​Elon Musk was busy over the weekend. In response to the dire situation of the 12 Thai youth soccer boys trapped in a cave, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla tweeted on Saturday that he was working on an "escape pod design" made from a tube pulled from one of his Falcon rockets. By Sunday, he had a working prototype.

As Musk posted videos of his team testing the pod in a high school pool on Sunday, Thai divers rescued four of the 12 boys from the cave. As Musk jumped on a plane with his pod en route to Thailand on Monday, divers had rescued another four boys. By the time Musk arrived to the cave with his rescue device, the Thai rescue operation was preparing to extract the final four boys and their coach.

The head of the rescue operation, Narongsak Osotthanakorn, expressed doubts about the usefulness of Musk's pod. "The equipment they brought to help us is not practical with our mission," he told the BBC. ""Even though their equipment is technologically sophisticated, it doesn't fit with our mission to go in the cave."

On Monday night, Elon and his pod finally made it to the cave with his pod. He posted about it.

Just returned from Cave 3. Mini-sub is ready if needed. It is made of rocket parts & named Wild Boar after kids' soccer team. Leaving here in case it may be useful in the future. Thailand is so beautiful. pic.twitter.com/EHNh8ydaTT — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2018

By Tuesday morning, divers successfully rescued all 12 boys and their coach.

Given the amount of posting Musk did, compared to actual amount of help he ended up offering to the rescue efforts, one might wonder if he might be using a global news event to keep his name in the headlines. While it's difficult to say if Musk's pod solution would have actually worked, now that the rescue operation is over, here's one dive expert offering their expert opinion of the viability Musk's pod in the Ars Technica comments section.

I am a certified cave diver (both NACD and NSSCDS) and when I was living in a part of the country where a lot of cave diving takes place I was on a recovery team (fortunately I was never involved in any actual recoveries). I would be very leery about trying to use that thing in a cave with restrictions (that's the technical term for "pinch points" ). I certainly wouldn't be on the cave side of it (as opposed to the entrance side – when I was acting as a guide I wouldn't even be on the non-entrence side of fat divers if the system had restrictions). It also looks like it would be very easy for the divers to get seriously injured trying to maneuver it. Especially if, as the media has reported, there are currents in the water – and in low-to-no visibility conditions as has also been reported. It would also be exhausting and dramatically increase the divers' breathing gas use. Without knowing more about the actual circumstances in a given rescue, I can see almost no advantages in trying to use that in a real cave over what the divers are doing now. Both are very, very dangerous but the tube adds the possibility of trapping or injuring divers as well as the rescued person (and everyone else further in the cave). I don't know from this story but I wonder if any actual cave divers were involved in the development of this thing or if this is another example of the modern tech world not knowing what it doesn't know. Cave diving is not like open water diving and this is a circumstance where the "move fast and break things" approach is one I wouldn't want anything to do with. The people to listen to in this circumstance are not people in the tech community but the actual divers in the water there. There is a reason that so much specialty cave diving equipment is made in north-central Florida and not silicon valley. I don't question the designers' motives, just how workable a solution this in this case.

[Ars Technica]

So: an earnest attempt at trying to help in the face of potential tragic loss, or opportunistic pantomime aimed at depicting yourself as the smartest person on the planet with all the answers to every problem? Only Musk can truly answer that. Still, this isn't the first time the self-styled Real Life Tony Stark has attempted to help out.

That Time Elon Musk Promised To Fix Puerto Rico

After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September of last year, Musk sent a thousand battery systems to provide power to over 600 locations across the island. In the process, Musk suggested that his company, Tesla, should be the one to rebuild Puerto Rico's power system. Much like his rescue sub, experts criticized Musk for stepping into something he didn't quite understand.

Former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele expressed concern over a company like Tesla jumping in to solve a problem before it's fully understood:

While we know for a fact that the current grid in Puerto Rico is badly damaged, we do not yet know just how badly damaged it is, and what is salvageable and what needs to be replaced. Before we rush off to give any one entity the authority to rebuild the grid, shouldn't we have a better understanding of its current state? Tesla's offer might be the right one for Puerto Rico, but it might not and there are other challenges to consider in order to achieve a fully solar powered island.

