Earth vertically and land on it on a launchpad, using it for another mission, greatly reducing the time and money for another launch. Plus, it can rescue the astronauts now stranded on the International Space Station.
Musk and Politics
Unfortunately, last year, Elon Musk decided to get into politics because, according to him, he couldn't stand watching the country go to hell. He also thought Kamala Harris would ruin what was left of a country already approximately $36 trillion in debt.
Being inside the D.C. bubble, though, helping to create DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is costing Musk a lot, both personally and professionally.
According to the world’s richest man, he's getting more death threats than ever before. Like he says, just pile them up in a stack.
Meanwhile, the share price of Tesla has declined, mainly because a Biden supporter is more inclined to buy an electric vehicle than a MAGA supporter. The decline in the gas price, which is coming, will also work against the electric-driven Tesla, as will the elimination of tax credits for electric vehicles.
Still, the guy carries on uncovering government waste, fraud, and abuse, and he’s not getting paid for it.
Instead of thanking him, it seems as if the 75 million who voted for Kamala Harris want to tar and feather him.
“How dare you uncover government waste of my tax dollars.”
These are, by and large, the same people screaming at Trump and ICE: “How dare you take violent offenders off American streets who remain in this country illegally.”
Some people, even Republicans, argue that Musk and Trump are moving too fast, and DOGE should slow down when it comes to cutting government waste. That may be true, but then on the other hand, people are asking if they go slow, how long will it take to really cut out waste?
Or, as the U.S. senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, likes to call it, “Spending Porn.”
If we slow down the cost-cutting process, convene government meetings ad nauseum, congressional committees, will American taxpayers (approximately 50 percent of U.S. households) ever finally get to the very bottom of the money pit where we can exactly see how much waste, fraud, and abuse taxpayers have been subject to over the past four or five or six decades?
Doubtful. Some people, too, undoubtedly forget that our national debt is so big – approximately $36 trillion – or put another way, the interest on our debt is costing taxpayers $2.6 BILLION PER DAY. (Source: Congressional Budget Office.)
Seldom do I use all upper- case letters, but I thought that amount of money lost to taxpayers PER DAY was worth it.
So, while our feckless politicians and bureaucrats would sit around all day with their thumb up their backside, convening hearings that go nowhere, poof, in a day, there goes another $2.6 BILLION.
Gone. Down the sewer, the billions in interest payments sent to the people/ countries who buy up our national debt, including the Chinese Communist Party.
Makes sense. Also, let’s not forget that both political parties are responsible for this cluster.
It’s just that no one until this administration, like Trump/Musk or not, has done the hard work of uncovering the waste, fraud, mismanagement.
A peek behind the Wizard of Oz curtain, if you will.
Personal Attacks
The commonality between Musk and Trump are the ad hominem/personal attacks. Rarely, if ever, do the talking heads on the political talk shows, or Democrats supposedly in charge of representing their constituents, discuss the massive fraud being uncovered. For those interested, it’s easy to see what that fraud and waste actually are, line item by line item.
A simple online task anyone of us can do — go to DOGE.gov.
Pretty easy. In fact, let me do it right now and see where our tax dollars went to relatively recently: Here is a $3.5 million contract for “larval fish monitoring.”
Here’s another one, and this does indeed prove once again that truth is often stranger than fiction: A $1.7 million study to, wait for it, help China with its “China Health and Retirement Longitudinal study” at Peking University in Beijing.
Aren’t these the same people, the same communist party, that helped North Viet Nam kill 58,000 Americans before South Viet Nam fell?
Yep. How about this use of taxpayer dough, as listed at DOGE.gov: “$1.3M for transforming health for gender-diverse young adults.’” What does that even mean to anyone with a functioning brain?
Rather than help feed hungry families across the U.S., the National Institute of Health, under the previous administration, would rather send $160K for researching “racialized sexual discrimination” among “young sexual minority men of color.”
Ramp that taxpayer amount up to $241,0000, and our beloved bureaucrats in D.C. were set to spend that amount on this important line item: “An intervention to promote healthy relationships among transgender and gender expansive youth.” (Source: DOGE.gov.)
Until it was cancelled last month, American taxpayers were set to spend $74 million for “inclusive justice” in Colombia.
Instead, of getting wound up over this waste, outraged over the waste of our tax dollars, your tax dollars, too many people want to launch personal attacks against Musk and/or Trump.
In a sane world, people would criticize Trump’s policies, what his administration is doing. Instead, they want to launch personal attacks against the person.
Musk did this, and Trump didn’t do that, or vice versa.
Yes, but they’re uncovering massive fraud in government, mis-expenditure of American tax dollars. Shouldn’t that count for something?
I don’t get it. Then again, there is a lot these days that I don’t get.