Tag: Tesla

Investing in the Future: A huge growth sector is coming

I have to spend some time on A.I. because it’s probably the most significant psychological crisis our civilization will face over the next several thousand years.  And my wife is right there with many of you.  We were at Kings Island with the grandkids, and a Tesla Cybertruck was parked next to me, and I loved it.  I think it’s the best car on the road today, and I’m probably going to get one in the not-too-distant future.  But most people think it’s ugly and disgusting, and they believe that for a lot of deeply psychological reasons.  Yet it reminds me of the Starship, which is one of my favorite things in the world right now. As we discussed our opinions on Cybertruck, Starship 11 had just successfully landed in the Indian Ocean on a spectacular mission, which I was very excited about.  And the main reason was that it was a big, complicated rocket, but humans didn’t operate any of it.  Everything was autonomous.  All that engineering innovation took off from Texas and landed autonomously at precise points on the other side of the world.  And much of that technology has made its way into the Cybertruck and its autonomous driving.  And I would like that automatic driving feature.  My lifestyle would greatly benefit from it.  I could get a lot done with all that commuting around, which usually requires physical driving.  Which many people aren’t ready to accept.  But I would encourage everyone to shift a gear and get with the program, because a lot of exciting stuff is coming.  And human beings will be getting a lot busier —not less so —because vast amounts of the economy will be unlocked, and humans will benefit, not find themselves replaced. 

And my wife and I were compelled to have this discussion, as I have been having it with many people lately about labor.  I’m a 24/7 guy, certainly not a Monday-through-Friday 8-hour-max person.  I hate driving around on a Saturday and seeing so many manufacturing facilities closed up for the day.  I want to see more 7-day-a-week operations everywhere to maximize economic output.  That doesn’t mean people need to do all that work.  But sandbagging potential revenue when there is work to be done because some human doesn’t want to do it, or is trying to stuff labor hours into a box of convenient assumptions, is not the wave of the future.  More work, more often, is the new standard.  And what all this technology I’m talking about leads to is the new market trend of Tesla Optimus robots, which are being built rapidly, and the Gen 3 designs have nearly full articulation in the hands.  They will be about half as fast as a human on labor-intensive tasks, but they will be able to do them around the clock without complaint, seven days a week.  While people are in church on Sunday, Optimus robots will still be able to perform work.  And that is exciting because that means that humans will be able to settle space without having to do all the dangerous work on Starship.  In a few short years, Starships will be able to fly into space every day, and there will be thousands of them.  And none of them will likely have human beings on them.  Optimus robots, Gen 3 and beyond, will be the first to Mars, and by the time humans arrive in those remote places, there will already be infrastructure in place, built by robots and A.I., to make the trip much safer and easier.

I have been very impressed with the Grok A.I. program developed by Elon Musk’s team at the X platform.  It has been a strange chain of events: Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a free-speech platform, which played a significant role in getting Trump’s message out so people could vote for him.  But more than anything, it has captured all the information people have put into it, building a very sophisticated A.I. program that I already think of as a kind of personal C-3PO from Star Wars.  It’s swift at research and at conversational communication.  And that development of A.I. will roll straight into making the Optimus robots much more human-like and effective right out of the box.  I think all this technology will help human beings, not hurt them.  It will be more of a Star Wars relationship than 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Terminator.  Going back to the Cybertruck, the kind of hatred it generates is a reminder that the future has arrived and people are not ready for it, with such a radical design change that completely alters the aesthetic of what transportation is supposed to do.  Not only does it look different, but it acts differently, and it is more of an A.I. companion than a car, and that really rattles people, including my wife.  She is not happy about these changes, but I think it’s funny.  Because she’s not alone, we’re rapidly redefining many things, and in just a few short years, we will be looking at a very different economy, with most of the growth happening in space. 

As I talk to market types, that’s what I’m saying to those who want to listen: the 24/7 day work week is the future, and the growth is in space.  Starship 11 showed that SpaceX can launch and land a reusable craft exactly where they want it, without fear of human error.  It’s all autonomous.  And that means that soon, A.I. will be able to take over air traffic control and coordinate all these vehicles with great precision, without ever having to stop for a coffee break.  So, human limits won’t hold the economy back; it will grow enormously by trillions of dollars.  However, all that money generated won’t be spent by the A.I. technology.  They will have no use of money, only the currency of energy.  Humans will have a lot more leisure time and will see vastly improved incomes for the time they do commit to the job.  Which is why I like Cybertruck —it respects my time and lets me do so much more in a 24-hour day.  Work will greatly expand, but leisure time for humans will become much more manageable.  Humans will go to Mars and the Moon.  But to colonize them, it will essentially be A.I. and Tesla robots that build the vast infrastructure and cities needed to make human visits much safer and more reliable.  Robots, not humans, will perform the dangerous work.  And there will be many thousands and thousands of robots, adding to our labor force by necessity.  And I think it’s all very exciting and significant.   But for many, like my wife, they are very skeptical and see all this new technology as a serious threat to their very life essence.  But that’s what’s coming.  That’s what I’m telling everyone is the future of aerospace.  There will be lots of opportunities for great adventure and vast work, and it all becomes possible and reasonably achievable with that last Starship launch that was nearly perfect.  Grok’s advancements, a very sophisticated A.I. program, are directly feeding the Optimus robot’s development.  And that all points back to the practical use of the new Cybertruck.  A glimpse of the future, today.  And it might be scary to a lot of people.  But it’s coming, ready or not.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why The World Needs Tesla Semis: There is just too much regulation in the trucking industry

