"Musk is not in it for the money."

I need to come back to this article because there's a lot of wrong packed in here but this one brief section needs to be singled out because it spells out one of the fundamental lies upon which the myth of Elon rests. It is a lie that is completely transparent and yet persists to this day.

David Roberts writing for Vox:

Musk is not in it for the money. If all he wanted was money, he wouldn’t keep risking enormous sums of it on schemes that nine out of 10 people predict will fail.

Instead, as he’s been very forthright in saying, he’s trying to address what he sees as humanity’s most pressing problems. 

Even by 2016, it was obvious that Musk had gotten extremely rich from government subsidies and by playing the game mainly with other people's money. Well over a year before the Roberts piece came out, the LA Times laid out in great detail the dependency on taxpayer money while the then upcoming SolarCity merger looked like (and turned out to be) an attempt to have Tesla stockholders save Musk's dying company. And this wasn't the first time he had used investors' money from another company to bail out his ill-conceived solar business.

Musk has now become the world's richest man largely by manipulating stocks, using questionable accounting practices and flat out lying about his products and paradoxically he's gotten away with it in no small part because the standard narrative holds that his motives are pure and he's "not in it for the money."

I suppose we're lucky. Imagine the level of criminal behavior we'd have seen  if he were just motivated by greed.