What ’s Going on With Elon Musk? How the Happy Billionaire Rocket Scientist Became a Cautionary Tale

It ought to be fun being Elon Musk. You get to build rockets. You get to build cars. You get to be really, really famous and — not for nothing — really, really rich. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it, and Musk has got it. But Elon Musk does not appear to be having any fun at all lately. That’s not just because of continued delays in the development of his Dragon spacecraft, which may not be ready to carry crews to the International Space Station until 2020, three years behind schedule. And it’s not just because of the two fatal accidents, in 2016 and 2018, involving people using the autonomous driving function in one of Musk’s Teslas. Those are setbacks — in the case of the Tesla deaths, tragic setbacks — that can be an unavoidable part of any big operation trying to do ambitious things. Musk’s problems lately are more about, well, Musk — a recent combativeness that has been coming in smackdowns and tweetstorms that threaten to turn the one-time wünderkind into just another media troll. The latest and easily most egregious case involves his growing feud with British diver Vern Unsworth, who played a key role in the recent rescue of twelve boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in Thailand. Shortly after the rescue efforts began, Musk stepped into the center of the surrounding media storm with offers to send drilling teams and a child-sized submarine to lend a hand in the work. That seemed to a lot of ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized psychology society Source Type: news