It was unfortunate that Elon Musk went sideways with President Trump, because there are enough problems in the world without something like a minor scuffle to derail what are otherwise fantastic opportunities.  Inflation is down, as predicted, and the economy is expected to boom.  And a lot of the debt we are currently incurring will easily be paid off with growth, if you can keep foreign and domestic terrorists from shutting the world down again with another COVID-type bioweapon.  The relationship Elon Musk has had with the White House has been positive so far in 2025, and there are many people who would like to see that optimism end.  And because of Elon Musk’s embrace of the MAGA movement and the great work he did with DOGE, I have been planning to get a Cybertruck.  I think it’s the best vehicle in the world being made right now.  I don’t mind that it’s electric.  I like traditional fossil fuel vehicles, but the power that these electric engines produce is an excellent example of fantastic engineering, so I am very interested in all Tesla products.  And I want them to continue to grow in market share.  But when Elon Musk got upset and supported an impeachment of President Trump, I dropped those plans for a Cybertruck faster than a New York second.  If Musk isn’t supporting MAGA, I’m not supporting Musk.  I might like him.  I might cheer him on as an innovator.  But I’m also not going to go out of my way to buy a Tesla if I can’t believe in the creator himself.  I only looked at Tesla vehicles because of Musk’s embrace of President Trump.  So we’ll see if any reconciliation lasts, or if it’s just a matter of personal survival.  Always judge people not by what they say, but by what they do.

But speaking of Elon Musk, self-driving vehicles, especially the Tesla semi trucks, and MAGA, there is a lot of fear that the self-driving aspect of these modern vehicles is just another way to steal jobs away from Americans.  But I don’t see it that way at all.  I’ve pointed out before that electric semi-trucks don’t have the range to replace full-time, diesel over-the-road trucks.  The concern is that self-driving trucks will replace the jobs of professional truck drivers.  However, I believe it will only benefit them, as the transportation industry is overly regulated. Therefore, when asked, “Why the Tesla semi?” the answer is a solution to overregulation that makes being a truck driver a challenging occupation. And that if you could change the nature of the over-road part of it, then we might find more drivers who would want to enter that field.  The problem with shipping products from the West Coast to the East, for instance, is that drivers are forced to be on the road too long.   They have to stop every 11 hours within a 14-hour on-duty window after 10 consecutive hours off, and all of this has to be recorded in a logbook. It’s just a pain in the neck for the driver.  It forces them to be on the road longer and away from their families needlessly.  The regulators will say that it prevents accidents from driver fatigue.  I know a lot of truck drivers, I’ve dealt with thousands of them over the years and for them there is nothing worse than driving all across the country with all the regulations involved only to get to their destination and have to sit in the parking lot waiting for a manufacturing plant to open, to unload them, further wasting their time.  Transportation times across the country are ridiculously long due to excessive regulations and a lackadaisical approach to labor hours in manufacturing these days. 

Where the Tesla semi trucks come in is that they can drive automatically across the boring states, such as Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, and drop their loads off at designated drop lots outside major cities.  And from there, a live driver can get up and work an 8-hour day picking up that trailer and taking it the rest of the way to the destination.  I think it would create more truck driving jobs to use the self-driving trucks to haul loads over the vast distances where there isn’t much traffic.  Self-driving trucks could operate outside of that 11-hour window, significantly reducing delivery times and making the live driver’s time much more productive.  However, to impose all those restrictions on a live driver and force them to stay on the road for over a week due to regulatory burdens is unreasonable.  It is no wonder, then, that there is a shortage of drivers.  It’s fun to be on the road for short spurts, but day after day, year after year, it wears out families and makes life challenging.  We should be making the profession easier, not harder.  The Tesla semi would work well with a drop lot system, which would make more commerce available by removing the capacity ceiling.  With capacity being determined by the regulatory burdens.  The safest thing to do to a truck driver is to keep them from driving.  However, we want drivers to drive more and haul more product from one place to another, and that limit should not be confined to human driving hours. 

One of the most attractive aspects of Tesla vehicles to me is that they are self-driving.  I enjoy driving cars probably more than most people.  But I can think of a million things to do with my time than driving when I am just trying to get from one place to another.  And I could use that extra half hour in those drives around town to do other things if the car is driving itself.  I could improve my efficiency significantly if the car drove itself.  And I see that being the significant benefit to the Tesla line of products.  They enhance time management, which will undoubtedly benefit the trucking industry.  I always feel sorry for truck drivers at rest stops, forced to wait out their 11-hour driving window when they are still 2,000 miles from home, heading in the opposite direction.  If I were them, I’d want to drive for 16 hours straight and cut down my time on the road, so I could either spend more time with my family or have the opportunity to make more money with additional routes. However, as things stand, a significant amount of trucking capacity remains underutilized due to drivers being constrained by excessive regulation.  The Tesla Semi would help make those long routes much more manageable, making it more achievable to give drivers a regular 8-hour workday and the ability to get home to their families each night.  And to let the Tesla Semi handle the long over-the-road hauls, driving way past the 11-hour maximum.  I see an expansion of the trucking industry, making it more attractive for human drivers to become truck drivers, as the automated Tesla semis could handle the heavy lifting that is currently discouraging market entry.  And that part of making America Great Again is in making truck driving great, maybe for the first time.  Tesla’s innovation in self-driving vehicles can give human beings a great gift, greatly expanding economic opportunities in the future.  And that has more value than money, most of the time.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

