Doug Derwin is very cross at Elon Musk. According to Bloomberg, it is not because the lawyer and venture capitalist is opposed to going to Mars or electric cars. Indeed, he almost bought a Tesla. Derwin is irate at the CEO of SpaceX because he has a cozy relationship with President Donald Trump. He is so furious that he is spending millions of a campaign to try to shame Musk into breaking all ties with the president and to denounce him as a Global warming denier.
The campaign includes billboards, bumper stickers, ad buys, and information booths at colleges and universities to dissuade engineering graduates from working at SpaceX, Tesla, and any other company Musk owns.
He’ll even pay people who have ordered Tesla Model 3s to cancel their orders. Derwin has vowed to keep it up until Musk complies or he runs out of money.
The latter is likely to be the case. Elon Musk is not the sort of person to take direction from outside agitators. He has become an advisor to President Trump for very sound business and political reasons. Musk maintains that Trump needs to hear the point of view of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as himself. Remarkably, Trump agrees.
The irony is that Musk almost certainly agrees with Derwin that Trump’s position on climate change is horrible. They disagree on what to do about it. Derwin’s idea is to stand on the sidelines and yell invectives, not very productive against a man like Trump, but it does make one feel better about oneself.
Musk would counter (and in fact has countered) that the best way to influence the president is to be at the table with him and to explain, businessman to businessman, that solar power and electric cars are sound ideas. So is going to Mars, in Musk’s view. Trump is more likely to listen to a man like Musk, who has successfully grown a number of businesses, than someone yelling in a bullhorn at an Antifa rally.
It’s not that the SpaceX CEO is particularly finicky about the politicians he associates with. When Obama was president, Musk was there explaining to him about commercial space. When SpaceX wanted to build a spaceport near Brownsville, Texas, he was in the office of then Texas Governor Rick Perry why tax subsidies and regulatory relief would be good ideas to make such a thing happen.
If Doug Derwin were not so much in the claws of Trump Derangement Syndrome, he would not be enriching ad agencies with his new found wealth but would deploy it to better purpose.
