There are very few scenarios where any of Musk’s legal violations cost him anything that actually means something to him. The fines are so insignificant that they amount to a minor ego blow, and change nothing about the way Musk operates.
Contrast this with how ordinary people are treated by our justice system for even minor infractions. In a country where 57 percent of the population has less than $1000 in savings, fines for small civil offenses—parking tickets, expired licenses, etc.—can bankrupt people or prevent them from paying rent or being able to feed their families. Even an overnight stay in jail, justified or not, can result in job loss—and people are often incarcerated much longer while awaiting trial and presumed innocent, simply because they can’t afford bail. There is nothing our justice system can or will do to Musk that will exact the pain and disproportionate response that it does to poor people in this country. The cumulative effect of this is that the system telegraphs a perverse philosophy of justice that says a minor violation of the law by a poor person is a bigger crime than a major violation of the law by Elon Musk, or anyone with his level of wealth.
This is not an argument for tossing Musk into the penitentiary system so that he understands the consequences of his actions. Mass incarceration is a failure of justice, not an exemplar of it, and the financial destruction our system wreaks on the poor is inhumane and rooted less in any kind of justice than a deep-rooted contempt for the poor themselves. But it does expose the weakness of accountability mechanisms for the rich—securities laws that are mostly toothless in their enforcement, a willingness to allow the endangerment of the public’s health for profit, and weak worker protections that are easy and painless to violate. And conversely, it endorses overly harsh punishments for people without resources, effectively criminalizing poverty. No punishment is too harsh, or offense too small, if you’re poor.
Musk presents an opportunity to consider remedies. His law breaking is intentional, and escalating, and the less he faces any kind of real accountability, the more he will do it. He also enjoys the provocation, and provocations in general, and has no regard for who his antics harm. Even when they’re not illegal, they display the same ongoing contempt for the well-being of others and open acknowledgment that rules are for other people. He has pushed the idea that the coronavirus was a “dumb” panic, and compared social distancing protocols to imprisonment (with the glibness of someone who’s never been anywhere near a prison). He smoked pot on air while continuing to drug test Tesla workers for the same substance.
This weekend, his impulsiveness and desire to provoke manifested in a tweet that read “take the red pill” followed by a red rose emoji. The “red pill” is originally a reference to a line in the movie The Matrix, where the protagonist is offered a choice between two alternate versions of perceived reality. In recent years, the “red pill” reference has been largely co-opted by right wing “mens rights activists” (MRAs) to signify the acceptance of a misogynistic worldview that says women are inferior to men, that men are unfairly disenfranchised, and that women should be manipulated and stripped of their autonomy. Musk, who is an extremely online type himself, certainly knows the significance of the phrase, especially to his Reddit-heavy Silicon Valley fanbase. But the red rose, a symbol often deployed by the Democratic Socialists of America, in theory offers him some plausible deniability, but not really; Musk despises socialism. (This is not the first time Musk has said something appalling on social media with the built-in hedge that it could be misconstrued. He argued in court last December that when he referred to a British cave diving expert as a “pedo guy,” he meant it as a joke.) The ambiguity is meant to exculpate if necessary, but in the service of allowing Musk to do what he wants to do.
Tellingly, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr, themselves having narrowly avoided criminal indictment with the apparently bulletproof defense of being very, very rich, retweeted the red pill tweet—Ivanka, with the commentary, “Taken!” It’s doubtful that Ivanka would argue for the destruction of her own rights and autonomy, and she likely read it as an endorsement of “red” or Republican America, but there’s a symmetry there. Musk is simply being applauded by two people who believe exactly what he does: that rules don’t apply to them either, that corporate profits are more important than public health, that the welfare of others is inconvenient and irrelevant, and that accountability is something reserved exclusively for those who can’t afford immunity from it.
