Elon Musk Enterprises Has Almost No Cleantech News These Days

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I have countless sources for tracking and following cleantech news. Every day, I go through numerous feeds and websites and news alerts to try to find out what’s happening and spot the biggest stories to cover. I very seldom see anything notable cleantech-wise from Tesla or other Elon Musk companies these days. So, yesterday, I decided to go through two weeks of stories from a big Elon Musk superfan site. I figured I must be missing stuff and this is where I’d definitely find it.

Well … it seems there’s been almost no cleantech-related news from Musk Enterprises in recent weeks (or months). There’s tons of stuff about SpaceX, Starlink, Elon Musk companies getting contracts from the Department of War, and Elon Musk massively funding Republican political campaigns. Oligarchs gonna oligarch … and profit from war.

Frankly, considering that Tesla used to be 100% focused on accelerating the transition to clean, sustainable energy, and Elon Musk used to be pouring his time into Tesla, it’s massively disappointing to see how things have changed. Even further, there’s strong suspicion Musk is weighing heavily on the side of oil/fossil fuels (beyond supporting anti–clean energy Republican politicians). And there may be some odd business behind all of this.

Donald Trump recently said, “We told Zelensky, ‘You can do whatever you want to Russia, but don’t hit the refineries because that’s a world problem.’ And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel. He better damn well stop.” Now, big news today is that Ukraine’s Starlink connections are not working so well, interfering with missions, and Ukrainian officials and their allies think this comes from SpaceX and the US retaliating for Ukraine hitting Russian oil refineries. Notably, Poland Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski referenced a Kyiv Independent report on Twitter and wrote: “Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again? As your European customers, we are watching you.” Musk responded: “be quiet, small man.”

It seems that SpaceX is limiting the speed of Starlink connections Ukraine relies on for drone activities, and without warning, totally messing up live missions.

“According to Zelenskyy, the Kremlin launched “wave after wave of drone attacks throughout the day and night today” on Oct. 14, just days after President Donald Trump and Putin announced a deal to bring Russian diesel fuel to the United States. Critics, including some Republicans, have slammed the deal as a boost to Putin’s war effort with little payoff for Americans at the pump,” USA TODAY reports. “Zelenskyy called Trump’s deal with Putin a ‘betrayal.’”

Interestingly, Musk has also apparently been hurt by Ukraine’s activities. On Monday, President Zelensky highlighted that the country had successfully struck three Yandex’s data centers. Yandex is a major Russian tech company. Reportedly, these attacks have led to a huge drop in Russian bot activity on social media (or antisocial media as Steve Hanley calls it). “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelensky noted. “A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

How is Musk himself being hit by this? That’s where it gets even more interesting. “The phenomenon may even be hitting close to home for certain billionaires. On Elon Musk’s Twitter-turned-X, users quickly noticed that the number of interactions the site’s owner was getting on his posts seemed to plummet in the wake of the strikes,” Futurism notes. “‘Woah, Elon Musk out here getting less than 5k likes on his tweets after the bot farm got exploded,’ YouTuber Zack ‘Jerry Rig Everything’ Nelson tweeted. A screenshot appended to the post shows Musk receiving 4,900 likes after responding ‘Wow’ to a racist conspiracy theory that claims Brussels, Belgium, is ‘only 10.5 percent white.’” That doesn’t tell us much or prove anything, right? But Futurism dug in a bit:

“On its face, the theory sounds pretty far-fetched. Could the destruction of a few Russian data centers really be tanking Musk’s engagement on his own platform?

“But looking at the average number of likes his posts have been receiving does raise eyebrows. Throughout October, his posts garnered an average of between 17,000 and 81,000 likes per day — until the past two days, the averages slid to a dismal 11,000 and 8,000, respectively.

“We certainly can’t determine a causal relationship, but the numbers are striking. And experts are paying attention.”

Remember, Russia did work to support the election of Donald Trump. (As if this wasn’t obvious enough to those who looked at the evidence, Trump admin eventually accidentally redacted documents showing that this is exactly what happened.) More recently, Musk was the #1 supporter of Trump in the last election and is now pouring money into Republican campaigns. Are oil money and corrupt alliances weaving a tangled web of lies and nonsense on social media, interfering with Ukrainian efforts to repel Russia, and just overall messing up the world? It sure looks like it. You aren’t winning from this. I’m not winning from this. It seems that just a few super rich oligarchs and their political puppets are.

John McCain was a mixed bag, no matter what side of the aisle (and democracy) you sit on, but he brilliantly said Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country.” It’s also been called a “big gas station” and a “gas station with nukes” by leaders on the left. Now Elon Musk is strongly linked with and siding with that giant gas station of a country? Meanwhile, Trump’s red line in everything is that Ukraine can’t hit Russian oil infrastructure (which is how you actually hurt Russia), and he’s eager to open up oil trade with Russia again? Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed because Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran (another mission from an oil state that was supposed to be completed in about a day). At least he’s inadvertently and ignorantly raising the price of gas and encouraging a transition to electric vehicles.

Now, all of these things are not directly linked. But it’s a real shame that there’s so little cleantech news and excitement from Elon Musk and Tesla, and instead there’s all of this stuff.