What Elon Musk Should Learn from the Thailand Cave Rescue
People have been trying to tell Elon Musk and Silicon Valley this for years now.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pedestrianobservations.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;13&#x2F;loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pedestrianobservations.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;13&#x2F;loopy-ideas-ar...</a><p>&quot;Musk’s real sin is not the elementary mistakes; it’s this lack of context. The lack of references comes from the same place, and so does the utter indifference to the unrealistically low costs. This turns it from a wrong idea that still has interesting contributions to make to a hackneyed proposal that should be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible.<p>I write this not to help bury Musk; I’m not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won’t check his numbers against anything.<p>There are two stories here. In the less interesting one, Musk is a modern-day streetcar conspiracy mogul: he has a car company, he hopes to make money off of it in the future and uses non-generally accepted accounting to claim he already does, and he constantly trash-talks high-speed rail, which competes with his product. Since he’s not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.<p>The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.&quot;