It Takes “Big Balls” to Reform Government Efficiency: To have a job, high performance matters

To answer a question that has come up recently from government workers shocked by the DOGE exploits of a 19-year-old young man who is known as “Big Balls,” this debate is already too late to have.  The wasteful practices of the federal government and all the massive amounts of terminations that need to be made to make government much smaller and to push those workers into the growing private sector employment will not be fought in the courts, as many hope.  It will be fought in public relations.  For instance, the poor-performing government workers at USAID will not be able to hide behind polite society and continue to underperform for the American taxpayer without exposure any longer.  I’ve been warning about this day for decades, and here it is.  Everyone was told, and they chose not to listen.  So, don’t be surprised when some wiz kid that Elon Musk hired right out of high school can come in and eliminate many government jobs with the push of a button on a laptop.  Nobody in the world is better at finding overachieving engagement from employees than Elon Musk right now; he has been very successful at finding those types of people at Tesla, SpaceX, and just about everything else he has touched.  And, of course, we see the same practices from people like this: Edward Coristine, the young man who has the world melting down as he calls himself “Big Balls.”  Well, it takes a lot of guts to step into a very corrosive work culture with the power of government behind it and tell them all that they are worthless and that they need to go.  They have been underperforming, and in the case of USAID, the Pentagon, and many other places that DOGE will be analyzing for President Trump, if you want to be great as a nation or at anything, you can’t accept underperformance.  There must be standards that define winning, and employees must meet or exceed those standards.  But coming up short was never going to be acceptable.

I’m not surprised that Musk has hired many bright-eyed young people to perform these analysis jobs, such as in the case of Edward Coristine.  I know many young people like this “Big Balls” kid.  They remind me of the old hot rod culture we used to have in America, where kids coming of age to drive could get their hands on an old car and hot rod it up so they could race on the weekends.  That kind of car culture has been taken away from kids so they have turned to computer coding.  Getting computers to do things better and faster than stock options right out of the store is what many kids like Big Balls spend all their time thinking about.  Elon Musk has given those kinds of kids homes in his companies.  They can take their passion and put it to good use right out of high school.  So, they end up with a pure view of the world that makes things easy to see.  Edward Coristine has an advantage as a young person who has not yet learned to fail.  Many people who have failed a lot in life seek a government job to hide those failures even from themselves, and they hope all their lives that nobody notices.  So, government employment has become a joke over time, and nobody feels confident in criticizing it because the power of the government might crush them for doing so.  I’ve been through all that myself, where I have been very critical of the government and have seen its wrath firsthand.  Not that it did them any good.  But I can see why Musk has people like Big Balls on his team.  It takes a person who has not lived long enough to accept failure sometimes and the ambition to change the world without learning to hold back so as not to hurt other people’s feelings to walk into a roomful of government employees and tell them they are all worthless and could be removed immediately and all their jobs could be done in the corner of the room with one guy and a second-hand laptop.  It takes Big Balls to be that honest.

I have received a lot of hate mail these last few weeks, much more than usual, which is usually quite a lot.  But the hate comes in the form of an almost mirror mirror on the wall complex where they are trying to convince themselves of their point more than me.  They think government jobs are protected and the courts will protect them from the realities of performance measures, a standard labor union fantasy.  Through mass collectivism, they can be insulated from the rigors of reality.  But of course, I say to them, generally politely, that these fights won’t be conducted in the corrupt courts, but in the realm of public opinion.  The next time we get to a government shutdown, for instance, and Congress has to vote for more appropriations, how are they going to do that when it is a PR nightmare now that people know how useless a lot of these government workers are?  They aren’t worth the money wasted on them, and the fear of continued services lost because those employees aren’t there will be removed. 

The low-engagement people will lose whenever you have a high-engagement culture fighting against a low-engagement culture.  You can’t fight against people who work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day because they love their job with people who barely work 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, even if they still report to the office, which many of them have been working from home.  Those low-engagement people will get slaughtered in the process, which DOGE brings to the table.  Not just in the one young man, Big Balls, but in many like him.  And behind him is a vast army of like-minded people who don’t want some stuffy adult government worker culture holding back their future from them.  They have more than a few reasons to be angry about how they approach their job of performance revolution.  If people are going to be in a government job, we always expect performance.  Not to hide behind some social constructs like a worthless college degree in basket weaving so that they could get into one of these government union jobs and sit on their butts for the next thirty years until they retire with a ridiculous benefits package for essentially doing nothing that whole time.  Those days are over and have been for many years.  But it’s catching up now because it took people like Big Balls to expose how useless those government workers were.  They need to be removed from that comfortable, expensive position and put into the private sector, where they must compete for a job every day.  And if they fail there, it is because in competition, they didn’t make the team.  If you want a great country and economy, you have to make it so that the people doing the work are the best.  And those who don’t work so hard are not just sitting around milking the system from the taxpayers who worked so hard to provide the funds.  Regarding Big Balls and the kind of people Elon Musk typically surrounds himself with, they are not losers who have learned from society to lose.  They are rebelling against that premise, which I think is fantastic.  This is why I have been a fan of Musk for a long time.  And I love what he is doing with DOGE.  We don’t want losers doing these government jobs; we want winners.  And the best way to do that is to put people in place to analyze these jobs who have not yet learned to lose.  Big Balls has yet to learn how to lose, much to his credit.  And we need in the world a lot more people like him.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Tariff’s on Mexico, Canada, and China: Stopping the looting of Marxist countries and their unearned merit

