The Shocking Stupidity of Elon Musk

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

On November 10th, Reuters headlined “At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk’s rush to Mars”, and reported that, “Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.”

They reported shocking cases of rampant psychopathic unconcern by Musk about the physical safety of his employees. For example: His employees “needed to transport foam insulation to the rocket company’s main hangar but had no straps to secure the cargo. LeBlanc, a relatively new employee, offered a solution to hold down the load: He sat on it. After the truck drove away, a gust blew LeBlanc and the insulation off the trailer, slamming him headfirst into the pavement. … He was pronounced dead from head trauma at the scene.”

Federal inspectors with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) later determined that SpaceX had failed to protect LeBlanc from a clear hazard, noting the gravity and severity of the violation. LeBlanc’s co-workers told OSHA that SpaceX had no convenient access to tie-downs and no process or oversight for handling such loads. SpaceX acknowledged the problems, and the agency instructed the company to make seven specific safety improvements, including more training and equipment, according to the inspection report. …

Current and former employees said such injuries reflect a chaotic workplace where often under-trained and overtired staff routinely skipped basic safety procedures as they raced to meet Musk’s aggressive deadlines for space missions. SpaceX, founded by Musk more than two decades ago, takes the stance that workers are responsible for protecting themselves, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, including a former senior executive.

Musk himself at times appeared cavalier about safety on visits to SpaceX sites: Four employees said he sometimes played with a novelty flamethrower and discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors.

The lax safety culture, more than a dozen current and former employees said, stems in part from Musk’s disdain for perceived bureaucracy and a belief inside SpaceX that it’s leading an urgent quest to create a refuge in space from a dying Earth.

“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” said Tom Moline, a former SpaceX senior avionics engineer who was among a group of employees fired after raising workplace complaints.

The very idea that a solution to the environmental deterioration that our species causes to our planet would consist of evacuating its billions of humans (currently around eight billion) to Mars, which has an average surface temperature of -60°C (-76F), and has an air “pressure less than one hundredth of the Earth’s, and that it is composed mainly of carbon dioxide with a little nitrogen and argon. There is almost no oxygen.” would be insane if it weren’t plain stupid. Mars is anything but the habitable planet our own planet is. After all, the creatures on Earth have come to be as we are because of our planet’s environment — adapting to these conditions over millennia. It produced us. We’d fast die on Mars. We didn’t develop there.

What would be the expense of relocating just one of these 8 billion humans to Mars? Would it be a billion dollars? Multiply whatever it is, by how many humans Musk’s Space X would relocate there. How many persons would those be? Would it even possibly be more than a million? That would be a mere one eight-thousandth of the human population. And is Musk thinking that none of the perhaps trillions of other creatures on Earth matter at all — it’s okay to simply ignore their needs (as well as to ignore the needs of all of the nearly 8 billion humans who won’t be making that journey)?

This is why Musk thinks it’s worth his employees “paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed”? Wow!

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.