[The Hill]

Here's Wired's Adam Rogers on why a single private company like Tesla single-handedly rebuilding infrastructure is a bad idea. It's something a government should be responsible for, not a company.

Engineers love a chance to fix a problem. But these challenges are borne of failure and incompetence. It's fine to celebrate technical improvisation—people cobbling together battery-powered refrigeration for their insulin and tech companies donating solar panels and battery systems. I've done some of that lionizing myself. But those kind of stories also tacitly accept the lack of a formal infrastructure—and in one possible timeline they enable privatization. Indeed, privatizing Prepa is already a possibility. The risk is that cheering on high-tech fixes (instead of embracing a big plan like the one in the New York report) will give a weak, cash-poor government cover to corporatize the grid instead of fixing it.

[Wired]

That Time Elon Musk Promised To Fix LA Traffic

Before Musk decided he was the one to save Puerto Rico's systemic power grid issues, or before he decided that a spare piece of one of his rockets could do what a team of 90 experienced divers couldn't, Musk came to the conclusion that he could solve LA traffic.

Reportedly, after being stuck on LA's notorious Interstate 405, Musk realized that if he just dug a tunnel underneath the highway, he wouldn't have to sit in traffic. So, Musk bought some boring equipment, founded The Boring Company. Yet again, experts experts wondered if Musk's public promises to fix this problem would actually be fulfilled. Capital & Main's Julianne Tveten spoke to a number of transportation experts, who, while applauding Musk's enthusiasm, just shook their heads at his tunnel solution. It wouldn't really fix anything, they said.

Like the idea behind freeways, the Boring Company's proposal misses a fundamental principle in reducing traffic: limiting the number of cars on the road. Critics claim that, in merely seeking to accommodate those cars, it perpetuates, rather than challenges, the system of car dependence responsible for Los Angeles' congested roads—an apparent manifestation of Musk's own self-interest. Last year, Musk garnered much opprobrium for his animus toward public transit, which he's called "a pain in the ass." But his greatest incentive, most likely, isn't so much ideological as financial: For the owner of electric-car company Tesla, an atomized, driver-centric future of transit is simply good for business. (The Boring Company did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Capital & Main]

By the beginning of 2018, Musk and the Boring company switched to offering a public transit solution called "The Loop". Gizmodo's Tom McKay found it to be even more of a complicated mess than the original car-focused tunnel.

The urban loop doesn't seem to have an accurate understanding of how cities are actually laid out and their limited geometric spaces are divvied up. It's similarly overly optimistic about well such a system could perform in practice and at scale. A subway train breaking down is bad enough, but what happens when one of this theoretical system's thousands of track components get stuck and traps dozens of people movers in a tunnel? How much does it cost to maintain hundreds of tracks and cars versus a smaller number of high-capacity ones? How is building a maze of hydraulic platforms all over the city more efficient than a smaller number of frequent transit corridors?

[Gizmodo]

It now sits in bureaucratic hell.

That Time Elon Musk Tried To Fix The Media

Hot on the heels of multiple reports of worker safety issues in Tesla's factories amid mounting missed production targets, Musk came up with yet another sprawling solution to negative media coverage: Create a single site that serves as a "credibility" database for all working journalists. Musk called it Pravda.

If a single, privately-owned and centralized organization that determines what truth is sounds troubling, well, you're not alone. Here's the Verge's Bijan Stephen on exactly why you can't just crowdsource the truth:

Pravda is a very, very bad idea mostly because it won't work. By ignoring the reality of how truth is manipulated, degraded, and propagated in online spaces, it ensures that it will tell us little about journalistic veracity or "core truth" and everything about what its most zealous mobs feel should be the truth. Starting an organization dedicated to letting people believe reality is whatever they say it is might feel nice, and possibly even generous, but there's also an ulterior motive here. Musk, like the president, may not like the way reporting makes him feel exposed or like a victim or like a failure. Nobody does! But you cannot legislate veracity and reality, or put it up to a vote, and expect any result but a dystopia.

[The Verge]