The more I hear about Elon Musk, the more I like the guy. Granted, I doubt I’d see eye-to-eye with him on every political issue – no two people with working brains will ever agree 100 percent of the time anyway. But he’s not overly worried about who he ticks off. That’s manifestly a good thing, and that’s for sure and for certain. I admire that in a guy; I’m rather like that myself, and if I wasn’t, I sure wouldn’t be a libertarian/conservative pundit.
Now, we read that Musk is ending his business association with the city of San Francisco, and both sides seem well satisfied with that. Of course, the people running San Francisco are missing a big helping of good sense in that estimation.
Elon Musk and San Francisco will be parting ways in the coming weeks and it seems neither side will be shedding a tear.
“I share the perspective that most San Franciscans have, which is good riddance,” City Attorney David Chiu told the New York Times. Chiu was a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, which backed the tax break that lured then-Twitter to the city in 2012.
Musk is shutting down the social media company’s headquarters and will move the remaining employees based there to offices in Palo Alto, about 30 minutes away, and San Jose, about 50 minutes away. X’s new headquarters will be in Austin, Texas. Musk is also moving SpaceX from its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., to Boca Chica, Texas.
One has to wonder what flat rock David Chiu has hidden his common sense under, if indeed he ever had any. California’s public policy in recent years has seemed deliberately designed to drive businesses and the productive people who start and run them clear out of the state. And San Francisco is Ground Zero for this nutball attitude.
Elon Musk may not be exactly Moses here, in that he’s not leading the exodus but is rather joining the march in progress. But he’s taking a big chunk of business with him, and will doubtless lead more people away from Pharoah Newsom and through the wilderness to much more business-friendly places like Texas.
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And really, we are left wondering if the Democrats currently running California will ever get the hint. Perhaps a plague of locusts would help them see the light? Case in point, from the Washington Examiner story linked above:
Like Chiu, Randy Shaw, director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, isn’t sad to see Musk go.
“Elon Musk tweeted complaints about Mid-Market but never used his vast wealth to improve the situation,” Shaw wrote. “Much of the Twitter building was vacant despite Musk’s March 2023, 2:30am request that employees return (several rounds of layoffs left far fewer employees available to return).”
Shaw said Twitter’s departure “offers San Francisco a great opportunity” to seize the situation and renew focus on reviving Mid-Market and the famous Tenderloin district.
Randy Shaw, another prominent local figure who has apparently taken leave of his good sense, brings up a very good question here, but it’s not the one he poses. The question is this: “Why in the ever-loving world should Elon Musk use one red cent of his vast wealth to help improve Mid-Market? In case nobody informed you, Mr. Shaw, that’s not his job. The taxpayers are paying some of the highest taxes in the republic, and they have every reason to expect that some of that money would be used to keep people from, well, shooting up and crapping on the streets. That’s not Elon’s responsibility. He doesn’t owe Mid-Market, the Tenderloin, or the city of San Francisco a damn thing. But that’s just like the left – sit around whining, waiting for someone else to do something.
Some years ago, one of my literary heroes, Robert Heinlein, wrote about situations just like this:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
(Yes, I realize I’m mixing metaphors here, but they are both apt.)
Elon Musk is part of that tiny minority, and Chiu and Shaw are the ones driving him out of San Francisco society. And Heinlein already predicted what will happen when all of the productive, like Musk, have had enough and have bailed out. If I could offer any advice to Chiu, Shaw, and Gavin Newsom, it would be that they had better keep a sharp eye peeled for locusts.
