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With a net worth beyond the trillion-dollar mark, comparisons between Elon Musk to the robber barons of America’s Gilded Age basically write themselves.
Even Musk seems to think so, bragging in a SpaceX investor presentation that “we’re kind of like Union Pacific,” name-dropping the powerful 19th century rail empire.
As if often the case, Musk was speaking glibly and with no real understanding of the subject matter. In fact, the actual history of Union Pacific completely undermines the point he was trying to make.
Union Pacific was the railroad company that built the first transcontinental railroad, the tracks that connected the East and West coasts of the US for the first time back in the 1860s. Whereas Union Pacific laid track to fuel industry and mass migration across the North American prairies, Musk’s reasoning seems to go, SpaceX is creating the rockets that will allow humanity to tap the market potential of outer space.
What Musk clearly didn’t realize is that Union Pacific couldn’t have laid a single mile of track without generous taxpayer handouts.
In fact, the company was started as exactly the type of public service that he so publicly detests. Founded as a private corporation by the US government in 1862 with the express purpose of completing the transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific received millions of dollars in bonds, millions of acres of free land, as well as plenty of help from the US military in order to forcibly remove thousands of Native Americans from the railroad’s path.
Though it was technically organized as a for-profit company, it operated more like a government-backed monopoly — so to give Musk credit, in that narrow sense his comparison to SpaceX is actually spot on.
Musk also conveniently skipped over a little bump in 1872, an event known as the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Basically, a couple of muckraking journalists discovered that the tycoons in charge of Union Pacific had dramatically overstated the costs of the project, essentially fleecing US taxpayers for a handout while bribing members of congress to keep the gravy train running.
By the time the scheme was busted, Union Pacific’s top brass had pocketed $44 million in taxpayer money, in the ballpark of $1.2 billion today. To compare SpaceX to Union Pacific is to say that the entire project is “too big to fail” — a get-rich-quick scheme dressed up as a historic infrastructure project, subsidized by the public.
As Richard White, American history professor emeritus at Stanford University explained in an interview with Bloomberg, Union Pacific was a “mess of self-dealing and corruption.”
“To use that as your model of what your corporation is going to be, plays on the immense ignorance of the history of this country, of financial markets and most Americans,” White said.
The only difference is that the Union Pacific Railroad Company did eventually deliver the railroad — albeit with devastating consequences for Native Americans and the immigrant workers who actually built the line. That said, the comparison raises an inevitable question: is Musk’s SpaceX is capable of ushering in a new epoch in the country’s development on par with the rail age, or will it all crash and burn?
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