Mr. Musk goes to Trump tower — but that doesn’t mean he’s walking away with a deal (TSLA)

Won’t back down

Even if the tech industry generally has a cluster of policy, regulatory, and economic issues it might want to raise with Trump, ranging from visas to the in-sourcing of manufacturing, I don’t think Musk is going to miss the opportunity to draw a line in the sand.

He hasn’t been kidding around about global warming and how the challenge should be addressed. In a speech late last year in Paris at the Sorbonne, he called in no uncertain terms for a carbon tax.

Musk’s speech in Paris.Screenshot

“We have to fix the unpriced externality,” he said. His entire speech hinged on this simple observation: that the addition of carbon to the atmosphere is effectively a worldwide subsidy that’s contributing to global warming and preventing humanity from freeing itself from the fossil fuel era.

Musk called this a “hidden carbon subsidy of $5.3 trillion per year,” citing the IMF. In response to questions after his speech, he said that a good outcome of the current UN Climate Summit (COP21) taking place in France would be that governments “put their foot down” and use a revenue neutral, gradually applied carbon tax to accelerate the shift from an economy driven by fossil fuels to one driven by sustainable energy.

Musk revisited the speech in March of 2016, when he unveiled Tesla’s forthcoming Model 3 mass-market vehicle in Los Angeles.

The V-word

In Silicon Valley, there’s no shortage of people who are routinely referred to by using the “V” word — V for visionary. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants the world to be more open and connected. Bill Gates has moved into an emeritus role as the steward of a vast fortune that he intends to use to eradicate global diseases.

But Musk is unique in that his vision is so vast, and so tied to the specific operations of his businesses. If Tesla succeeds, million of electric cars will hit the road and the demise of the internal-combustion engine will be hastened. If SolarCity succeeds, clean power will replace dirty energy, spelling the end of the coal-and-natural-gas-burning powerplants. If SpaceX succeeds, we’ll colonize Mars.

Trump’s HQ.Reuters/Eduardo Munoz

These are the explicit business goals of Musk’s companies. When he made his first fortune after eBay bought PayPal, which he co-founded with Trump supporter Peter Thiel, Musk sank his entire net worth into a vision that was fraught with so much risk that he initially discouraged investors from signing up because the chance they would lose everything was so high.

During the election, Trump labeled global warning a Chinese hoax, and although he’s wobbled on that view since winning the White House, he’s also named Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as his Secretary of State; Oklahoma Attorney General and climate-change denier Scott Pruitt to head the EPA; and former Texas Governor Rick Perry to head the Energy Department, an agency he once advocated abolishing.

Actions speak louder than words

Musk shouldn’t judge Trump by his words, which are reliably unreliable. Musk should look at the team Trump has put in charge of the country’s climate-and-energy future and draw the obvious conclusions: valid climate science is now officially under siege, and sustainable or renewable energy sources are about to lose out big time to Big Oil.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at the USA Thank You Tour.REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Some analysts don’t think Musk should stick to his vision. Trip Chowdry of Global Equities Research, a consistent Tesla booster, sent out a note this week detailing the ways that Musk could “screw up” his meeting with Trump by “[i]nsisting on Scientific Data to prove Climate Change is real and Insisting on Sustainable Transportation.”

The note continued: “Trump knows very well that Scientific community is completely clueless and stupid …. they can always find data to fit that particular theory. It is the scientific community, which in 1970’s were saying the coming of “Ice Age” and then in 2000’s pivoted to the coming of “Global Warming.” … basically fitting a data to a theory. President Trump is for reducing/eliminating pollution — but thinks Climate Change is a Hoax — Pollution control and Climate change are completely different from each other.”

An artful deal?

It is certainly possible that Musk could see a “deal” to be made here: Trump supports a carbon tax in exchange for Musk dumping his views on global warming.

But Trump isn’t going to support a carbon tax — and if he did, he’d have a revolt in a Republican-controlled Congress on his hands. At a more microscopic level, there’s a very good chance that Pruitt will direct the EPA to roll back mandated changes to increased fuel-economy standards, benefitting the traditional auto industry.

Trump is going to tell the tech people what they want to hear, praising their genius and encouraging them to keep up the good work of driving innovation in the US economy.

But the economically disenfranchised blue-collar voters who put him in office don’t care about the tech industry; they want to roll back the clock to a time before the internet, before automation in factories, before the flow of global goods, services, and capital made Silicon Valley wildly rich. The internet came of age when Bill Clinton was President — and Bill Clinton’s wife just lost her bid for the White House. Trump’s supporters don’t want more tech, which is based in science. They want less.

Musk has to know this. So now he faces a test. Go to Trump Tower and play the Trump game. Or be Elon Musk and stick to the game he’s been playing so well his entire life.