Jason Bermas and Jon Fitch Slander Elon

April 10th, 2022

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https://rokfin.com/stream/16720/Elon-Musk-Twitter-Free-Speech-Front

This interview is an embarrassment which will not age well.

07:45 Jon Fitch "he uses child slavery to help produce his cars"

TRUTH: Every year, Tesla releases an Impact Report. The sole purpose of this report is to combat this false narrative. Elon doesn't use child slavery to help produce his cars. The closest thing to this being true is that Lithium Ion batteries contain cobalt. In Congo, child labour is used to mine cobalt. Tesla makes every effort to avoid this conflict material. Tesla discloses publicly where they source their cobalt:

Furthermore, Tesla has taken tremendous strides in making their batteries cobalt-free. The LFP battery produced by CATL for example is cobalt-free. And for non-iron chemistries, Tesla is striving to replace cobalt with higher concentrations of nickel.

In order to do this, Elon has sent out a calling for nickel miners to mine more nickel “Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way,” Musk said on a post-earnings call on Wednesday. Does this sound like somebody who has a priority of using child labour to produce their products, or the opposite?

8:03 John Fitch "He's a controlled person"

TRUTH: There is no evidence to support this. SpaceX and Tesla have factories in Boca Chica Texas, Cape Canaveral Florida, Nevada, Palo Alto and Freemont California, Austin Texas, Grünheide Germany and Shanghai China. Who is controlling him? Completely unfounded conclusion based on no evidence at all.

8:17 Jason Bermas 600% increase in his wealth during co-vid.

TRUTH: A true statistic however, there is no evidence to support Elon Musk in any way benefitted from Covid. Tesla thrived despite covid challenges because of its extraordinary adaptability. When chips became a challenge, Tesla rewrote the software to support different chips. Things other car companies could not achieve. TSLA stock was pummeled in years prior due to Tesla not being a profitable company and media FUD attacks. In 2019 Tesla became profitable and launched a new massive factory in China. At which point the hedge funds flipped from short-selling Tesla to covering their shorts and going long. Elon fought the county of Alemeda to keep his factories open during the pandemic as GM and Ford were allowed to do. Covid provided absolutely no benefit to Tesla other than the talent Tesla had on hand was superior at adapting for the situation and the competition was not.

9:23 Jason Bermas on Elon founding Paypal.

TRUTH: Elon Musk was kicked out of Paypal despite being the largest shareholder. Elon and Peter Theil ran separate companies which merged. As the story goes, Elon wanted to use Microsoft and this presented scalability problems. His opposition wanted to use Linux and this was the primary reason for him being ejected. I am not going to defend Elon on this. I think that Elon has learned that Microsoft is inferior to Linux. Tesla vehicles run Linux. Elon is very pro-open source and very pro-Linux now.

Green Hills software is a pile of trash. Linux ftw.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2022

Crypto is a new form of currency. That doesn't automatically give it a success. Most cryptos will fail. Selecting the crypto you like, is like selecting a sports team you want to root for. After careful consideration, Elon has selected Doge as his favorite crypto. Tesla accepts Doge in exchange for products in the Tesla store. He publically backs this crypto and he pumps it. But does not dump it.

10:23 Jason Bermas "His main money is moving military cargo around the world in an hour".

TRUTH: SpaceX is 1/10 the size of Tesla. Elon owns over 20% of Tesla ~= $200B. Elon owns 50% of SpaceX ~= $50B. As the math works out, Elon's interest in SpaceX is worth 1/4 what Elon's interest in Tesla would be. As such, Elon's main money is made through Tesla, not SpaceX. In terms of SpaceX if Starlink has 200K terminals , the 200K terminals will provide a revenue stream about $20M/month. You can currently hitch a ride to launch a satellite with SpaceX for $1.1M.

Tesla has a net profit of $450M/month ($5.5B for 2021). In order for Elon's main money to come from military cargo, the military would need to pay SpaceX more than $450M/month to facilitate launch contracts. That is, SpaceX would need to secure 5 of these future military contracts/month to make the claim true that "His main money is moving military cargo around the world in an hour" to be true.

14:29 Jason Bermas "Bezos' grandfather was the initial director of DARPA."

RED HERRING: Elon and Jeff Bezos are not friends. They are rivals with competing space companies. There is also a non-zero chance that Tesla will succeed in creating full self driving and create humanoid robots which could more products from stores to households in a manner which is able to undercut Amazon.

18:20 Jason Bermas "He is goating out Putin without any provocation". Putin is invading the Ukraine and killing innocent people. Did you consider the possibility that this provokes Elon?

18:36 Jason Bermas google searches "musk satellites drone attacks".

TRUTH: The internet is a powerful tool with limitless capabilities. One such capability could be to communicate to drones. An internet provider is not held responsible for end-user usage of their system, just like Louisville Slugger isn't responsible for the deaths of people bludgeoned by their baseball bat.

