Never trust a salesman – least of all a multi-billionaire whose slick and sophisticated seductive pitches helped get him to the top of the pile. That’s Elon Musk, whose latest sales-motivated claim about solar power is picked apart, fact by fact by Ivo Vegter here, exposing it as a huge lie. He takes Musk’s beguiling comparison of Solar with Nuclear and does a bit of basic maths based on solid scientific findings to show just how much he exaggerated. If you say solar produces more power than a nuclear power station for the same land area, you better not be talking about the northern hemisphere, turn a blind eye to which countries are still using coal, and look at MIT studies on the future of solar energy. Rhetoric trumps hard fact, every time it seems; just look at Donald Trump, Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema – not such strange bedfellows when it comes to pure bulldust. – Chris Bateman
Elon Musk, the solar panel salesman, tells a fib.
By Ivo Vegter*
The world’s richest man has a sideline selling solar panels. He says they produce more power than a nuclear power station for the same land area. That is a towering lie.
Ivo Vegter. Image Credit: The Daily Friend
In a transparent attempt to compete with Chinese Communist Party’s spying and data collection network, TikTok, the US National Security Agency’s spying and data collection network, YouTube, has launched an appalling new feature called ‘shorts’.
It features an endless playlist of annoying vertical-format short videos with no playback controls other than play/pause, and no fancy functions like transcription. You don’t get to choose what to watch next. You just scroll, and some new banality pops up designed for people with a teeny attention span.
For some reason, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, features in a lot of these shorts. It’s not directly his doing, of course. Random people grab something he said they think is profound and meme every last cent out of it.
One such person enticingly styles themselves Create Quantum Wealth, and titled the video without regard for capitalisation conventions, ‘Elon Musk Stuns Oil Giants With His Simple Solution’.
You won’t be stunned to discover that Musk’s stunning and simple solution has to do with products he sells. In particular, it has to do with solar panels.
The solution
‘The world could be powered many times over by solar,’ Musk intones.
An interviewer, acting sceptically, though probably hamming it up for the camera, asks: ‘The world? I mean, obviously California, where you’re based, but in Europe? Can you really say that? In Europe?’
That is, on the face of it, a good question, because north of the French Riviera, the sun hardly ever shines. I hear Berlin had …….
Source: https://www.biznews.com/global-citizen/2022/02/22/musk-solar-panel-hot-air