When the editorial team behind this year’s Forbes Sustainability Leaders List started brainstorming possibilities for the list, Elon Musk’s name came up early. And for good reason. The 2008 introduction of the Tesla Roadster did something many thought impossible–it made electric cars cool. And as Tesla continued to deliver new models, it spurred the auto industry into accelerating their own EV models. That’s been a big deal for the environment in the U.S., where cars count for over 20% of total carbon emissions.
But the Forbes Sustainability Leaders List isn’t a lifetime achievement award. It’s focused on people continuing to make an impact in an ongoing way, and evaluations were weighed heavily in favor of what these people had accomplished in the past two years. By this metric, Musk has fallen short.
Let’s start with the most obvious problem: the slow decline of Tesla. Once the undisputed leader of the electric car industry, its profits are down four quarters running. China-based BYD now manufactures more electric vehicles — which landed its CEO and founder Wang Chuanfu on the list. And a series of leadership mishaps have major Tesla investors turning on its embattled CEO.
One major misstep has been the Cybertruck. Since Musk introduced it to the world in 2019 by breaking the vehicle’s “unbreakable” window, it’s been plagued by delays, manufacturing issues and general mockery. It started shipping last fall, years later than promised, but fewer than 20,000 have made it into the hands of customers. Despite the short window of time, it’s already been recalled four times, and videos of manufacturing failures have gone viral on social media. On Reddit, the ‘Cyberstuck’ subreddit, which relentlessly posts such failures, has over 160,000 members–over 10 times more people than actually own one. That’s not a good sign. But even if the Cybertruck’s rollout had been flawless, it would still have issues with respect to sustainability–the large amounts of energy, aluminum and materials it takes to make the massive vehicles compared to other EVs makes them environmentally unfriendly.
Tesla’s facing other problems, too. The Tesla Semi is years behind schedule, leaving customers waiting while rivals in the commercial fleet market are fulfilling orders and growing their delivery totals. (Rivian’s success in its line of delivery vans, for example, helped land RJ Scaringe, its founder and CEO, on the list.) And after months of dealmaking in which Tesla got several EV rivals to agree to use its charging standard, Musk axed its Supercharger team and announced it would slow the growth of the network. It was a key competitive asset for Tesla, and a selling point for EV buyers — the lack of a robust charging network is a major stumbling block for many potential EV customers reluctant to pull the trigger due to range anxiety. Slowing down the network’s growth may mean slowing down electric vehicle production, making it harder for the U.S. to meet its climate goals. Instead, he’s tasked engineers at Tesla to make a line of humanoid robots instead of cars. On top of all this, the company also cut down nearly half a million trees in Germany in order to build its battery factory there.
Elon’s Musk’s takeover of Twitter has also been detrimental to broader climate goals. Since he bought the company in 2022, Musk has dismantled significant parts of the trust and safety team and loosened restrictions against misinformation. One consequence of this? Climate denialism has surged on the site: A recent report from Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of environmental and anti-misinformation groups, ranked X last among major social media platforms in handling climate misinformation for “lacking clear policies that address climate misinformation, having no substantive public transparency mechanisms and offering no evidence of effective policy enforcement.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX has faced a series of government inquiries regarding its environmental record. In the past six months both the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have pending actions against the company related to its Starbase facility in Texas. These actions are based on allegations that the space company has repeatedly violated the Clean Water Act by dumping pollutants from the site into local bodies of water. The company denies any wrongdoing or pollution, arguing in a lengthy statement earlier this month that these actions are “entirely tied to disagreements over paperwork.”
Finally, over the past couple of years, Musk seems to have lost interest in leading the way on environment and sustainability issues. Earlier this year, Tesla removed the company’s 2006 climate manifesto from its website. In it, Musk said that he aimed to “help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.” But in a conversation with former President Trump on X earlier this year, he backtracked on those ambitions, saying there’s “no rush” for a sustainable economy because the impacts of climate change won’t be severe enough to worry about until atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches much higher levels than exists today. Scientists who study the climate say those dangerous carbon dioxide levels are less than half of what Musk suggested.
Forbes plans on running a new edition of the Sustainability Leaders list every year, always with a focus on recent, impactful action. If Elon Musk changes course, we’d be delighted to include him on a future list. But right now, he is no longer a leader on the environment.
Source: Forbes
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