Let’s do some basic math to understand the genius of Trump’s economic proposals of using tariffs to replace internal taxation, and to put the wealth that America generates back to the people who make it, not the leeching socialists, communists, and Marxists who have been living off America for over a century with unearned merit.  President Trump is talking about getting rid of the ridiculous Jekyll Island progressive income tax system that was devised in 1913, which generates around 2.4 trillion dollars a year.  The new proposed tariffs for Mexico and Canada are around 25% to deal with a trade deficit of around 200 billion dollars for each country.  DOGE is discussing cutting around one trillion dollars from the budget, which I think is a very conservative start.  There is much more to get, but it’s a good beginning.   And with China, Trump is imposing a 10% tariff on top of an already maintained limit of roughly 10.1%.  So there is a long way to go to get all these countries up and over 20%.  And we haven’t even started talking about Europe, specifically the EU, and the lack of support they all have poured into NATO, which we have almost funded at 100%.  Socialist economists, just about everyone coming out of the university system, can’t get their minds around this.  But essentially, enough money would be generated to take America back to wealth levels before the creation of the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service.  Enough money will be generated to create an External Revenue Service, allowing us to eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with better revenue generators. 

The problem with Jekyll Island was that it was created by very wealthy people who were globalists in their assumption about where the world was headed, and it essentially planned to use the United States to fund a one-world government off the backs of Americans.  And even if America were left a carcass in the end, it would be, from the socialist point of view, for the greater good.  And that’s where we find ourselves today.  Only, they never planned for Americans to ever put someone like President Trump in office with a promised platform to undo it all.   I think the Jekyll Island participants were trying to do what they thought was right when they came up with the Federal Reserve and the Progressive Income Tax system.  But most murderers could also justify their crimes in the same way.  It sounded like a good idea then, but upon reflection, over a century later, it was a disaster.  And we’re tired of it.  What Trump is talking about doing is brilliant and well-needed.  It will be earth-shattering for the world.  It will cause some short-term disruptions in the supply chain and profit margins.  It will drive up prices a bit, but that’s OK.  There are a lot of costs that will snap into shape quickly, and people will be pleased with the result.  We have needed as a nation to cut ties with all these socialist and communist countries who, by design, were set up to loot and pillage American capitalism to choke it off and destroy it and call it good, friendly international relations. 

Watching Justin Trudeau speaking from Canada about the pending tariffs was quite a spectacle.  That Canadians would cry over tariffs from America, which would undoubtedly be painful for them, indicates how out of touch they have always been.  They have existed off the good work that America has produced, which has allowed them to spread Marxism to every corner of the planet while not paying the price for too much-centralized government.  In many ways, Mexico has enjoyed the same liberties, which is why the country is run essentially by drug cartels.  Their trade imbalance with the United States has allowed them to make bad economic decisions because if they stumbled and fell, it was the United States that always picked them back up.  It is through the theft and looting that China has gained superpower status from emerging as essentially a third-world backwater armpit of a country, as it was during World War II and would have easily been conquered by Japan if America had not intervened.  The same people who put together the plan for Jekyll Island are the same type of investors who propped up China to become a world power of dominant communism and the global, centralized government model.  And these efforts are over a century old, but they didn’t just start there.  They emerged with the Marxist movement as soon as transportation allowed for easy travel and communication from country to country.  Globalism planned to loot off the success of America, steal American wealth, and redistribute it through centralized government to every corner of the world.  That is the hard fact of centralized banking and their intentions at Jekyll Island.  It was an early form of predatory lending to destroy the host for some lofty investment in social construct.  China didn’t earn its wealth; it was created by the very same global investors who purposely tried to destroy America without firing a single shot in a military campaign.  And President Trump is doing as he promised he would upon re-election; he’s stopping the carnage. 

America’s best years were around 1870 to 1913.  After that Jekyll Island mess, everything started going downhill from there.  And it is back to those policies that President Trump is proposing to return.  This is the period of western expansion, gold coming out of the west, railroads, and great optimism.  It’s why progressives want us to think of that period as an imposition on the American Indian.  At that time, boatloads of Marxists were stepping off ships in New York from Europe and trying to convince everyone what a brilliant idea Karl Marx had.  Because Americans were personally wealthy, compared to other places in the world, they could afford to listen, and the poison was injected into our political system, which has stayed there for more than a century now.  However, President Trump is finally starting to remove that poisoning from our political and economic systems.  And it will happen quickly because the value of what is made in the world primarily comes from America—and consumed.  So goes America, so goes the world.  It might take a minute to untangle the mess given to us.  However, Trump’s tariffs are the first step toward a much more excellent economic recovery package.  Not one that looks at the 80s and wants to replicate Ronald Reagan.  However, one that steps back to the 1870s, the period of Reconstruction, where more people of all places and colors could elevate their lives through personal wealth than had occurred at any point in history.  The economy Trump is proposing to build and do it quickly will be the greatest that history has ever seen anywhere in the world at any time.  But best of all, these countries getting tariffs to cover trade imbalances are all losers who have adopted Karl Marx’s thoughts about economic development.  America is turning away from that garbage, and it will force those other countries to do the same, or they won’t be able to compete.  They have avoided that fate up until now because America funded their communist fantasies.  But with Trump’s moves, that isn’t happening anymore.  And that is great news ahead of an exciting future.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: His high score on the video game Diablo

