Musk's Fake Flying Car And 'CEO Said A Thing!' Journalism

U.S. corporate journalism is actively, enthusiastically invested in lying to you.

That's the only conclusion you can draw after the U.S. press spent the last week helping white supremacist huckster Elon Musk sell the public on the idea of a flying car that simply doesn't exist.

Musk Corp recently "demonstrated" what it claimed was a flight-capable Tesla Roadster at a SpaceX stage in McGregor, Texas. The demonstration featured a "car" accelerating vertically up a Hot Wheels-esque ramp before using thrusters to flip over and descend to the ground.

To be clear there is no actual flying car. There is absolutely no evidence that Tesla has solved any of the engineering, physics, regulatory, safety, or design hurdles of strapping rockets to the back of extremely heavy electric vehicles. We are simply repeating history (see: The Lady and The Dale documentary).

Freeze frame photos show what appears to be a lightweight hollowed out car shell prop, likely using magnets, suction, and compressed gas to help the country's richest nazi once again lie to the gullible American public and boost the valuation of a car company that stopped being innovative more than a decade ago.

You can "order" one of three configurations (Performance, Thrust, and Rocket), but the fine print in the contract makes it clear you should never expect to actually get one. Especially the variations affixed with rockets. Because, again, you know, it's not fucking real. And if it were, it would kill oodles of people.

Still, the U.S. corporate press immediately proceeded to inform the public that the age of the flying cars had arrived at the hands of a singular engineering genius. Rupert Murdoch-owned right wing propaganda companies were particularly excited about the nonexistent advancement in vehicular flight:

Data indicates that between 59 and 75 percent of people never read past the headline, so it's particularly important that journalists try to, you know, avoid lying in the headline. Of those that click past the headline, about half give up after fifteen seconds. 20 percent of people actually fully read stories.

A few outlets feebly tried to solve this ethical dilemma by couching the language or putting quotes around the words "flying car," as if that would be enough to help the typically-befuddled American to decipher the lie:

Because U.S. journalism is disastrously based on commercial ad engagement, even outlets that know the flying Tesla is bullshit felt compelled to cover it to exploit news cycle traffic. So you got another class of stories purportedly about the engineering challenges (see: Wired and Gizmodo) or the ethics of flying cars (The Atlantic) that still failed to properly illustrate how this was all just bullshit.

Others, like The Verge, informed us that it's ok it's all bullshit, because it was exciting and entertaining bullshit:

No one puts on a show quite like Elon Musk. So if the goal is to score a PR victory, dominate social media feeds, and cement Tesla’s brand as a frontier tech pioneer, then I would say the Roadster demo was a success. 

Which is great, except for the fact that the flying car isn't real, so Tesla's identity as a "frontier tech pioneer" isn't real either. By framing the lie as a "success," you are helping a notorious bullshitter sell a lie.

Also: Elon Musk is a nazi whose extremist right wing racist politics have killed millions of people (as usual, the fact that Musk is a far-right-wing extremist, or that he lies constantly, about everything, was buried down the page of almost every news report, if it was mentioned at all).

There were really only a few outlets that treated the 12-year-old boy's fever dream demonstration with appropriate journalistic skepticism, using headlines invested in communicating something vaguely resembling the truth.

Like Ars Technica's Jonathan Gitlin, who pointed out the underlying compressed gas stunt technology Tesla utilized is actually fifty years old, and reminded everybody that this is really about propping up absurd stock valuations for a company that really isn't actually still innovative:

Its stratospheric valuation was predicated in large part upon promises of constant growth, something that perhaps seemed possible when its market share was near total and there was little competition for EVs. But now Europe and China have hundreds of models to choose from—only two of which are offered by Tesla. The Models 3 and Y are both increasingly aged, and Tesla has shown little ability to innovate rapidly like the Chinese brands that have taken so much of its sales away there. In fact, it might even leave the Chinese market.

Tesla stopped caring about affordable, safe, and compelling cars some time ago. The Cybertruck was the biggest failure in automotive history. Tesla's Cybercab is a forgettable also-ran. The company's dedication to misrepresenting undercooked "full self-driving" has an historic body count only made possible by the fact Musk's right wing politics have lobotomized our public safety regulators.

It's clear (to me, anyway) that Musk ultimately wants out of the challenging auto industry and dreams of dominating robotics and AI, despite not being very competent in those arenas either (the company's Optimum robot gets gushing press attention despite not being a real, mass-produced product, and the only people that use Grok AI are creepy Musk cultists keen on fucking their phones).

Elon Musk is best understood as an unremarkable child suffering from extreme arrested development whose endless fantasies about being a supergenius engineer are propped up by extreme wealth, endless sycophancy, and the lazy press of a vapid country being devoured by its obsession with artifice.

Musk's hoping to merge Tesla with SpaceX to further prop up his memestock empire's absurd IPO valuation and muddy the waters further between the useful stuff actual SpaceX engineers do (reusable rockets, Starlink) and the stock-fluffing vaporware bullshit that endlessly spews out of Musk's maw.

As I've noted, the U.S. consolidated corporate press long ago stopped serving the public interest. It now exists largely as a marketing extension of industry and extraction class commercial interests; resulting in lazy "CEO said a thing!" journalism that's so foundationally broken and pathetic it doesn't require any particular intelligence to exploit it (see: Donald Trump).

The press fixation with fake flying cars helped Musk downplay other stories of the week, like the fact Musk settled two different lawsuits accusing him of illegally trying to bribe voters during the 2024 election season. Or that he and Trump throttled Ukrainian military Starlink satellite connections to aid Vladimir Putin.

Or that the Supreme Court had agreed to hear arguments from watchdog groups seeking records on Musk's illegal efforts to dismantle U.S. federal public interest governance under the pretense of "DOGE" efficiency. Or that Musk was caught funding racist mailers and conspiracy theories to undermine James Talarico's Texas Senate bid.

Musk is integral to the fascist project's misrepresentation of itself as forward-thinking and innovation-centric (as opposed to virulently racist, immeasurably incompetent, rabidly corrupt, and profoundly full of shit). And if you're a toddler with moderate to severe brain damage, it's very effective messaging.

Amusingly, the broken American press did find the time to pause their fake coverage of fake flying cars to prop up Elon Musk's fake claim that he was going to give every kid in America a share of SpaceX stock. Something that's also not going to actually happen, and reflects a growing midterm desperation for Musk's political ideology (corrupt fascism dictated by the whims of mad oligarchs).

It's all very embarrassing.

Many people assume mainstream editors and reporters are just naive or clumsy in the way they repeatedly prop up the lies of terrible rich men. But ultimately, the evidence suggests the only honest conclusion you can draw is that the American press is actively and enthusiastically complicit in selling the con.