Swimming with Cybertrucks

I used to like Elon Musk. There’s an openness to him, an unguarded transparency. While other technoligarchs remodel as Augustus Caesar (Mark Zuckerberg) or a curiously buff Jean-Luc Picard (Jeff Bezos), Musk has never pretended to be more than what he is: an awkward geek who likes cheesy science fiction and questionable wordplay. His dogged enthusiasm for reinvigorating forlorn technologies such as electric cars and space exploration is refreshing in a Silicon Valley trained to yip after every fleeting microtrend. Above all, I have appreciated his insouciant approach to failure. At his SpaceX, a rocket explosion is a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, a euphemism so blatant, it might as well be a wink.

This was charming, or at least tolerable, when Musk was only burning his own money and that of his rich friends. (The exploding rockets have no passengers.) But things have changed. Twice this year, on January 16 and March 6, Musk’s huge Starship rockets have rapidly disassembled themselves over the Caribbean and Florida, raining fiery debris. No one was hurt, but dozens of aeroplanes were diverted, ruining the days of thousands of travellers.

Less explosive, but ultimately more consequential, is Musk’s leadership of Doge – the “Department of Government Efficiency” – an exotic instrument of Donald Trump’s unconstrained will. This quasi-governmental entity employs twentysomethings to menace civil servants and override Congressional appropriations that are not to their taste.

Surreally named after the internet meme featuring a cute shiba inu dog, Doge exemplifies Musk’s longstanding tendency to make big promises and refuse to provide credible evidence. Its website spotlights a figure tracking its alleged savings for the public purse, which ranged as high as $55 billion. But an NPR investigation found that the figure fell to only $2 billion when cleaned of exaggeration and typos.

Then there is the saga of the federal Cybertrucks. Soon after Trump returned to office, the investigative website Drop Site News noticed a State Department planning document seeking to spend $400 million on armoured Teslas. (After the news broke, mention of Tesla was quietly edited out of the document.) No one has yet explained where the mammoth expenditure came from or why it seemed appropriate in a moment of Musk-induced savage austerity.

The Cybertruck is an apt avatar for Musk’s recent career. It spent years in production delays and looks like a giant’s discarded steel clog. But I have to admit that I kind of like it. Most cars are boring and indistinguishable; why not a bit of mobile ridiculousness to liven up the streetscape? And I am still sometimes charmed by that old Musk whimsy. A child of 1980s sci-fi paid serious engineers to make what appears to be a rejected Star Wars prop go really fast. Honestly, it’s a bit sweet, in a mecha-Peter Pan way.

If only it weren’t also endlessly misleading. In September 2022, Musk tweeted that the (then still-in-development) Cybertruck “will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat”. I took this for Muskian humour, a wink at his own hubris. But he wasn’t kidding. A year later, after the Cybertruck was finally released, Musk was still tweeting plans for a “mod package” to make it seaworthy. Yet there are no documented members of the Tesla fleet, excepting one voyage related by the automotive website Jalopnik: “the first Tesla Cybertruck in Slovakia had to be rescued from a lake by passing swimmers”. Meanwhile, the truck seems to be having problems enough on land. On March 20, Tesla announced a recall of most Cybertrucks sold in America, due to an exterior panel that threatens to “delaminate and detach from the vehicle” while driving.

This is the Musk playbook: promise big, wink often, never accept responsibility. The game is to make over-the-top claims so rapidly that recent gasps cover the echoing emptiness of earlier boasts. It is also a famously Trumpian tactic. The Art of the Deal (1987) preaches “truthful hyperbole” – or telling suckers what they want to hear. In fact, the idea is much older. As Immanuel Kant put it, in an eighteenth-century treatise on dramatic tragedy, “Resolute audacity in a rogue is extremely dangerous, yet it touches us in the telling … [and] a cunningly conceived scheme, even when it amounts to a piece of knavery, has something about it that is fine and worth a laugh”. Kant hoped that our entertaining encounters with literary knavery might inspire us to careful moral reflection. Worryingly, it seems we may have settled merely for being amused. Now more than ever, it seems we live in a time of resolutely audacious rogues. The shame is that they’ve graduated from duping those with more money than sense to shaking down entire nations.

As for the Cybertruck’s nautical aspirations, the petrolhead publication Road and Track wisely says: “We do not recommend using a long-delayed electric truck with bulletproof windows as a boat for any amount of time”. That the idea was ever seriously mooted shows the hazardous fantasia where whimsy borders deception. It can be tempting to float away on charm. But one should always stay in reach of passing swimmers.

Regina Rini holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Reasoning at York University in Toronto

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