I could tell Elon Musk was expanding his intellect as much as a few years ago, and I covered it as I witnessed it.  It was in the kind of books that he was reading, and because of that, I’m not surprised by his support of President Trump.  The only way you can remain a Democrat with Marxist foundations is through ignorance.  When you start learning things, you can’t support dumb politics.  While Elon Musk has always been intelligent and very successful, his political positions are more a result of knowledge than of upbringing or regional considerations.  For him, the realities of running his businesses have driven him to learn more to survive and, ultimately, provide him with a political point of view that facilitates productivity.  Having compassion for other people is one thing.  Destroying the world over compassion is quite another, and I could tell that as Elon Musk dealt with the realities of politics through his businesses, especially the Department of Labor trying to push him to unionize his Tesla plants, he was heading toward more small government than an imposing, all-powerful government that could take everything you own, and sit on FAA permits because you weren’t supporting their political party to stay in power.  For that matter, President Trump also went through the same kind of conversion throughout his life.  That doesn’t make all these people suddenly conservative the way I would be.  I grew up in a conservative area around a lot of conservative people, so I started that way.  As I learned more in life, my roots in conservative thought deepened.  But logic dictates that we all get to the same place once we figure out how the world works and the people in it strive to live in it. 

So, with all that said, people wonder why Elon Musk is so successful and why those who work for him are so engaged.  Now, I talk to many people at a consulting level.  If people listen to me, they are successful.  If they don’t, then they fail.  There isn’t any muddy middle.  There is no consensus on where everyone gets a participation trophy; success is a very rigid standard, and I always get asked about it by compelling people worldwide.   My joint statement toward any successful enterprise is that engagement is the most important and challenging thing to manage in a business.  You can see it in sports when two NFL teams play football.  Usually when one team wins over another given that all the players are the same essentially, they all weigh the same, they are all just as tall and have talented players at all the positions.  The element that determines winners from losers is the coaching staff and their ability to get good engagement from their players.  Labor unions tend to be unproductive because people aren’t motivated to engage in the business through collective bargaining.  They are always fighting the company management they work for to do as little as possible and still get paid wages at a highly engaged value.  Getting people engaged in a project or company is elusive, and the easiest thing that most management turns to is wages, hoping that people will be motivated to make more money and that they might work harder as a result of how much they are paid.  But of course, as I always say, money is not a good motivator.  Throwing money at people does not get people to be more engaged; most of the time, it lowers it as more money often destroys the things that make a person good and strive to be better.  Once a person stops striving for goals in their life, they tend to be less engaged in the things they do, from raising children to buying a new car. 

I thought it was interesting that Elon Musk during the middle of October 2024 had launched new Tesla products, the Tesla Bot and the Tesla Taxi, then a few days later launched with SpaceX, the first Super Heavy Booster into space carrying a Starship, then landed it back at Boca Chica right on target to be captured by the giant chopsticks, to be reloaded with fuel and to launch again.  It was a remarkable feat of engineering by thousands of people, and Elon Musk had created the culture that performed it.  But Musk wasn’t done.  The next day, SpaceX used a Falcon Heavy to launch the Europa Clipper, which is going to Jupiter to study a moon there, and it came off without a hitch.  That launch alone a few years ago would have resulted from a decade of work at NASA.  But after all that, do you know what Elon Musk was most proud of?  He leveled up in the Diablo video game, which he does quite a lot playing video games.  With all his success, he lives in a little shack at Boca Chica, runs around in t-shirts, and plays video games with his co-workers.  He’s one of the wealthiest people in the world, if not the richest, and he has no pretense of measuring success the way we traditionally do, with great wealth hanging from him in a social context.  And he cares about his high score in a popular video game. 

What is expected at Elon Musk companies, and I know this personally, is that he recruits and retains highly engaged people. Business schools have yet to unlock this mystery because everyone learns the same wrong things.  Elon Musk does a lot that goes well beyond Lean Manufacturing techniques, and no consulting firms in the world have yet figured it out.  But I’ll tell everyone here for free because I like you.  The secret to Elon Musk’s success is that he does not, as a management culture, rob his employees of their emotional investment in their work.  By providing a job, they have a means to make a living.  But he does not impose himself on their work and instead removes barriers to success.  Not success measured in monetary value.  Once people can pay for their lives, families, homes, and social engagements, they want to do work they feel good about.  Elon Musk gives them jobs in which they can invest to create high-engagement cultures.  Cultures where people want to work and express themselves through good work.  If you watch employees at SpaceX, you see them highly engaged at all hours of the day, 7 days a week.  Because they like their work, and it shows in what they do. Most companies miss these traits altogether because engagement is challenging to measure.  But once it is unlocked, the results are apparent.  Elon Musk showed how he gets high engagement by not being pretentious at so much success, especially after a week where he started it on stage with President Trump at that now famous rally at Butler, Pennsylvania.  Musk was equally impressed with his high score on Diablo; people see that in him and can relate to him.  When an owner or job provider does not rob people of the value of their work through social conditions that impose a static order upon them, people will then invest in themselves into a project because they want to, for all the same reasons that people play video games with no monetary compensation provided, at all.  People do things because they feel good doing them.  The world is far better off for a business or capitalist enterprise when people are engaged in their jobs because the products produced reflect that engagement.  And when people are allowed to invest in themselves and not be robbed by some cultural stigma, success always follows.   And winning becomes expected, not just some fantasy folklore from some island that time forgot.  But it is available to all who dare to tap into its vast secrets and opportunities for the curious and hardworking.

