Billionaire and practicing narcissist Elon Musk, along with his flagship corporation Tesla, are getting consistently bad press coverage. The failings of Tesla company’s electric vehicles (EV)s, involving recalls of millions of Tesla cars and cyber trucks and malfunctioning autopilot software, are splashed across the pages of the media.

The problems with these electric vehicles, and the dysfunction of Tesla corporation are indicative of a problem which can rightly be called ego-nomics.

Elon Musk is a long time promoter of himself. An ultra libertarian offering hallucinations in the purported ideology of futurism, Musk is trading on Silicon Valley-driven big tech dreams. Paris Marx, writing in Time magazine, described the promotion of Musk as this visionary entrepreneur developing the IT future of humanity.

The electric vehicle, among other Musk company assets, was seen as an example of technology and the capitalist market combining to solve a host of problems. The ecological breakdown could be reversed, according to Musk and the fans of billionaire entrepreneurs, by relying on innovative technologies being taken up by the market. Musk is there at the forefront of this frontier – a kind of real life non-military Tony Stark.

However, Tesla’s fortunes are declining precipitously, and its vaunted EV is plagued by numerous problems. This observation is not just a product of a fertile imagination. Writing in The Verge magazine, Andrew J Hawkins reports that Tesla’s profits and sales are down, the company laid off 14 000 workers earlier this month, and its much-hyped new EV, the supposedly affordable ‘Model 2’, has been cancelled.

In December last year, Tesla recalled 2 million of its self-driving cars because of problems with its Autopilot software. Numerous crashes and fatalities were found to have been caused by autopilot failures and driver distraction. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is opening a new investigation to determine if the December recall actually did enough to address the safety hazards of the autopilot software system.

Even the name ‘autopilot’ is a bit misleading, says the traffic regulator, because it implies capabilities the software system does not have. Fatalities arising out of drivers putting too much faith in autopilot are nothing new. In 2019, George McGee was driving in Florida in a Model S on autopilot. Distracted by a phone call, he dropped his mobile and went to retrieve it.

The autopilot did not detect the road ending, and the car proceeded to crash into a stationary vehicle, killing the occupant of the second car. McGee survived to tell his story.

Driver error is always a factor in traffic accidents. However, human error does not absolve Tesla’s autopilot product of culpability. Transferring guilt to human error as a result of corporate production is a tactic used by big companies to avoid legal liability.

As the gun lobby always claims, ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. This casuistry deftly sidesteps any legal consequences for the use of a corporate product.

Autopilot-caused deaths have been under the spotlight for some time, so Tesla corporation was fully aware of these problems.

When considering debates around AI, which occur when discussing and developing self-driving cars, we can find help from an unexpected and distant source. Ibn Sina, (980 – 1037 CE) the Persian Muslim philosopher (Latinised as Avicenna) wrote voluminously on the issue of personhood.

What constitutes a human, as opposed to say an animal? Personhood involves having an ethical responsibility. Consciousness of intentional action is a component part of being human.

Such considerations about ethical responsibility, and culpability, are being discussed by AI software developers and engineers. If a car is being guided by its autopilot software while it has an accident, can the driver evade responsibility for any resultant damage or deaths?

Corporations have and should be held responsible for any fatalities or damage caused by their products. The billionaire class, exemplified by Elon Musk, play up the image of an everyday ‘self-made man’ to promote public sympathy for himself, and his corporate activities. Public relations and marketing are powerful tools in winning over hearts and minds – it’s called propaganda in other nations.

There is one country that has shifted the majority of its vehicle-owning population, and car production, away from the internal combustion engine and over to EVs – China. Tesla faces strong competition from Chinese EVs, because the state has strongly subsidised the production and sale of said vehicles.

The shock-inducing headlines regarding Chinese EV production are in abundance in the corporate media. China comes to ‘dominate the world’ in electric vehicles, screams one particular headline in a technology magazine. Strangely enough, when it comes to lithium battery production, the profit-making media discover and circulate news regarding the environmental problems associated with that particular resource extraction.

Funny to observe the barons of the fossil fuel industry, one of the most ecologically destructive industries in the world, don a green veneer when speaking about lithium batteries.

Instead of building upon the cult of the private entrepreneur as a device to achieve community improvements and public outcomes, let’s look beyond narrow ego-nomics. The latter is a term created by David Korten, a former professor from that bastion of Kremlin Communist propaganda – Harvard Business School. He writes that we have adopted an economic model which elevates personal profit as the ultimate goal of socioeconomic activity.

In contrast to ego-nomics, how about we prioritise the well-being of the very environment that makes economic activity possible? An ecological perspective in economics is desperately needed to avert climate catastrophe. Elon Musk’s ultimate purpose – similarly to the other billionaires – is to exploit resources for private profit. Holding them to account for the damage they have caused would be a positive start.