Elon Musk's new racist chatbot factory runs on, sigh, 18 illegally installed gas turbines?

While we're dumping on Elon Musk, here's still more evidence that for all the hype and drama the man likes to surround himself with, the real secret of his success is the same one that's fueled the success of nearly every other fabulously wealthy man in American history. The capitalism-breaking "innovation" involved is that once you've achieved a certain amount of wealth, you can break whichever laws you want to, and if you just keep on breaking laws while paying whatever petty fines are leveled against you by the towns and governments trying to hold you to account, that amounts to a very sizable competitive advantage against any company not large enough to get away with those crimes.

Via CNBC, here's the latest local Musk scandal that will be reported today and ignored next week. Remember back in June when Musk announced he was going to turn a shuttered Electrolux factory in Shelby County, Tennessee into a new artificial intelligence center so that he could hurl himself into the A.I. hype bubble with a bunch of other companies who are pretty sure that they'll soon be able to recreate Shakespeare's entire body of work, just as long as we're willing to let them melt the entire Greenland ice sheet in exchange? Yeah, guess how that one's shaping up.

The Southern Environmental Law Center sent a letter this week to the Health Department in Shelby County, where Memphis is located, and to a regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of several local groups, asking regulators to investigate xAI for its unpermitted use of the turbines and the pollution they create.

The letter notes that xAI “has installed at least 18 gas combustion turbines over the last several months (with more potentially on the way).” [...]

Some of the 18 turbines are visible from the road around the property and, according to the advocates’ letter, emit air pollutants called nitrogen oxides (NOx) that add to a longstanding smog problem in the area. Shelby County has been given an “F” grade by the American Lung Association for its smog.

In order to move as rapidly as possible to meet his goal of competing in "A.I." but under his own brand rather than someone else's, Musk had a 100,000-processor facility constructed in an old appliance factory. But A.I. is an unparalleled electricity hog (see: 100,000 processors), and the location can't access that kind of juice—and won't be able to until the local utility company upgrades a whole lot of the surrounding infrastructure to serve Musk's dream of "what if a chatbot, but more racist."

Musk could either sit on his luxuriously pampered ass and wait for all that to be completed, or he could just have his company truck in "at least 18" industrial-sized gas turbines, install them without county approval, and invite every resident of Shelby County, Tennessee to eat shit.

The groups wrote in the letter that the xAI turbines already in place have the capacity to emit an estimated 130 tons of nitrogen oxides annually, which would rank them as the ninth-largest source of the pollutants in the county. Their combined capacity could power around 50,000 homes.

Ah-ha, you may say, at least they are natural gas turbines and not old-timey steam engines powered on coal and human souls. They emit hardly any pollution at all in comparison!

Well, yes and no. Burning natural gas still creates pollutants, and you might remember Republicans creating a very big stink about home appliances a while back because new research was showing that Actually, it turns out that we've probably been drastically underestimating the health effects of indoor air pollution from gas stoves and similar appliances. This caused an uproar, because Republican lawmakers then declared that Americans like being low-key poisoned by their home appliances and how dare government even suggest that lighting things on fire in an enclosed space designed to allow as little air exchange as possible because it's hot/cold/dry/humid in the outsidelands might, as it turns out, be not as much a good idea as 1960's Americans thought it would be.

Where was I? Ah, right. It turns out that living next to At Least 18 uninspected and illegally installed industrial-sized gas turbines has health consequences, especially when you've already put your Racist Chatbot Factory in the county that already boasts the worst air quality in its state, and now Elon's neighbors are pissed off about it.

What will happen next? Well ... nothing, probably. It's almost certain that county officials will come groveling to Elon, rending their clothes and weeping real tears, apologizing to him for having to trouble him with these minor concerns of "poisoning our residents," and that Elon's fifteenth best division of lawyers will then arrange to have the At Least 18 illegally installed turbines made retroactively legal, probably not even bothering to levy a fine as punishment. This jump in air pollution will be formalized as just something county residents will now have to deal with, and Elon will have gotten a jump on his "A.I." competition by ignoring health and safety laws, again, so that his new toy wouldn't have to wait for the utility company to fix the inadequate infrastructure that Musk and his team knew damn well was inadequate when they chose the place.

That is not, I will mention, how I would handle such things if I were your benevolent dictator. Musk's complete indifference to American laws, especially the ones that involve not injuring or killing people poorer than he is, has been so well established that at this point government officials need to get a bit more creative in dealing with that lawbreaking. If Elon wants to install 18 industrial gas generators in a location already suffering from dangerous local smog levels, well then maybe the county drives 18 fully loaded cement trucks onto the property and tells him oops, it turns out the location of our new Excess Cement Storage Facility happens to coincide exactly with the inner guts of those 18 turbines.

So sorry pal, don't worry though, we have a permit to do this. It just hasn't been approved or requested or drafted up yet. We'll get to it.

I just do not know about this, everyone. What a remarkable confluence of events we've been living through. We've got the return of the railroad barons, a class of people who are so wealthy that they can break laws with impunity—and who use break laws with impunity as the central plank of their own wealth-enhancement plans. We've got the collapse of the free press and the irony of Americans being inundated with so much information that information itself becomes useless. We've got a political party that's fully embraced fascism as their governing principle, from the reliance on propaganda to the insistence that if they're not winning their elections then that proves democracy's gotta go.

And lumped on top of all of this, just to make sure there's no way our children and grandchildren are going to get out of this no matter what we've do, the very moment we begin to take the destruction of the planet's atmosphere seriously and begin actually-maybe attempting to do something about that, a brand new technology comes up that allows weird basement dwellers to get pictures of fake women with three arms and eighteen toes delivered to the screens of their smartphones, and the only catch is that that it requires so much raw power as to render most or perhaps all of that progress irrelevant.

I'm not sure which parts of this are supposed to be Our Glorious Future but I, for one, am sure not feeling it.

There's another part of this Musk story that you may or may not have missed: Where those 100,000 processors for Musk's new toe fetish delivery plant came from. Nvidia H100 processors aren't just things you find lying on the ground; there's stiff competition when it comes to getting enough of them to run a company on. And one of the more consequential companies scrambling to find enough of them is Tesla, the company currently paying Musk enormous sums of money to bleed them dry.

In June, we learned that Musk procured the 100,000 Nvidia processors by ordering Nvidia to divert H100 chips reserved by Tesla to his private A.I. company instead.

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

“Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead,” an Nvidia memo from December said. “In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”

What. A. Tool. But you can't say Tesla shareholders don't deserve this. They've had ample evidence that Elon was neglecting or even sabotaging Tesla to instead siphon resources to his other projects. Darn straight he's going to use his Tesla position to funnel Tesla-reserved purchases to his Tennessee Smog Machine—nobody on Tesla's board or among the voting shareholders can claim they didn't think he'd be doing such things. (In defense of Musk, however, that June story notes that Tesla has been cratering so hard as a company, with layoffs hitting the projects that were going to use the H100's in the first place, so part of the reason Musk felt he could divert the chips for his own use is that oops, turns out they probably weren't going to be needed at Tesla in the near future anyway.)

Again: This is what passes for the future? This is what passes for business acumen, this dull-minded screw-anyone-who-isn't-me mustache-twirling crime spree plucked right out of the robber baron era? This man is a cartoon given human form.

You can't tell me America's current relationship with its billionaire class is a healthy one. You can't really even tell me it's a step up from the just-before-the-Great-Depression version that caused, well, the Great Depression. Something's got to give.

As for me, I find the "what if we just got 18 cement mixers" idea to be almost compulsively appealing. I know, I know. But I still can't stop thinking about it.