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk and President Trump: Coming over to the right way of thinking

If I were recruiting people in my life who only thought just like me, I would never speak with anybody.  So, I am always open to giving someone a chance to get it right and to come around to the right way of thinking.  Not all people come to the right way of thinking the same, but in a competitive exchange of ideas, some things are revealed that are universal truths.  So, I am always open to people discovering those truths, even if they come from a background where their thinking has steered them down the wrong path.  And that is the case with President Trump.  I wouldn’t have cared to speak one word to him twenty years ago during the height of his Apprentice show on NBC.  Unevolved playboys never interested me.  But people who make fortunes and then want to do good things with those fortunes do.  And that is the trajectory of Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people, trading back and forth with Jeff Bezos for that title.  But without question, Elon Musk is one of the biggest influencers on planet Earth.  There have always been aspects of his character that I have liked, particularly the kind of guy who would appear on the television show Rick and Morty and be associated with the Babylon Bee podcast.  However, I was not interested in the guy who loved Barack Obama and the idea of climate change and globalism—and managing supply chains in China.  However, I noticed a change in Musk’s political interests about a year into Biden’s first term.  I wouldn’t say I liked how stand-offish Musk was toward Trump during his first term, so I had a lot of questions about Trump and Musk’s relationship, which was put into context in the recent book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. 

It’s exciting to see in that book that the author, Walter Isaacson, was uncomfortable with Musk’s relationship with President Trump over the time he covered him.  This book project is a Simon and Schuster New York thing, and they are all part of the Trump-hating group who find the concept of the President as revolting because it’s a serious disruption to their plans for global communism China style.  So, Walter would look for ways to demean Trump in the text, even though Elon Musk has been moving toward Trump over the last several years.  A couple of things happened to Musk by Biden’s administration that set things in motion for which Musk and many others took for granted in the pre-Covid world of Trump successes.  The biggest thing is that Biden had a big event at the White House to celebrate the EV car market, and there simply isn’t any bigger name in the business than Tesla.  So Musk should have been the feature guy.  But Biden made it all about union labor, and Tesla isn’t unionized and has no plans to become so.  So Tesla was cast out of the White House spotlight, which, from then on, changed Musk politically, and he took a hard turn toward defending free speech and conducting a less rules-based society centrally run by big government bureaucracies.  The Elon Musk of the last three years or so is not the same political Elon Musk from the Obama period going into Trump’s administration, and that is consistent with my observations and what I have said about Musk’s political transition.  Like I said, I don’t hold people to previous assumptions.  As people learn things about the way the world works, I expect people to come around toward a big tent party, so it does not surprise me that Musk is now supporting Republicans rather than Democrats, which many of Musk’s friends find apocalyptic, best expressed in that book by Larry David who thought Musk was casting off a responsibility toward Democrats that he played a central role in.

As I have said for years, there is no way to become a human civilization going to space under a communist flag with mixed societies of socialism as part of the process.  The more capitalist space endeavors are, the more successful they will become.  And that is certainly the case with what Musk wants to do with SpaceX and the Starship program.  Math is math; the more accessible society is, the more opportunities there are for the human race to get into space and still support a positive culture on Earth.  The more socialism and communism there are politically in those systems, the more failure is introduced into all the assumptions. And now that everyone has seen what kind of world a third term of Obama looks like, through the inserted President Biden, people have decided that China-style communism is not their thing.  And people like Musk have moved toward the direction of a big tent version of the Republican Party that is fighting for personal freedoms, starting with free speech.  Musk had been supporting softer versions of Republicans like Ron DeSantis, and as I have pointed out, I have been on presentations online where Musk participated in conversations with Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance.  So Musk has indeed transitioned into a supportive Republican understanding that America will not survive if the global communists get their way.  Now that the game plan is relatively straightforward, these intentions are no longer a “conspiracy theory.”

There was a part of the Elon Musk book where Walter was disturbed by Musk’s father, a Trump supporter who would send messages to his son indicating that Biden didn’t win the last election, which was stolen from Trump.  Walter writes about all this as if Musk’s father, Errol, was “one of those people,” a conspiracy theorist with one foot into insanity.  The emphasis on the many mistakes Errol had made in his life was something that Walter wanted to make prominent, such as having children with his stepdaughter and Elon Musk and his brother being so upset that they refused to have continued relationships with their father.  But there is more to the story; intelligent people can’t ignore the evidence.  You can’t have corrupted software in society and expect everything to run right. The obvious problems with COVID and the 2020 election converted Musk to a less authoritarian government in America. He is now deeply committed to that pursuit, starting with the purchase of Twitter.  However, the definitions of success are the same, even if the means of getting there are varied.  And when people like President Trump are willing to put everything on the line to preserve our culture, and Elon Musk is signing up to be on your side of things, you open the door and let them in.  You open the door for them wisely, not linger on their past mistakes.  Be happy they have seen the light and are now on your team.  Logic dictates that people will discover the truth if only they can access it.  But it’s what happens after they find out it that matters most, and Elon Musk is now a tremendous advocate for a more capitalist society led by the United States and companies that are distinctly American, like Tesla and SpaceX.  And now, with Twitter being converted to Musk’s “X,” there are many opportunities for greatness that weren’t present before.  But they are now, which will impact the growth of the human race in the months and years to come.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Danger of Cost Plus Contractor Mentality: Elon Musk and his fantastic views on work ethic

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. 

