This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Elon Musk was once lauded as a sort of green Tony Stark—the genius inventor who leads a double life as superhero Iron Man—for single-handedly tackling the climate crisis one Tesla at a time, helping to forge a clean energy future and pushing for new taxes to drive down fossil fuel use.
But the climate credentials of the world’s richest person have become clouded by his embrace of rightwing politicians, some of whom dismiss global heating, as well as by his management of X, formerly known as Twitter, during which many climate scientists have fled the platform amid a proliferation of misinformation about the climate crisis.
Those contradictions run deeply through his work and life. The man who sometimes seems to think of himself as a spartan-living, green thinker is actually one of the elite 1 percent of the world’s population who, according to a new Oxfam report, produce as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, comprising 5 billion people. Where does the reality lie?
Musk’s private jet has taken about 200 flights in the past year.In 2020, Musk vowed to get rid of “almost all physical possessions” and he has since jettisoned a number of mansions, opting instead to occasionally sleep on the couch of friends’ homes and, more recently, to move into a $50,000 modular home in Boca Chica, Texas, near the testing and development site of SpaceX, his space tourism venture. And unlike many billionaires, Musk does not own a superyacht, which tend to be highly polluting.
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