Tuesday, August 09, 2022

Musky

To be fair, I'm not sure it's his biggest boondoggle.
Not everyone has fallen for it. In June of 2018, Musk paraded through the streets of Chicago with former mayor Rahm Emanuel, celebrating an agreement for an 18-mile tunnel from the city’s Loop (that’s the neighborhood, not the Teslas in tunnels) to O’Hare Airport. The estimated cost was $1 billion (Musk was paying, of course), and tunneling would begin within a year. But in December 2018, a delegation of elected Chicago officials traveled to L.A. for the opening of the test tunnel at SpaceX headquarters. As promised, there was a party; Grimes was in attendance, and Gary the snail was there, too (although it was, in all likelihood, not the same Gary). Musk stood in the green glow of the tunnel opening like an extraterrestrial delivering bad news as he returned to Earth: The team had run out of time, he explained; there were no pods and no electric skates. Guests were given stomach-turning rides in Tesla Model Xs that topped out at around 40 mph through an unpaved 1.14-mile tunnel. The Chicago contingency was not impressed. “A little bumpy,” alderman Gilbert Villegas told the Chicago Tribune. “There has to be a lot more questions answered before we can begin a type of project like that.” Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa was even more cynical, telling The Verge, “If you look at Elon Musk’s career — he comes off as a grifter.” When Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor, she promptly killed the tunnel.
Rahm's an asshole and he's stupid.