The Trouble with Elon

I'm bummed that this is a paid post. I'm not sure I care enough about it to subscribe to another substack. If there are revelations in the lower half of the post, please share and I can change my mind.

I can say my own personal worry/concern regarding Elon and similar, is I don't know how far "similar" goes. I'm fairly skeptical of any hero worship in the business sectors, but it is hard to shake the idea that a lot of current tech leadership is a bit more certain of their views than they should be. Especially politically/socially.

All the more frustrating, as I feel that open criticism and dialogue have been weaponized against folks to a degree that we started punishing people for honestly acknowledging mistakes in the past.

Pay wall.

Side note: I haven't liked anything of Harris since about 20 years ago during the new atheist movement, any suggestions for some of his more recent work?

I first noticed a change with Elon publicly when he fired PR for Tesla and said in an investor meeting something about twitter being more effective and cheaper than a full PR team. This was around the time/soon after trumps first election, and I believe he studied trumps ability to dominate the news cycle and began emulating him. Ted Cruz started going this route around the same time, and both Cruz and Elon were quite bad at it at first. Cruz eventually gave up trying to be like Trump, but Elon leaned into how he was kind of bad at it and became like a clown. It's "no news is bad news" taken to the extreme - if he does something stupid and people talk about it, that's publicity!

I don't know how he's gotten as far as he has, both in access to power and down the rabbit hole, but it looks like he's drank the kool aid now. Maybe it's cynical opportunism, or maybe he surrounded himself with true believers who pushed him into it. But I have a feeling his story arc is far from over

It's 2025, if you're just seeing the trouble with Elon now you're probably not as smart as you think you are. He's a fake and a con artist, and when he's not those things he's a ruthless tyrant. It's not a credit to Sam's moral character, which he clearly rates very highly, that he was ever friends with the guy in the first place. Sam likes elites, but he prefers them more refined. He's just lamenting that Elon's letting it all hang out now.

All I can say is that I believe Elon went into Trump's camp for one reason: backroom deal.

SpaceX was the prioritized during the last 4 years of Joe Biden.

It only makes sense that Trump approached Elon offering to prioritize government contracts for SpaceX and possibly others, w which would ensure the financial stability of these companies for next several years. In exchange Elon helps Trump win. That's a little bit tangential in relation to this article but, I mean, it makes perfect sense. It's also why Elon was willing to immediately turn on the extremists in the Republican party (e.g. the anti immigration barnacles) as soon as possible.

Paywalled unfortunately.

Seems like Elon decided to use his platform for political power, and is learning politics as he goes at the Trump school. He's achieved star pupil/teacher's pet status helped by his ability to buy his way in. Despite all the propaganda he spouts on X are his long term goals still the same, i.e. combat climate change? Plus he is finding new things to optimize, like government efficiency.

I’m flagging this for being a paywalled post, no reason to discuss this here without the full text.

Harris used to be an interesting person to listen to but the advent of Trump seems to have been too much for him. When someone claims (in a discussion on the suppression of the 'Hunter Biden Laptop' news during the previous election) "At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared" [1] that person has signed out of civil society and joined a cult.

It is rather surprising that Harris who is known for promoting meditation has gone so deep down the 'anything but Trump' rabbit hole and keeps on digging deeper, it does not speak well for the efficacy of his meditation techniques.

[1] https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/author-sam-ha...

Here's the paywalled second half of the post, for anyone interested:

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6. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.

7. At the end of 2022, I abandoned Twitter/X altogether, having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my life—but also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon. I’ve been away from the platform for over two years, and yet Elon still attacks me. Occasionally a friend will tell me that I’m trending there, and the reasons for this are never good. As recently as this week, Elon repeated a defamatory charge about my being a “hypocrite” for writing a book in defense of honesty and then encouraging people to lie to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the Triggernometry podcast might suggest to naive viewers), I’ve taken great pains to defend Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X. However, he simply does not care that he is defaming a former friend to hundreds of millions of people—many of whom are mentally unstable. On this occasion, he even tagged the incoming president of the United States.

All of this remains socially and professionally awkward, because Elon and I still have many friends in common. Which suggests the terms of another another wager that I would happily make, if such a thing were possible—and I would accept 1000 to 1 odds in Elon’s favor:

I bet that anyone who knows us both knows that I am telling the truth.

Everyone close to Elon must recognize how unethical he has become, and yet they remain silent. Their complicity is understandable, but it is depressing all the same. These otherwise serious and compassionate people know that when Elon attacks private citizens on Twitter/X—falsely accusing them of crimes or corruption, celebrating their misfortunes—he is often causing tangible harm in their lives. It’s probably still true to say that social media “isn’t real life,” until thousands of lunatics learn your home address.

A final absurdity in my case, is that several of the controversial issues that Elon has hurled himself at of late—and even attacked me over—are ones we agree about. We seem to be in near total alignment on immigration and the problems at the southern border of the U.S. We also share the same concerns about what he calls “the woke mind virus.” And we fully agree about the manifest evil of the so-called “grooming-gangs scandal” in the U.K. The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale. (And if grooming were really one of his concerns, it’s strange that he couldn’t find anything wrong with Matt Gaetz.)

Elon and I even agree about the foundational importance of free speech. It’s just that his approach to safeguarding it—amplifying the influence of psychopaths and psychotics, while deplatforming real journalists and his own critics; or savaging the reputations of democratic leaders, while never saying a harsh word about the Chinese Communist Party—is not something I can support. The man claims to have principles, but he appears to have only moods and impulses.

Any dispassionate observer of Elon’s behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality. There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise. The callousness and narcissism conveyed by his antics should be impossible for his real friends to ignore—but they appear to keep silent, perhaps for fear of losing access to his orbit of influence.

Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses he’s built, he will likely become the world’s first trillionaire—perhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elon’s wealth has grown by around $200 billion. That’s nearly $3 billion a day (and over $100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chance—and many would argue the responsibility—to solve enormous problems in our world.

So why spend time spreading lies on X?

Sam Harris used to be respectable but he really started losing his balance and rationality after the 2016 election. I hate to use this term, but he really does have TDS and probably now, EDS. I was upset over Hillary’s defeat too, but as Sam became more and more one-sided, and spoke about voters in a sort of vicious elitist tone, listening to him became more and more difficult and I stopped subscribing. For those who are reading past the paywall, all I’ll say is - try to find other sources to know the other side of any situation or event he’s talking about.

   If I hadn’t known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.