Finance

Biden’s Twitter Snub Brings Elon Musk Back To Earth

America’s most productive billionaire should realize he doesn’t have to wait on anyone’s praise. 

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Elon Musk (Photo by Heisenberg Media)

I’m a pretty big fan of Elon Musk. When everyone thought for a hundred years that an electric car company could never be profitable or produce widely popular vehicles, he proved them wrong. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, SpaceX mastered reusable rocketry and vertical landing technology. On a personal level, Musk helped a few shares of stock in my portfolio become much more valuable even after a Tesla stock split, without me having to do anything except hang on for the ride. He’s given me something to write about from time to time over the last three years too.

Oh, and Elon Musk is, at least from time to time depending on the markets, the world’s richest person. Hey, he even pays his workers a fair wage and supports a lot of good charitable endeavors. Elon Musk can walk into any room in the world and hold his head high.

Which makes it a little strange that he seemed upset by the fact that the president didn’t congratulate his space company on its latest accomplishment. On September 19, SpaceX completed a mission that took the first-ever crew of laypersons to space. After spending three days up there, the group of four amateur astronauts safely and successfully descended, all of it for a good cause: the mission helped raise in excess of $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In addition to sending the first all-civilian crew well beyond the earth’s stratosphere, the effort also marked a number of firsts for diversity in space, including a first in sending a person with a prosthesis into space and utilizing a Black woman as a spacecraft pilot for the first time.

Despite succeeding in such an inspirational space mission, it seemed the wind was taken out of Musk’s sails because Joe Biden did not directly offer congratulations. Someone on Twitter asked Musk why the president “has refused to even acknowledge the 4 newest American astronauts who helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for St. Jude,” and Musk replied (in the afternoon on September 19, a Sunday), “He’s still sleeping.”

Later, another Twitter user tweeted a meme suggesting that Biden was under the sway of a powerful autoworkers’ union. Musk responded by saying, “Seems that way.” Tesla is currently a nonunion automaker, while Joe Biden is perhaps the most pro-union president in history (Biden has had some trouble keeping autoworkers’ unions on board with the transition to electric vehicles since electric vehicles require significantly less labor to assemble compared to traditional gasoline-powered vehicles, which have many more moving parts). Bill Nelson, a former senator who was appointed to serve as NASA administrator by Joe Biden, did tweet in celebration of SpaceX’s groundbreaking flight, as did Musk rival Jeff Bezos, who leads the competing space company Blue Origin.

Making America’s most productive billionaire sad because he didn’t see a congratulatory tweet from Joe Biden on there is the least of Twitter’s crimes against the human race. Still, maybe Biden could get on Twitter for a couple of minutes and at least recognize a milestone in American exploration, plus a lot of dollars raised for a good cause, even if he doesn’t particularly like Elon Musk (and a lot of people don’t; he’s not for everyone). Biden obviously has a great deal on his plate right now, but his predecessor somehow found the time to tweet 74 times in a single hour during another time of national crisis, so you’d think the president could spare just a few minutes to help encourage classic American-style space accomplishments.

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If that doesn’t happen though, maybe Elon Musk will realize he doesn’t have to wait on anyone’s praise. Normally in private industry, the reward for a big accomplishment is built right into the system — you get paid, handsomely. Even though this spaceflight was a charitable pursuit and a proof point that normal people can make it in space, that’s its own reward too. Sure, a tweet from the leader of the free world is great, but if it was that or a fifth of a billion raised for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and pushing the boundaries of human space exploration while you’re at it, I’d take the latter any day of the week.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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