Techlash free South Seas New World Beckons Besieged ex Presidential Efficiency Czar
A new opportunity awaits Elon Musk in the federal sphere and it is in Australia which the Labour (i.e Democrat) government is loudly positioning as the world’s “green energy superpower.”
Musk is no stranger to Australia which was the site of his defining coup with his trademark battery technology.
Trump’s former efficiency czar has a simple technique in his ability to overhaul an area which everyone else has overlooked.
These included the way in which battery technology had become a research and development backwater. Another was how rocketry had become too costly even for the US government.
His Australian battery breakthrough (pictured) was commemorated in the implementation in South Australia under a no-cure-no-pay deal of what was then the world’s most powerful energy storage array in the form of massed Tesla batteries.
His ability to straddle win-win market opportunities based on government procurement or on government policies is encapsulated in his Tesla offsets deal in the United States.
This is a cross subsidisation in which non-electric vehicle manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, General Motors have to buy Tesla credits in order to sell their petrol or diesel powered vehicles.
Last year alone Tesla earned in pure profit only slightly under the equivalent of AUD5 billion from its offset carbon credits.
Now all this along with all the other green incentives and offsets will evaporate under the Trump presidential purge on mandated incentives.
Another problem: China is the ultimate source of battery ingredients and so much else in green energy making it vulnerable to every twitch in Trump policy.
Australia now beckons as the new launching pad for Elon’s ventures.
When it comes to rocketry Australia at Woomera once led the pack. Musk’s Starlink with its low altitude satellites is an internet feed to the remotest nooks and crannies in Australasia and everwhere.
With his own NASA appointee his buddy Jared Isaacman pointedly sidelined at the last moment Musk is likely to find Australia’s space agency ASA much more helpful.
Musk’s developments such as into neuro surgery blend with the determination of the Labour government to wean Australia’s economy away from reliance on resources and force it into a hydrogen powered service economy aligned to a Singapore model. Minus the oil refineries.
Back in the United States Elon’s former boss is unlikely to forget the salvo of public parting shots increasingly personal and vituperative from his onetime Oval Office anti feather bedding supremo.
Musk as a presidential lightening rod is likely already considering how to recuse himself from the United States and attendant troublesome regulatory interference from his former Oval Office boss..
There is the way in which for example Tesla has to maintain its lead in autonomous vehicles seen as the new automotive horizon
Musk is basing his technology on human vision imitating camera recognition. Competitors notably Alphabet’s Waymo brand are based on Lidar technology.
Success though may not rest with the market. But with officialdom. Autonomous vehicles rely for mass take-up on federal transport safety regulations.
Alphabet is part of Google which in recent years has found a research and development base in New Zealand for new era energy generation capture. Urs Holzle a pioneer Google figure has residency in New Zealand.
Google co-founder Larry Page similarly has New Zealand residency
In a curious coincidence so does Peter Thiel, an associate of Elon Musk’s in PayPal days in which the technologists correctly perceived an answer to the lagging payment systems required by accelerating digital banking.
His White House transition saw the presidential cost-cutter as an inner circle consigliere, then as a weirdly-garbed courtier evolving into a latter-day court jester and finally into a mediaeval-style turncoat.
A new life in a new part of the New World might reasonably beckon. In the United States Musk was only a quite recent convert to the Republican cause.
Typically Musk anticipated the shift of public sentiment known as the Techlash against Silicon Valley and so he re-positioned himself politically.
In Australia he will find a Democrat equivalent party running the federal government and with no Opposition in the accepted parliamentary sense of having discernible opposing policies. Especially one likely to threaten his offsets or incentives.
Undeclared in Australia suburban public life lurks a deep seated belief.
It is that Australia can somehow leap to the fore through a native and world-saving intellectual asset base that can be implemented without having to penetrate, rip up, or even disturb the terra firma.
Nobody answers this submerged but politically exploited yearning more than Elon Musk and his ability to generate assets from thin air.
