Elon Musk is concerned about climate change, and created Telsa to lead the migration to electric cars to help combat climate change. That seems like a positive impact to life on earth.
So maybe in the past he was concerned about climate change, but that appears to no longer be the case, or its further down on his list, below accumulating billions in wealth and amassing political power.
Lovely word "materially" there, doing a load of work. That way you can just say that subsidizing renewables, or battery manufacturing, or efficiency refits for housing isn't "material" and now you aren't a liar!
Well sure, I'm unhappy about every politician's efforts, they all need to be doing more. But I can also be more unhappy about the guy who denies it exists entirely, staffs his cabinet for more deniers, and does his incompetent best to roll back the very tiny gains we've managed to obtain.
Musk believed in the silly Peak Oil theory, and jumped in early at Tesla because he figured that Peak Oil would create a market for electric cars. Tesla itself has embraced climate change both because there are many employees there passionate about it and because it's good marketing for them.
Elon Musk did not found Tesla, and most definitely did not did it for environmental reasons.
"Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors." [1]
"If, I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be okay. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately.
[...]
"The risk is not as high as a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming." [2]
Thanks for the clarification about founding. But he joined as chair of the board when the company was less than 1 year old, and helped develop their first car.
>and most definitely did not did it for environmental reasons.
From that same link, he says one of the goals of Tesla is to make environmentalism cool:
> And so you get the solar power, mind that with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn't shine at night and then you use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long-term sustainable solution.
> And, you know, that's what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we've made a lot of progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, like we don't believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer.
> So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they're fast, they're, you know, sexy. I mean, they're cool.