Unless I am somehow mistaken, Russia invaded Ukraine and is killing innocent civilians. Ukraine is the victim and self-defending. If Elon Musk is providing Ukraine with tools to allow them to defend themselves better, that makes him a hero. Not a villain. Elon Musk simply sent satellite dishes to Ukraine. They provide an internet connection which is helpful because Russia has bombed Ukrains telecommunications systems. It doesn't make sense to be upset about. Being outraged that Ukraine uses a communication system in an attempt to have less of their innocent civilians murdered by taking out weapons that are killing their population doesn't seem appropriate. It makes you appear heartless Jason.

~27:00 New World Order

RED HERRING: This has nothing to do with Elon Musk. The "New World Order" Elon is working on is the world order on Mars. Such a world order is inhabitable by humans for the foreseeable future.

SpaceX launches DARPA contracts

TRUTH: If Tesla didn't do it, the ULA (United Launch Aliance) AKA Lockheed/Boeing will gladly do it for a higher $ to the tax payer.

35:46 [Call in] Elon has similar traits with Anti-christ because "people are attracted to that think will save the world".

TRUTH: People are attracted to Elon because he takes on the most difficult tasks and makes good progress. Settling Mars is not an easy thing to do. It is an ambitious mission that could be a stepping stone to how humanity plays out over the next 100,000 years. Elon thinks on a massive scale. Beyond Earth and beyond his lifetime, Elon is attempting to set up humanity to thrive.

37:00 Elon is a false profit for freedom.

TRUTH: Elon succeeded in developing rockets that can land. There is a common saying "I am no rocket scientist". Well, Elon actually is a rocket scientist. But not just a rocket scientist, he is the best rocket scientist the world has ever known. Even with billions of dollars at his disposal, SpaceX's proof of concept, and several years of development time Jeff Bezos has not been able to launch a rocket to orbit and bring it back and land it. The ULA (Lockheed/Boeing) have been around since 1926 and yet they were not able to make rockets land before SpaceX. This is an incredible achievement. People aren't looking at his as a profit. They are looking at him as a mentor. Elon has taught me many valuable lessons. First principles thinking, and that most engineers spend too much time building things that shouldn't exist. His aspiration to be the best and leave no room for improvement for the products he is involved with developing is obvious and inspirational.

Another TRUTH: Elon has more powerful adversaries than anybody else.

1. Lockheed and Boeing - aren't happy that SpaceX can land rockets and undercut them with better launch pricing.
2. Big Oil - doesn't like it that when Elon sells a car, $30,000 in gasoline does not get sold for that vehicle.
3. UAW - the corrupt organization that is trying to inject themselves as unnecessary middleware for Tesla employees. Also, the democratic party has been paid tens of millions of dollars over the last few decades by the UAW.
4. Big Auto - Unhappy with the transition to a new type of vehicle, Big Auto would prefer to maintain the status quo. Tesla wasn't supposed to succeed and legacy OEM auto companies were depending on their failure. But Tesla didn't only succeed, they made the internal combustion engine obsolete. This will play out as ICE sales collapse.
5. Car dealerships - It is outright illegal to sell a Tesla in 10 states. Tesla wants to sell directly to the customer, but many states have passed laws banning this from happening. This is an inherited issue that Tesla is faced with as these laws pre-existed Tesla. Nonetheless, it is difficult to run a car company when you can't legally sell cars. People travel from out of state and switch their licence plates just to get a Tesla.
6. Mainstream Media - You haven't seen an advertisement for Tesla because there aren't any. No magazines, no TV ads, no newspaper ads, no social media or online ads either. As such, MSM gives Elon's companies no favours and in fact often appear to bend to the will of their major advertisers (GM, Ford, VW, Toyota etc) to either knock Tesla or falsely praise other companies.
7. Comcast - Not only is NBC and other Comcast stations losing out of ad revenue, but Comcast itself is a major internet service provider that Starlink is encroaching on.
8. Short Sellers - when the company was not profitable, Tesla was hit hard with news story after news story after news story by short sellers trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future of Tesla.
9. Jeff Besos - A competitor in the space industry with his company Blue Origin, Jeff Besos is probably not happy about Elon's success and also this tweet
10. Vladimir Putin - On Feb 13, 2021 Elon invited Russia to an open discussion. It never happened. Just over Russia invades Ukraine. Some weeks after that on March 22, 2022, Elon challenges Vladimir Putin to "single combat"
11. Big Insurance - Tesla is taking on the insurance industry. Tesla is attempting to make cars uncrashable and insure these uncrashable vehicles at a competitive price. On top of that, Tesla vehicles have cameras that have been used to prove fault of countless accidents.

So the question is, if you aren't happy with the world, would you rather have the worlds best rocket scientist on your side, or not?

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jsturgis

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Software Developer always striving to be better. Learn from others' mistakes, learn by doing, fail fast, maximize productivity, and really think hard about good defaults. Computer developers have the power to add an entire infinite dimension with a single Int (or maybe BigInt). The least we can do with that power is be creative.

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