When you’re the richest person in the world, people can’t help but assume you’re a genius. If you’re worth $270 billion, as Elon Musk is according to the Forbes real-time billionaires list, you must be one of the smartest people on the planet, right?
For those having a hard time understanding exactly how much money $270 billion is, let’s put it this way: it’s 1.4 million times the median net worth of American families, which is $192,900. Yes, the multiplier required to calculate Musk’s wealth is seven times larger than the median net worth. The Tesla CEO and newly minted Trump surrogate must have a once-in-a-lifetime intellect if he’s achieved all that.
At least, that’s how people tend to treat Musk, whether we’re talking about the press or your average American. He’s often referred to as a real-life “Tony Stark,” the fictional billionaire brainiac better known as Iron Man. And Musk’s astonishing achievements in electric vehicles and spacecraft — where his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, have succeeded where others have failed — have made it easier for people to believe his misleading claims, conspiracy theories and outright lies in all fields, even those where he has no expertise, like election integrity, immigration and epidemiology. That’s more true today than ever, as his self-made image as an all-knowing tycoon is propped up by his total control of Twitter, which he’s renamed X.
So when Elon Musk does lie, whether it’s about one of Tesla’s electric cars or about the Democratic party bringing in people to vote illegally, most people have a hard time calling him out on it. Not Jason Fenske.
To be clear, Fenske sticks to the Tesla side of the Elon Musk equation. The 34-year-old runs a YouTube channel called Engineering Explained where he uses the mechanical engineering degree he received from North Carolina State University to teach people how cars work. It’s a simple enough format — most of the time, Fenske simply stands in front of a whiteboard in a hoodie with a dry-erase marker — but one that has proved gripping even to people who flunked high school physics: he has amassed just under four million subscribers and 818 million views across his videos.
“People are lazy,” Fenske tells InsideHook. “If you can explain something that is complicated in a short amount of time, plenty of people are curious enough to learn about it. The thing that people don’t want to do is spend two days reading research papers to try and understand the answer to what seems like a simple question. I find joy in that research process.”
Some of his most popular videos during the course of his 13 years running Engineering Explained, which has been his full-time job for 10 of those years, include a five-minute video about what happens to an engine without oil and a seven-minute video about the difference between horsepower and torque. But in recent years, Fenske has waded into more complex and, some would say, more combative territory by using his engineering lessons to debunk the claims of automakers, from Ford to Tesla.
Back in January, a couple months after Elon Musk held a Cybertruck delivery event at Tesla’s factory in Austin, Texas, Fenske released a video titled “No, Tesla Cybertruck Is *Not* Faster Than Porsche (While Towing).” He starts off by playing clips of Musk talking about the electric truck and pointing to “two statements that definitely seem like blatant lies back to back.” You’ll notice Fenske doesn’t use the phrases that have become common in today’s media landscape: “falsehoods,” “mistruths,” “misinformation.” He comes right out and says it: Musk is lying to you.
At issue here is that, at the aforementioned release of the Tesla Cybertruck, which was livestreamed online, Musk made a litany of bold claims about the electric pickup, including that “it can tow a Porsche 911 across a quarter-mile faster than the Porsche 911 can go by itself” and it’s “faster than a 911 while towing a 911.” The second claim is a blatant lie, as the top speed of a Cybertruck is 130 mph (and that’s without towing), while the slowest Porsche 911 tops out at 181 mph. (If they meant quicker, not faster, they should have said that.) But the first declaration included a video allegedly showing the stainless steel pickup beating the ultimate Porsche sports car in the quarter-mile — the drag-race benchmark for tests of acceleration — which led to rapturous applause from the audience in Austin and smirks from Musk.
But in 12 minutes and 33 seconds, only using a whiteboard, a variety of colored markers, some video replay and easy-to-follow math, Fenske proves this claim from Musk is impossible. Not only that, but he went a step further, partnering with the car magazine MotorTrend on a follow-up video where they actually tested it in the real world. And guess what? His math was right. One of the pitches Musk was using to sell his new $100,000 pickup was a lie.
“Those are really fun,” Fenske says of his videos debunking automaker marketing stunts, “because you can very easily show with math why it is accurate or not accurate.”
In the end of his original video on the Tesla vs. Porsche drag race, Fenske concluded that “how this was presented during the Cybertruck reveal was misleading,” but he couched that admonishment by giving Musk the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe he simply misspoke,” he said. But that doesn’t excuse the screen behind the billionaire at the delivery event that read “Faster Than a 911,” or the fact that the video Tesla played deliberately cut off at the eighth-mile mark, not the quarter-mile, proving Tesla did indeed know the quarter-mile claim was bogus. Moreover, it’s not as if Tesla — much less Musk — admitted any wrongdoing once they were exposed. Although, Musk has altered his language around this stunt since then, so it’s clear he knows he was caught in a lie.
What’s It Like Owning the Most Hated Vehicle in America?
The Tesla Cybertruck is an object of relentless online derision. An owner shares what driving the electric pickup on a daily basis is really like.This is the most recent time Fenske has exposed false claims from Tesla, but it’s not the first, having previously explained why their Model S Plaid can’t hit 60 mph in less than two seconds. He’s also discussed why other marketing gimmicks, like the Cybertruck towing a Ford F-150, are giving potential buyers the wrong impressions about these vehicles, and why the company’s products, like the Tesla Semi, maybe aren’t as revolutionary as we’re being told. But it might be the last video where he was able to include information actually provided by the company.
“I had a pretty good relationship with someone at Tesla,” Fenske says. “They haven’t spoken to me since publishing [the most recent videos], and maybe they never will again. They were really good at providing information, and now they don’t talk to me.”
If this all sounds like a bunch of nitpicking, inconsequential, harmless details that don’t affect anyone’s lives, in one sense you’d be right. It absolutely does not matter which car wins in a drag race or how fast a Tesla can accelerate. But zoom out from the drag strip and into the larger world being shaped more and more every day by the richest man on the planet, and there’s an urgent takeaway from Fenske’s seemingly trifling fact-checking: Musk isn’t the benevolent genius here to enlighten the world that he’s cosplaying as on X; he’s simply a salesman who is more than happy to bend the truth to suit his own selfish priorities, whether that’s selling electric trucks or misleading voters about the upcoming presidential election.
And there’s nothing Musk can do but let this YouTuber continue to poke holes in the image the CEO has tried to tweet into existence. Fenske is actually a Tesla fan — there are many videos on his channel talking about his experience owning their EVs — so no one can say he’s a troll. He also strictly talks about automotive engineering, so Musk can’t use his tired attack, which he stole from Trump, of calling him politically biased. Plus, it’s not just Tesla that Fenske takes to task; he has used math to take the wind out of the sales sails of both big automakers like Ford and small outfits like SSC, so no one can say he’s picking on the EV leader.
“I don’t want to be viewed as this source of knowledge,” Fenske says. “I just want to be viewed as providing that information because I have always looked at it as: I am curious about these subjects, I’m going to read about these subjects, talk to people who are experts about these subjects and then present what I find out. It’s more of, in my opinion, a journal of me learning things than me being like, ooo, look at all this knowledge I have that I will now provide to you.”
There are plenty of people out there whose stated goal is to expose Elon Musk. Fenske is just a man in a hoodie with a whiteboard showing the internet how cars work. But in doing so, he’s become the most convincing voice proving that the world’s richest man really is just out for himself. Go figure.
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