The McAllen Monitor: “Healthy Aversion” To Regulation Musk’s “Most Noteworthy Asset”
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We learned on Monday that Elon Musk was chosen as “person of the year” for 2021 by Time Magazine, which has been owned by Koch Industries since 2018.
It’s not surprising that the editorial board at Time chose musk. As you can tell from past choices, the theme is wealth, influence and power. In that respect, few can argue convincingly that Musk does not wield all three at the moment.
More interesting was The Monitor’s editorial stance on this year’s choice. The Monitor is one of several in-print and digital dailies in the Rio Grande Valley all owned by AIM Media Texas.
The editorial began by listing reasons for the honor — he’s rich, he’s “an affable young man”, and he can disrupt the stock market with a tweet.
The most notable passage, however was the following:
Musk’s most noteworthy asset, however — for which he also endures plenty of criticism — is his healthy aversion to government involvement in private enterprise. Musk jumps through regulatory hoops when necessary, but he doesn’t always wait for permits and support in order to launch new initiatives. He doesn’t wait for NASA to develop new technologies and he doesn’t buy up technologies that have been developed with federal grants and agreements. He saves time and money by simply hiring people to develop those technologies for him.
The choice to list “healthy aversion to government involvement” and that he “doesn’t always wait for permits” as his “most noteworthy asset” stands in contrast to the recent coverage around environmental concerns to our area.
Here‘s an article, for example: Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch site threatens wildlife, Texas environmental groups say
Note: I currently also cover SpaceX in The Rio Grande Valley for Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. TPR/NPR are not involved with the content on my Medium blog posts, which I publish independently.
I reached out to Michael Rodriguez, deputy editor at The Monitor, to chat about the piece. He commented that while he was not present for the writing of this editorial, most editorials at The Monitor are put together by an editorial board that consists of news editors, opinion editors and the publisher.
He also reminded me that the company that owned The Monitor for years, Freedom Communications, was transparently libertarian and that there may be some opinion editors on staff today that still share those values.
He also shared the following:
I wasn’t in this particular meeting, but I would say that this editorial was hyper focused on that recognition, and not designed to be a definitive take on the man. It’s also important to note that the our editorials are separate from our news mission.
Reporters on The Monitor’s news team have provided continual coverage of Starbase.
In November they published a story on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s concerns over insufficient details included in the Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment currently under review (and set to be completed by the end of this year): SpaceX orbital launch on hold; Starship waits for FAA decision.
And just this Sunday, they published an update on the regulatory process happening with the FCC: FCC OKs permit for Starship flight communications
However, environmental advocacy groups in The Rio Grande Valley continue to criticize local and national coverage of SpaceX.
One day after The Monitor’s editorial Trucha RGV, an “independent multimedia platform” based in the Rio Grande Valley published this criticism: What Journalists Should Know Before Reporting On The SpaceX At Boca Chica Beach.
From the Trucha post:
To the outside world, this facility’s existence is awe inspiring and futuristic, making fantasies of space travel more than just a TV show or a movie. That could not be further from the truth to the people who live here. This is very quickly turning into a nightmare in more ways than one for us. Our air and our beach are being polluted, our animals are dying, we’re losing access to the beach more and more each day, debris litters once pristine sand dunes, we’re being priced out of our own city to cater to wealthy white men, our elected officials roll their eyes at us and call us ridiculous when raise these concerns that threaten their bank accounts, and frankly, it is getting incredibly exhausting and increasingly worse.
Regardless of what occurred in that editorial meeting, The Monitor’s statement is noteworthy not just because of the community platform it was published on, but because this is possibly the first time that we see a local source of opinion leadership in The Rio Grande Valley explicitly champion Musk’s aversion to industry regulation.
I reached out to an industry source — a regulatory specialist with private and public experience that has been following the SpaceX project at Boca Chica for some time. They asked that I withhold their name for this post.
They had the following to say about the editorial:
What differentiates Elon Musk run companies versus their competitors is not technical know how or innovation. Rather, they operate on a divergent Risk Assessment framework. Where the so-called dinosaurs, be it Boeing or Toyota, weigh the pros and cons of risk taking, Musk focuses only on the prospect of a great breakthrough.
Musk doesn’t carry the scars of multi billion dollar litigation from decades past. He doesn’t wait for approvals from the government or to ensure that his engineering evaluations are bulletproof. This is what makes his organizations different from nearly every other big business on the planet. Time will tell if these gambles continue to pay off.
They also mentioned that Musk “brings stuff in house as much as a result of poor planning” as innovation, and gave the proposed LNG and power plants as an example.
I also sent the editorial to investigative journalist and anonymous creator of the popular “Common Sense Skeptic” channel on YouTube. They had this to say about it:
There is nothing “healthy” about an aversion to government involvement in this regard. There is no “private enterprise” where space is concerned. All space exploration is governed by international treaty, namely the Outer Space Treaty first ratified in 1967. All member nations agreed to hold their citizens accountable for their actions off-world. As an American citizen, Musk is beholden to the promises of the US Federal Government.
On the idea of Musk as an innovator, they shared the following:
There are no facts supporting that claim. Falcon/Dragon are based off 1960s/70s rocket tech. Even the reusability aspect isn’t a Musk concept. If we’re being honest, landing astronauts in the water in capsules is a tremendous step backwards for the tech developed in the Shuttle. They can’t even keep their capsule toilet in service. StarShip is unproven, and likely to fail. Even their ‘revolutionary’ Raptor production line is in crisis and producing unreliable product that have to be taken back to the drawing board.
It’s interesting to make note now of current public statements by Rio Grande Valley leaders and our local media as the SpaceX project at Boca Chica moves forward. Depending on the outcome of tests at Starbase over the next few months and years, we may be looking back at statements like these through a very different lens.