Cost plus contractors have had it all wrong, all along

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

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Communist Left is in a Panic Because Trump Doubled His Wealth: Why capitalism always beats communism

In the rock, paper, scissors game of life, capitalism beats communism 100% of the time.  It doesn’t matter that the world has been taught communism in their universities, public schools, and government centers of inefficiency.  When in direct competition with capitalist elements of any society, communism always loses.  So, as we prepare to become a space-fairing species as if we ever stopped being one, capitalism should be at the center of every culture that participates.  And there was never a more obvious example of this than in the battle to destroy President Trump by the SWAMP gas of the communist left of the Washington D.C. beltway culture.  They planned to bankrupt Trump with a bunch of corrupt courts and leftist judges and keep him from being able to run for President of the United States by the fall of 2024.  In the minds of the “left,” the political affiliates of Karl Marx, Trump would be serving 700 years in jail, have all his vast assets confiscated by the state, and his family would be broke and begging on the street.  That was their American-hating fantasy.  But what ended up happening was that President Trump, to defend his right to free speech, started Truth Social, and his total wealth value doubled to a present level of over 6 billion dollars. This infused Trump with more cash to fight all these Marxist criminal cases and took the air completely out of the plans of his political enemies, who are also our political enemies, and they are pretty desperate now.  They bet everything on this plan, and now it’s falling apart in front of their faces, as I said all along that it would.  Even a few months ago, when people said that Trump was done for in politics, I reminded them that he was far from finished.  And that he was going to win and win big.  Because capitalism always beats communism, and by the time all this work against him was done, the communist left would bankrupt itself in a way they would never recover.  Everybody laughed.

But news report after news report showed the anxiety of those who had bought into different levels of communism injected into American life, in a panic over their entire political philosophy falling apart right in front of their faces.  Where they thought the New York court cases were the end of Trump and that Trump Tower was going to be confiscated by the state, the opposite happened.  And there was plenty of desperation to go around on their part.  But America was set up so that people like President Trump could exist.  I gave an excellent little talk this past week to a group of people after I read the book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which I thought was astonishingly good, and I compared it to the Trump book The Art of the Comeback which I have been saying was the guidebook for the 2024 election.  If you want to know what Trump will do next, it’s all in that book published in the 1990s.  But the point of my talk, which I told them was likely the most crucial thing anybody would ever tell them, was that while how we measure wealth might change, the creation of it still has some essential ingredients that are important to the human race.  Wealth creation, specifically capitalist systems, requires the propensity of the human race to create new things out of risk.  To take chances.  And when you hit it big, the win may be celebrated differently.  Back in the 1990s, Trump was all about supermodels, fast cars, and tall buildings made of gold.  Elon Musk in 2024 has some compelling pictures of his most valued treasures on the covers of his book, one showing Starship stacking on SuperHeavy.  Then, on the back cover is a Tesla factory with a robot working in a nice, clean facility.  Both examples show the company’s success and how the people behind the enterprise measured that success.  But what made that success was always a risk and the ability to manage it for the betterment of all. 

Communist systems are all about averting risk.  They are the antithesis of creation.  It takes risk to do anything, so when you take the risk out of life, you take away the creation of things that are positive for the human race, which is why communist cultures, such as China, Cuba, Iran, and other places, are hellholes that depend on stealing from rich countries to sustain themselves.  That is why governments have to have massive taxes; they exist in at-risk environments that must be subsidized off the looted wealth of productive people who take many risks.  The more tolerance for risk a person had, and the better they managed it, the more successful they were.  Of course, those who don’t like risk and want a mother government to take it out of their lives will resent those who can handle it.  But what leverage can they inject into the world if they don’t bring any real value to an enterprise?  While the displays between the way Elon Musk displays his wealth as one of the world’s wealthiest people and President Trump may be different, it is similar to how they can handle more risk than others and use that trait to improve the world.

That was the swagger President Trump brought to his court cases.  When he was being hit from all sides by the communist left, he had the thought to use his money to start his own social media company, and I am proud to say that I was one of the first few hundred to sign up for it, which is how I was able to get my actual name in my username, @rhoffman.  And when Truth Social went public in March of 2024, it gave Trump access to plenty of cash to deal with all these pesky communists.   Trump could have spent these last few years working to be the wealthiest man in the world if he wanted to.  Instead, he doubled his billionaire status enough to stay alive for this presidential race, and the communists, because they count on systems to protect them from risk, were no match for someone very successful in managing risk and thrived in that environment.  This is why communism will never beat capitalism, even as much as the fantasy might wish such a condition to be so.  That’s why Karl Marx died broke.  That’s why the movement of Freemasonry in Europe failed to inject the entire world with socialism; group affiliations were intended to disguise people’s aversion to risk.  But it is always the risk-takers who succeed in life.  And there are always people who instead take risks to live the safe life of bootlicking their tribal leader in exchange for food from the confiscated wealth taken by mob rule.  It is that crucial designation that indicates why capitalism will always beat communism and why Trump has succeeded so well against these communist plots against him.  Most good things in life are created by risk, including asking out a pretty girl for a date.  Or driving a car that you just spent all day cleaning up for a night on the town, starting a new company, and making a profit.  People like Trump were successful because of their comfort with risk.  And what they create with that success makes the world a better place.  Which is why he’s winning, and the communist left is losing so spectacularly. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Biden Push for EV Vehicles: A total disaster by a tyrannical government that tampered with markets with massive failure

