I discovered things I liked about Elon Musk in the recent book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which transcends politics and other sentiments and strikes at the core of all human concerns.  As I read many books, I do not often get to read one like the Isaacson book, where we talk about a character who is essentially a real-life Thomas Edison.  But we’re not talking about him 100 years after his death, but in time, up to the moment.  And as is usual in books like that, there was a lot that I didn’t like.  I have a much different outlook on personal interactions than Elon Musk, and I would say that has caused him many problems, many things that cause him great turmoil. However, regarding manufacturing and productivity measures, I found that Elon Musk is a refreshing and essential character that reflects my core values.  And he’s great for American business.  There are things Americans have adopted from around the world that absolutely disgust me, especially regarding work ethic.  And if there is one reason that I hate, even despise globalism, it is because of its fundamental nature toward Marxism, which I want absolutely nothing to do with.  Elon Musk hates it with equal disdain, even if it took him most of his life to figure it out.  His work ethic was defined while building Tesla, and he has transitioned to SpaceX.  But after reading of his many toils in building those companies and confronting what I would call the vast evil of globalism, I have a lot of respect for him as a person I didn’t have before reading the book.  And it’s something that our government has committed great sins to promote and attach themselves to, and that is the concept of Cost Plus Contracts. 

The stigma was most noticeable for Elon Musk when President Biden invited EV car makers to a White House event but did not mention Tesla because Musk does not use unionized labor.  And everything about the government points companies they associate with toward cost-plus contracts, which is essentially the anti-business model that has been destroying the world.  The government has no care for reducing costs in anything they do because there is too much power in brokering access to more money for them to apply, which they then transfer to private businesses for the exact control mechanisms.  And that concept has rotted out the core of American capitalism in dangerous and horrendous ways, infecting every aspect of modern American business.  The shell game they play is that costs are always going to overrun, and when they do, you go back to Congress and get more money, or you print more money with Modern Monetary Theory and then apply the extra cash to labor contracts, inflated budgets, and lack of performance.  If something isn’t getting done, Cost-plus Contract entities always throw more money at the problem rather than actually solving the problem.  This is a common issue in most aviation companies, such as Boeing, which has been cultured into accepting a Cost Plus Contract existence for many decades, where essentially, they get paid not to innovate.  But they find themselves in the modern world under the pressures of great competition where Cost Plus Contracts are not the mode of operation for their competition.  And they are drowning in that level of competition presently, to disastrous effect, because they weren’t built for that level of global competition. 

That is essentially what Elon Musk has been facing with his largest companies, Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter.  For any company to work right, the first thing they must get under control is the concept employees have been taught by modern Marxists that costs must be managed, and that process never happens if the game is played to turn to government for perpetually more money. This is why I have always been against school levies for public schools; they are all Cost Plus Contracts by their very nature and purposely by those intending to game the system, such as labor unions.  Marxists wanting to crush the American way of life and productivity have advocated this nonsense to the detriment of our economy, and I take it very personally.  I have very strong opinions about this problem, and until I read that Elon Musk feels essentially the same way I do about it, I didn’t know many people who did.  This game of government subsidy, such as we see applied to farmers, is horrible, and it has undoubtedly destroyed the American work ethic.  In companies that are Cost Plus Contractors, there is never an incentive to do anything because they are paid to be failures, to work only to always ask for more money perpetually.  This is why NASA could essentially never get back to the moon.  And more innovations in aviation have not occurred over the last three or four decades.  All the great innovators are snuffed out of the system to make way for more Cost Plus Contract bureaucrats who are as worthless to payroll as a dirty toilet bowl in the local bathroom.  But because of the government’s attachment to perpetual funding, nobody does anything about it, no matter what work is performed, because they get paid to be failures. 

I would say that Tesla and SpaceX are successful because they fought the temptation to become Cost Plus Contract employers.  They are profitable in the old-fashioned way through productive output, cost controls, and delivery expectations.  But they are very much alone in the world of manufacturing these days.  However, it is good to see someone keeping the American spirit of productivity alive on a scale such as what Musk is functioning from.  People can say a lot about the many mistakes in his past and the downfalls of his lifestyle.  I have always liked Howard Hughes for the same reasons that I like Elon Musk.  I can deal with personality traits that many people find uncomfortable.  However, when a person has the kind of work ethic and productive output sensibilities that Musk has, forgiveness is deserved.  And I am thrilled to know to what extent Musk has fought against the connection of Cost Plus Contractors.  That may well be his most significant contribution to the human race.  To stand up against it and win.  Most companies in the world could be successful if they did as Musk has done at his companies and rejected the Cost Plus Contract model.  Of course, the government doesn’t want the manufacturing world to do such a thing because it takes control away from them.  All the colleges teach such a relationship, so most people are lost in dealing with such assumptions.  It’s undoubtedly one of my biggest concerns in the world and has been for a long time.  However, Musk, gaining the ability to bring his work ethic to mass manufacturing on a large scale, has done more to challenge the concept of Cost Plus Contractors than anybody else has currently.  I am thrilled, and my opinions about Elon Musk are much more respectful than I had previously expressed.  His political evolution may have been a moving target, but I like him more now than I would have ten years ago.  But his work ethic is something I greatly admire.  And it transcends political sentiment in every case for me. Additionally, I would say that anybody with a work ethic like Elon Musk was bound to share political opinions eventually.  As most logical people do once they step away from a Cost Plus Contractor’s view of the world. 

Rich Hoffman

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