A Washington Post reporter, Faiz Siddiqui’s portrait of Musk lists the world’s richest man’s misdemeanours. This fable begins with his initial attempt to rescue the boys stuck inside a cave in Thailand. Trying to be helpful, he goes there with his ill-suited mini-submarine before they realise it will not be able to negotiate the narrow underwater passage which leads to where the boys are stranded inside. Soon after, a suit is filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud. The alleged violation was to announce that a funding deal had been secured when it had not, artificially increasing the value of his stock. He swims into another lawsuit, filed over his pay, which he claims is estimated to be ‘250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation package’.

Siddiqui finds little redeeming about the man except when he says that Musk is ‘a man with little regard for the consequences of his actions, for the minor after effects one might describe as a fallout.’ Of course, frontline creations like the self-driving Tesla are often flawed, and this means that much of it has to do with technology; in getting his vehicles to be autonomous, a project that saw collateral damage in the deaths of drivers and a pedestrian after the autopilot failed to detect obstacles. The rhetoric shifts to: ‘cars do require active, constant, and attentive driver supervision,’ but that in no way makes them ‘self-driving’, or ‘not autonomous’

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