The Trouble with Elon
72 comments
·January 15, 2025taeric
VectorLock
I'm guessing Elon welched on his bet otherwise he wouldn't have needed to try to monetize this.
orionsbelt
It was for charity, not for his own pocket: "Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity)"
esfandia
Looks like he removed the paywall for this article? I was able to read the whole thing, and I'm not subscriber.
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gcr
I too would love to know whether Elon kept his promise! Alas I'm not able to financially subscribe to another subscription product at the moment.
trumpvoter
Found a $5M donation article (not personally fact checked).
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/19/nation/elon-musk-dona...
Presumably even if that wasn't the bet, he can backfill anyways so yes seems to be the likely answer.
belter
"...He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic. We continued exchanging texts for at least two hours. 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..."
hn1986
Musk stopped being friends after he lost this bet:
> Elon and I didn’t converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths).
sincerecook
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.
dwaltrip
He wasn’t a fake 10-15 years ago… I know people who worked with him directly. He has a technical mind and an eye for practical solutions to hard problems (when he’s not acting deranged).
He’s obviously far off the deep end now but the narrative that he is a complete charlatan is just plain wrong, as convenient as it would be.
C’est La Vie
profstasiak
can you write a bit about how he is a con artist?
sincerecook
Yeah, Tesla being a tech company instead of a car company is a con, all the publicity stunts - boring company, Hyperloop, Mars are all cons to attract attention. The crypto stuff is all a con. Elon is very good at getting a hype flywheel going, particularly in this age of man children.
thomasfromcdnjs
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?
liamwire
I found his book Waking Up to be a phenomenal resource in discussing meditation, psychedelics, and spirituality without reaching for religion/unscientific guesswork. Free Will and On Lying were both interesting, shorter reads that I thought to be very persuasive as well.
imartin2k
And his Waking Up app is amazing, and life changing (if one is open to practicing seeing consciousness as it is).
jfengel
I did a 30 day trial of Waking Up, gifted from a friend who also finds it life-changing.
I did my best with it, but it didn't change my life. It was fine; sitting quietly for ten minutes a day is probably a good idea.
I appreciated that he tried to avoid using woo-woo language, but I often didn't understand what he was going for. That's probably inevitable: he's trying to induce a state that you can't get a feel for until you've done it. (I'm reminded of learning to whistle. I put my lips together and blew, and kept doing that until suddenly it worked, but I could not tell anybody what made that instant different.)
I will say, though, that I often thought "If Sam Harris heard some yoga teacher say that, he'd rip them a new one."
It is entirely possible that I'd see more benefit if I continued past the 30 day trial. Clearly it works very well for some people; I'm certain that there's a "there" there. It's definitely better than trying to gaze into my soul through the backs of my eyeballs (which I did in fact hear from a yoga teacher).
hleszek
And that paywall is so annoying... As it is further down the page you don't realize it's paywalled and have time to get immersed in the story before you get stopped abruptly.
profstasiak
he's book "On Lying" is a short read but definitely life changing for me.
Of the reasons I started trying to live my life as honestly as I can
rstuart4133
It wasn't paywalled for me. Perhaps it's changed?
klik99
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
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hagbard_c
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...
wilg
It's genuinely a completely reasonable position to say you think Hunter Biden's (minor) crimes don't make you think Trump is a better option for president than Joe Biden.
jrsdav
Seen another way, perhaps Sam would be much worse in this regard without his meditation practice (but Vipassana can definitely make you more anxious).
I'm in agreement though, his podcast pre-2016 was pretty foundational for giving me things to think deeply about. But Trump broke him -- all the hours of airtime on that same soapbox, ad nauseam...
That being said, I still think he's pretty respectable. I started listening to his podcast again more recently, and realized my main dislike is his incessant nature to never let a poorly argued point go un-argued, until he wins. He's so tiring and brutal about that. But hyperbolic antics aside, there are very few times I've found myself fundamentally disagreeing with his assessment or argument (just his approach). And there are very few out there who are a match for his eloquence, when he can channel it and avoid stepping on a Trump rake.
Ironically, I think he could benefit from practicing more acceptance.
MoneyMeMoneyNow
He addresses this clip in the linked post.
amai
„but he[Elon] appears to have only moods and impulses“
Sounds like bipolar disorder.
x11antiek
How to unflag the submission? There's no paywall anymore, and it seems like you can't resubmit the link.
dave333
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.
jandrese
Paywalled unfortunately.
smitty1e
As with Trump, one is amused with Musk, but also mildly concerned.
How many of these world-historical figures have done the Full Solomon without stating to believe their own press releases?
Conservatives have been moaning (perhaps with some basis) about Soros for these years. Are we swapping one Eminence Grise for another?
Decentralize this mess.
idlewords
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?
LunicLynx
Since reading the book of Walter Isaacson. I just wonder if he is slowly becoming his father, or at least to others what he is saying about his own father.
dzhiurgis
Generational trauma marches on!
juliusdavies
This essay really reminds me of someone I know who's integrity and impulse control has changed dramatically over the last 2 years coinciding with their descent into crushing poverty (e.g., phones and internet and electricity often cut off, forced to use the local food bank, narrowly avoided eviction notices, etc).
Perhaps Elon is experiencing a degree of stress in his life that most people just cannot fathom - I am certain this other person I know is. I can imagine that extreme affluence and fame might also be as stressful as dire poverty. I believe extreme stress negatively affects integrity and impulse control.
LunicLynx
Thanks
quickthrowman
[flagged]
wilg
Is that an appropriate use of flagging?
x11antiek
Clearly an inappropriate use of flagging by @quickthrowman.
Hacker News Guidelines:
"If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."
That's it.
wilg
It is not mentioned in the guidelines?
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.