These days Elon Musk as a person has become synonymous with innovation, STEM, and our fascination with traveling to Mars. This itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Elon Musk proves to people aspiring to professions in engineering that they too can be a cool, suave billionaire who gets to date weird artsy singers and appear in tabloid magazines, just like regular celebrities. This weekend was particularly eventful for Musk’s SpaceX company, in which they unveiled their new, reusable vehicle, Starship.
The 50-meter, 200-ton structure rose up against the Texas sky like a monolith dedicated to the beauty of human perseverance and scientific achievement. Originally envisioned to cost between 2 to 10 billion dollars, Musk now believes the cost to be closer 
to the 2 to 3 billion end of the spectrum. SpaceX’s mission is to bring the cost of space travel down to a measly 200,000$, rather than the 10$ billion in costs with today’s tech. The most striking thing for me personally is the exterior, which was decidedly made out of stainless steel, rather than carbon fiber. This decision came for the desire to make the rockets hardier and more reusable, in order to cut down on costs. Musk is quoted as saying “Becoming a space-faring civilization, being out there among the stars, is one of the things that makes me glad to be alive,” in response to his motivations for SpaceX.
On the other side of the country, Elon Musk’s persona did not shine so brightly as it did in Texas. An administrative law judge ruled that Tesla broke national labor laws when it went to extreme lengths to prevent workers from unionizing. The investigation into the Fremont, California factory found that Tesla had suppressed unionization by preventing employees from distributing leaflets in the factory parking lot, unfairly fired two employees, and interrogated employees about their association with union activities. This is of course enhanced by the knowledge that Tesla has notoriously poor working conditions. Ambulances have been called to the Fremont factory over 100 times since 2014. Jonathan Galescu, a production technician at Tesla describes how “I’ve seen people pass out, hit the floor like a pancake and smash their face open. They just send us to work around him while he’s still lying on the floor.”
Probably the funniest part about this is that the judge ruled that Musk’s own tweets broke the law when Musk implied that unionized workers would have to give up their company-paid stock options. (I don’t know why the tweet embedded like this but just ignore it)
This is even better if you know that Elon Musk has a twitter babysitter that makes sure his tweets don’t say anything offensive or incrimiating, which have both happened multiple times. Musk is actually on at least his second babysitter, as the first one wasn’t rigorous enough.
Maybe I’m obviously not the biggest Elon Musk fan but I gotta hand it to the guy, he makes me laugh.
WORKS CITED
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/tesla-violated-labor-laws-by-blocking-union-organizing-judge-rules.html
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-stricter-twitter-babysitter/
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/29/765526405/elon-musk-unveils-spacexs-new-starship-designed-to-fly-to-the-moon-mars-and-beyo
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/29/business/elon-musk-spacex-mars-starship-cost/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-workers-factory-conditions-elon-musk