I do find the Tesla Truck a desirable option, not because it’s an electric vehicle, but because it’s armored, and would be a good addition to my lifestyle.  It would have come in handy a couple of times last week.  The bulletproof windows for small arms fire and the stainless steel body would be great things to have.  But Tesla is a good car company. Aside from the new Tesla Truck, they are fancy golf carts with reasonable market options for a gasoline economy.  And they have carved out a nice little niche for themselves, supported by just enough public interest to be interesting.  The drawback for me is all the charging, and the frequency of it.  Around town, for the stuff under 20 miles, the Tesla Truck would be great for my lifestyle.  For anything over those short stints, charging becomes a problem.  I know where most of the Tesla charging stations are within a few hundred miles of my home, and they are pretty well thought out, so long as there aren’t a lot of other Tesla drivers looking to charge their vehicles simultaneously.  So, as long as Tesla vehicles stay in a small market where they are rare on the road, buying one is much more attractive than if they were common and had to wait in line to charge their vehicles during long-distance travel.  It’s hard to beat the way travel is now, where fuel stops take under 15 minutes.  We have a very busy economy, which makes sense because it is the world’s most productive.  So, anything added to that economy by way of transportation needs to observe the rules of the game, which is speed.  And electric vehicles don’t have it.  They take too long to charge, and you must charge them too often.  Otherwise, I would say that the Tesla Truck is a superior vehicle.

But don’t say I didn’t say so on this electric vehicle market problem that has hit us, because of government intervention.  The Biden administration, thinking it knew better than the consumers, imposed all these regulations on car manufacturers to make more electric vehicles in their war against fossil fuels, and now all these companies, like Ford, have produced electric cars that are sitting on lots that nobody wants, and panic is setting in.  All the major car companies listened to the Biden administration when it was declared by such and such date, within this present decade, that all cars would be electric.  Of course, we know that Biden didn’t come up with all this nonsense on his own.  Rather, he was told what to do by the global World Economic Forum communists and their cult of love for Mother Earth, an insidious love that would make Norman Bates jealous.  Their beliefs should be considered technically insane, nobody should be listening to them to construct any public policy.  This is a consistent theme with these global lefties; they are authoritarian types who view government as a kingly mechanism and everyone is their subject who must honor every kind of edict constructed by the court no matter how dumb it is.  People are to do what they are told and to appease their king.  And if that king, or kings, decide that people should be driving fancy golf carts, that is just how it will be.  So, a complete dedication to the EV marketplace was imposed by the American government through a stolen election, and like a bunch of dumb fools trying to appease their insane king, the car companies tried to make a switch to all EV cars to meet the target dates set by the government. 

But that’s not how it works, not anywhere.  There is a reason most of the world’s economies are not very effective: they have socialist and communist governments that impose too many constraints on their financial opportunities.  Constraints take time, and they cost money.  They make bureaucrats and administrators happy by feeling like they are doing work when all they do is slow things down, which then holds down a country’s GDP.  The government in America doesn’t like Tesla cars for all kinds of reasons, mainly because of the way Elon Musk has built his factories, which are largely automated.  Automated factories don’t need unionized labor that can threaten to strike every five seconds and sleep on the job while watching Netflix movies—so big labor combined with big government is often the same.  Communist labor unions influence most government jobs, so they start with the wrong thinking.  So, the government thought it knew best to ignore the one EV company that had worked to satisfy a real market value for electronic vehicles, then would impose on the other corporations that were doing fine making gas-powered vehicles that they would all switch over to electronic vehicles, where the batteries are made in China largely, creating single point failures everywhere.  It was a hugely dumb idea, yet the Biden administration committed to it in the first months of his presidency, and now, three years later, there is a panic from those car companies that nobody wants their product.  Americans aren’t buying EV cars, not to the point that they were expected to, and now there is all this investment in a market economy that nobody wants, which is a big problem. 

But what’s worse is that the plot looks even dumber.  Now that all the car companies are failing, the real intention of the plan seems to be to make personal vehicles so expensive that ordinary people couldn’t afford them, forcing people to move back into their cities where public transportation would become the dominant form of personal transit once again.  Again, the Biden government represents an authority approach where slowing down is their method of choice.  My children had just returned from Europe, where they took the bullet trains all over the place.  They are interesting, but when you get to a train station in Edinburgh or Paris, then what?  You walk, take a bicycle, hire a driver.  People quickly lose their independence, which was always the point.  In America, you drive your big car from city to city, and once you get where you are going, you take your vehicle.  You don’t wait for a train, Uber, or anything.  The minds of the insane have created all this micromanagement in these 15-minute city concepts.  And now we see the cost of their authority approach in billions and billions of lost economic opportunities.  Rather than meet Adam Smith’s invisible hand of market need, they thought imposing their vision onto financial standards was best.  And the result has been utterly disastrous.  And just in time for the next election, it’s all hitting the fan, as I said it would, years in advance.  If only they had listened.  But many fools followed each other over the cliff and now have themselves to blame.  Government should support the expansion of market economies, not get in its way and that is the real problem with all the EVs sitting around looking for customers that will never come.  The government tried to shape the market rather than adapt to the growing need for economic expansion.  It hasn’t worked anywhere, especially in the United States.  If EV cars were truly the best, and Tesla at this point makes the best, they would find their way into market consideration.  Instead, the government has decided to pick winners and losers, and if people didn’t like it, they could take a train, which is the answer all left-leaning politicians come up with, which has turned out to be predictably, and grotesquely wrong.

Rich Hoffman

Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

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