Is Elon Musk “dumb”?

Maybe not, but there’s something systematically wrong

Elon Musk’s recent behavior has been so outlandish that the question has apparently been raised as to whether Elon Musk is “dumb”, according to the columnist Noah Smith, who somewhat twists AOC’s words here:

AOC didn’t really say that Musk was dumb.

She said (if I read her correctly) that Musk is a bullshit artist who pretends to know a lot of things that he doesn’t. That’s certainly been my experience in his commentary on AI, and of late I have seen him comment as if he were knowledgeable, on just about every topic imaginable, often spouting things that simply aren’t true. So if you ask me, her claim that he oversells (and overestimates) his own knowledge seems fair.

And the way in which he took a torch to American science institutions without apparently knowing how they work is egregious. Smart people talk to other smart people, knowledgeable in relevant domains, before making drastic decisions; Musk apparently didn’t.

DOGE has also been exceptionally error-prone:

And so much has been thoughtless, like his poorly-thought through cutting of Ebola programs (which he prematurely claimed had been restored). Proceeding with forethought rather than only afterthought is generally a mark of intelligence, and one that seems lacking in a number of Musk’s recent behaviors.

But is Musk actually dumb?

Well, I am sure if you gave him an IQ test, he would do well. And he’s probably a quicker study than average; he can probably acquire new knowledge much faster than most people.

But, let’s be honest, he’s been doing a lot of dumb things lately, things that I would not expect an intelligent person to do.

I replied to Noah Smith with a few:

No sooner that I hit send than I thought of another:

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial team, which endorsed Trump, thought that one was dumb:

And they were right. The stock market has already fallen 1400 points in the last two days, in part as a function of how dumb that one was.

Prediction markets agree, too:

And speaking of 39%, that’s roughly how much Tesla has fallen (44%) from its post-election euphoria peak of 480, as investors have begun to question Musk’s judgement.

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Taking a chainsaw, rather than a scalpel, to a largely functioning nation is pretty dumb. Nobody would say 2024 America was perfect, but radically changing virtually every variable simultaneously is hardly the scientific approach.

To AOC’s point, real engineers all know the maxim, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Musk evidently doesn’t.

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Doing dumb things doesn’t mean you are dumb, of course, and I will let the reader decide.

But I think that Musk has consistently made a dumb set of choices – largely stemming from a mix of four cognitive errors: (a) overestimating his own intelligence, (b) undervaluing the expertise of others, (c) relying too much on his own echo chamber, without the slightest effort to question what he is fed, and (d) underestimating how hard some of his errors will be to fix.

That mix in turn has lead him to make a lot of dumb decisions that are costing the world immensely. I dearly wish that Musk would use whatever raw intelligence he has to pull himself out of the mental state that he has placed himself in — for the sake of us all.

I am not at all hopeful. Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew.