When moving fast and breaking things breaks people
It’s a type, isn’t it? Overconfident, imperious, entitled, so drunk on wealth and power as to be bulletproof. How dare anyone question you, hold you accountable? How dare they insist you follow rules like other mortals?
We’re talking Elon Musk here. Whom did you think I meant?
The Washington Post presents an excerpt from an upcoming book on Musk: “Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk” by Faiz Siddiqui. The excerpt involves the investigation into a 2018 death involving Tesla’s Autopilot mode.
Walter Huang, a Tesla believer, trusted the tech in his recently purchased Tesla Model XP100D SUV a bit too much. When Autopilot followed a “faded and nearly obliterated” lane line into a space between lanes on U.S. 101 north of San Jose and into a concrete median on the off ramp to Route 85, Huang’s trust in Elon Musk cost him his life.
Robert Sumwalt and other National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators in Washington, DC called Musk as part of their investigation. They were stunned when the line went dead:
“He hung up on us.”
“Yeah, he did,” said Dennis Jones, a nearly forty-year veteran of the agency sitting across the table, also trying to process the ordeal.
Over twenty-seven contentious minutes on April 11, 2018, in Sumwalt’s later recollection, Elon Musk had fumed, protested, threatened to sue, and abruptly exited the conversation when safety investigators refused to bend to his will. It was a textbook example of Musk’s disregard for a public that had imbued him with godlike power — and his contempt for the safety establishment charged with ensuring he didn’t abuse it.
Fumed and threatened to sue at being questioned, did he?
Autopilot, Musk believed, would play a pivotal role in advancing traffic safety, ushering in a future where people no longer had to die on the road. Its very origins were tied to an internal meeting at Tesla where the subject of eradicating road deaths had gripped the engineering staff as one of them wrote out the annual number of yearly road deaths on a whiteboard. Already, major tech companies such as Google and Uber were envisioning populating the roads with self-driving fleets, but Tesla would be unique in pursuing autonomy through privately owned personal vehicles. And the company wanted to make it happen as quickly as possible.
Musk moved fast and broke things. Including Walter Huang.
Musk seemed to believe, Siddiqui, writes, “that even if some lives were lost in the process, those who opposed his vision of the future were roadblocks to progress.” So in pursuit of his “moral obligation” to eliminate highway deaths, “you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people” when some people die. So be it.
We’d see the same zeal in Musk’s gutting regulatory agencies under Trump 2.0 with his DOGE initiative. And if people get hurt in this effort to reengineer the government standing in the way of his progress, so be it.
His position was that the processes established by society to prevent automotive calamities were ineffective or, worse, obstacles to this moral imperative. Musk had legions of admirers and online fanboys who validated this belief; his methods were the right ones, and his way was the only path forward. Who was the government to stand in the way? How could they possibly possess the requisite knowledge, technological know-how, and raw data to undermine him? What had they ever built?
Um, the highways on which his Teslas careen into barricades? And his car company with the help of a $465 million federal loan? Just sayin’.
“Sumwalt felt that Musk lumped all the DC suits together,” and could not distinguish between the NTSB and the different role of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). They were all there to get in his way.
Seeing his image tarnished, Musk began running interference on the investigation, releasing Tesla’s own data and version of events in an attempt to blame someone else (Huang). Not unlike his Oval Office pal did on Friday when kidnapping Abrego Garcia began blowing up in his orange face.
Trump: "You're talking about Abrego Garcia — is an illegal alien MS-13 gang member and foreign terrorist. This comes out of the State Department and very legitimate sources I assume. I'm just giving you what they handed to me but this is supposed to be certified stuff." pic.twitter.com/7L6ooqxp7F
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 18, 2025
When the NTSB called Musk to confront him about blaming Huang and violating their investigation ground rules, things got unpleasant:
Sumwalt recalled him arguing: “You’re making a bad mistake. More people [will] die because of this, because of what you’re doing.”
Why, why your “due process” will keep violent rapists and murderers on our streets!
Sorry. That’s someone else. It’s a type.
The NTSB ultimately ruled that “system limitations” in Tesla’s Autopilot, plus “the driver’s lack of response due to distraction likely from a cell-phone game application and over-reliance on the Autopilot partial driving automation system” contributed to the deadly crash.
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