Teslas and nasty people

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently. We were talking about the Tesla car, and I was telling him about a test drive I had in one and what stunning technology it had. He said that personally, to add to Elon Musk’s billions would be, for him, a  bridge too far.

I understand where he’s coming from. If you knew that your local plumber beat his wife regularly, you’d be unlikely to hire his services; and if you knew that a particular brand of trainers was produced by child labour, again you’d probably baulk at getting a pair.

Which brings us to Keir Starmer. He’s at present in China, and that paragon of morality Donald Trump has warned him off having anything to do with China. As with much of Trump’s motivation it’s muddled, but you get the impression he’s thinking of China’s record on human rights. If you lived in China you would not have freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from arbitrary detention, the right to a fair trial, and freedom of assembly and association.

All good reasons for not dealing with China? Mmm – maybe.  Some people, including Joe Brolly, believe countries should refuse to play the FIFA World Cup in the US,  given what Trump is doing  there. Meanwhile, the GAA continues  to have its  contests come with the Allianz brand.Allianz makes no secret of the fact that it holds bonds or equities of Israeli companies and Israeli government debt.

The core question in all these examples is, should we allow the morality of the individual or company to decide if we have dealings with them? You get the same problem in a different form when UK soccer professionals are caught doing less than the right thing: speeding, drink driving, physical or sexual abuse – all these are given as reasons for suspending players.

I’m convinced that in some instances at least , this is wrong. When you pick a football team, you should pick it solely on footballing ability, not how up-right the players’ lives are. You use footballing criteria, not moral criteria. Or you should. None of us would dream of refusing the services of a truly skilful brain surgeon, because he was known to have extra-marital affairs.

So finally to come back to Elon Musk. There is little doubt that he is a nasty right-wing agitator,  with a Nazi streak. Likewise there is little doubt that he’s a technology genius – otherwise he wouldn’t have so many massive and enabling inventions  – electric cars,  the  X company formerly known as Twitter,  Space X which is playing a major role in space exploration. 

It often happens. Caravaggio was infamous for his violence and criminal behaviour, Picasso routinely abused and damaged the women in his life, Lord Byron engaged in incest and emotional cruelty, Wagner was openly antisemitic, Ezra Pound was a fascist propagandist. I could go on.

In the end, while it would have been nice if all these artists had been upstanding people in their private lives – but they weren’t. So what fools we’d be tf we rejected their inspired work.

Teslas should be bought with  vehicle quality in mind, not Elon Musk’s obnoxious behaviour.

Happy motoring.