Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk disputed former company executive Andrej Karpathy on the impact of plastics on human health.
What Happened: “Impressive how much the documentary of the day can influence people,” Musk wrote on social media platform X. “Plastics are not a significant health risk. It's bs.”
The CEO was responding to Karpathy’s post on the harms of plastic, based on his reading of the book ‘A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.’
Karpathy, who was previously Senior Director of AI at Tesla, said in his post that the harms of plastic are not limited to its polymer granules which can make their way anywhere including the human body owing to their small size but also the thousands of exotic chemicals, a majority of which are never evaluated for safety, that get mixed into plastics to tune them.
“It definitely feels like we’ve allowed the convenience of plastics to get way ahead of our understanding of their global effects and that there are some major unpriced externalities in the industry,” Karpathy wrote but Musk is seemingly not in agreement.
Why It Matters: Musk’s opinions on the environment, climate change, and plastic have spurred criticism in the past.
Earlier this month, in an interview with Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, Musk said that his views on climate change are “moderate” and that he doesn’t believe in vilifying or overregulating oil and gas as people would starve in their absence.
Musk later said that he indeed believes global warming is real. However, progress in sustainable energy production and consumption can solve global warming in time, Musk said, hinting there is no rush and dismissing the idea that there is an immediate need to address climate change.
In June, Musk said that climate change risk is "overstated in the near term" but "probably accurate in the long term."
Earlier this week, Musk said in response to an X user that the return of plastic straws in Californian restaurants will be a sign of the end of “wokeness.” The billionaire entrepreneur elaborated on his take on plastic bags and straws in August last year, saying there is no “good reason” for banning them in any country if trash is not dumped in the water.
It is also important to note that Musk’s companies, including Tesla which makes electric vehicles, have been faced with allegations of environmental damage multiple times in the past.
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