Elon Musk Pushes the Solar Fairy Tale Again in Rogan Interview

Let me preface this by saying that I respect Elon Musk and what he has built at Tesla. Yes, he built that on the backs of taxpayers and federal largesse, but that just means he, as so many businessmen have done before him, saw an array of subsidies, tax breaks and low interest loan programs laid out before him and decided to take legal advantage of them.

And now he runs pretty much the only sustainable electric vehicle company on earth outside of China. Well, ok, he’s partly in China now, too, so let’s just credit him for building the only sustainable and sort of profitable EV company in the U.S. He also happens to be the world’s wealthiest individual, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But Musk also frequently engages in the Joe Biden-like habit of repeating fairy tales about renewable energy that damage efforts to educate the public about them. In his recent interview with Joe Rogan, he repeated one of those fairy tales yet again.

In this bit of green energy Unicorn talk, Musk claims that “you could power the whole United States with solar” in an array that covers just 100 by 100 miles. He never admits that this amounts to 10,000 square miles of land, because that number would scare the crap out of listeners, so he always sticks with this “100 by 100” rubric.